The Notion Of Space In Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman (1792) And Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years: The Memoirs Of An Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924)

Résumé: This research is a comparative study between A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by the English feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and Harem Years: the Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1879-1924) by the Egyptian feminist writer Huda Shaarawi. The purpose of our dissertation is to study how the two writers read the notion of space (public and private spheres). To explore this issue, we have used Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962) as a frame theory. This theory will be supplied by a secondary one advanced by Chandra Talpad Mohanty in her essay Under Western Eyes (1986). We have come to the conclusion that the two writers share the same objectives and preoccupations. They fought to bring women from private sphere into the public one through education and politics. They also stress the importance of education in the private space. Besides, they used their writings as a means to gain access and visibility in the public sphere. The work has also revealed that Huda Shaarawi, like many other Muslim feminists, indiscriminately espouse Western feminist rhetoric despite the huge differences between the Western and Muslim cultures

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