Dr. Nawal al-Sadaawi is the elder stateswoman of Egyptian feminism, indeed world feminism – one of the first writers to expose to the West the horror of female genital mutilation and at the age of 76 still an activist.

Yet it appears (I’m aware that this is an Israel source and Dr Sadaawi is not quoted in it) she has been forced to flee Egypt after decades of withstanding fundamentalist pressure.

(And a nastily slanted piece in the Middle East Times – to which I won’t link although it wouldn’t be hard to find – appears to confirm it.)

Being serialised on Radio’s Four’s Woman’s Hour in 15 episodes is The Women’s Room, “recently voted in the Top Five Watershed novels” by listeners. And the book that when I read it as a 16-year-old suddenly revealed to me that I was not alone in my discontents at the life being offered to me.

(You can only listen to the last seven days – irritatingly – so you have to keep up!)

The spring edition of Girlistic magazine is now online, and there’s some great stuff in there – the focus is on technology (and I liked “how the internet introduced me to feminism”) but there’s also an excellent history of the pill, and an exploration of the gender stereotype of the librarian – it actually goes back to Dewey, I learnt.

An account in The Times of what would be a fascinating resource – a “correspondence magazine” shared among mothers from the mid-1930s onwards charting their pains, problems, and suggestions they made to each other … “its members were mostly middle-class housewives — educated, opinionated, excluded from careers by convention and legislation (teachers and other professionals were barred from working once married), often intellectually frustrated and harassed by the demands of household management and child-rearing.” Just in case anyone is looking for past golden ages.

Which ties neatly, if unhappily, with the news in Britain that women with children under 11 are the group most discriminated against in the workforce.

When Rasheeda, now aged 17, was aged two, her father lost a poker game. To settled the debt, he sold her to his poker partner who, now a man of 45, wants to take her, possibly for his son…

Khalid Rajput, a local councillor dealing with the case, said the decision that Rasheeda should be handed over to Haider was taken late last week at a tribal council meeting.
“We know some tribal elders from Baluchistan came for the meeting in which the girl’s family was told to give her as per their customs,” he said.
Irfan Bhutto, a police officer in Hyderabad, said Haider had been summoned. “We will ensure the girl does not have to do anything against her will.”

Probably significantly, Rasheeda lives in a Pakistani city, not a tribal area. How many girls go to this fate without hope of resistance in those areas?