Sha`rawï was eighteen years old when the fury over Qäsim Amïn's Tahrïr al-Mar´a (The Liberation of Women) blew through Egypt in 1899. In her memoirs she defended the book, seeing it as a door through which she and other women were able to pass into public life later, but she was sur- prised, at the time of its publication, that many of her contemporaries, all women of her class, disliked the book intensely: "How many times did we hear then women denying the issues and principles about which Qäsim Amïn wrote, despite the fact that these principles were for their betterment, because to recognize that would have meant recognizing their own power- lessness and this would have injured their arrogance. They reminded me of slave women who, when presented with their manumission papers, would cry for their past lives of obedience and imprisonment."

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 854