image of the successful and happy American woman as a housewife and mother.
30
Feminist literary criticism has been very successful especially in reclaiming the lost literary women and in documenting the sources. In this
respect, feminist criticism has successfully directed attention to the female intellectual tradition. Many early works on women writers before the 1960s
usually focus on the female literary tradition. Literary women, then, are forced to identify with men and male standards of writing, and yet they are, at the
same time, constantly reminded of being female writers.
4. Feminist Literary Criticism in the Middle East
Based on the phenomenon of the inequality men and women in the Middle East, finally there are women writers who make the feminist protest
works related to the inequality genders. In the view of women writers, the fundamentalist narratives strongest claims for legitimacy are penned on the
female body in an ongoing process that has contained women, muted their voices, and screened out their agency.
Egyptian jurist Qasim Amin, the author of the 1899 pioneering book Womens Liberation Tahrir al-Mara, is often described as the father of the
Egyptian feminist movement. In his work, Amin criticized some of the practices prevalent in his society at the time, such as polygamy, the veil, and
30
Vincent B Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties Columbia University Press, 1988. p. 308.
purdah
31
, such as Sex segregation in Islam. He condemned them as un-Islamic and contradictory to the true spirit of Islam. His work had an enormous
influence on womens political movements throughout the Islamic and Arab world, and is read and cited today. The womens press in Egypt started voicing
such concerns since its very first issues in 1892. Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese women and men had been reading European feminist
magazines even a decade earlier, and discussed their relevance to the Middle East in the general press.
32
Another Arab women writers are Wardah Al-Yaziji 1838-1942 and Zaynab Fawwaz 1850-1914 from Lebanon, Aishah Al-Taymurriyah 1840-
1902 and Malak Hifni Nasif 1886-1918 from Egypt, May Ziyadah 1886- 1941 from Palestine, until the contemporary writers in the end of 20 centuries
such as Layla Ba’albakki, Emilly Nasrallah, and Hanan Alshaykh from Lebanon, Ghadah Al-Samman from Syria, Sahar Khalifah from Palestine, and
Khunathah Bannunah from Morocco.
33
The significance of their contribution to the Arab literary works establishment lies in the fact that the women writers
have seen the female identity and have shown their ability in writing as well as men.
31
Purdah is a curtain which makes sharp separation between the world of man and that of a woman, between the community as a whole and the family which is its heart, between the street
and the home, the public and the private, just as it sharply separates society and the individual. See Understanding Islam, by Frithjof Schuon, p. 18.
32
Farida Shaheed and Aisha L.F. Shaheed, “Great Ancestors: Women Asserting Rights in Muslim Contexts, LondonLahore: WLUMLShirkat Gah, 2005. Accessed on May 20, 2011.
http:www.newworldencyclopedia.orgentryIslamic_feminism.
33
McKee, Elizabeth, Feminisme dan Islam: Perpektif Hukum Dan Sastra: Agenda Politik dan Strategi Tekstual Para Penulis Perempuan Afrika Utara, ed. Mai Yamani. Translator, Purwanto
Bandung: Penerbit Nuansa Yayasan Nuansa Cendikia, 2000, p. 155.
CHAPTER 3
RESEARCH FINDINGS
A. Data Description
