Every night she watches him “beat his wife and make her bite the dust.” Firdaus has many siblings, but they often die of dysentery. Firdaus’s only recollections of her father are negative. Firdaus’s account depicts pervasive sexism in Egyptian society in the 1970s and demonstrates how it plagues women from birth to death, exerting powerful influence over every aspect of their lives.Īs a child, Firdaus’s friends and family members oppress and exploit her for being born a woman, demonstrating how pervasive sexism affects women from the earliest years of their life. Although Firdaus is a natural survivor, her story is unrelentingly bleak as she goes from oppressive situation to oppressive situation, with no hope for positive change. As Saadawi narrates from Firdaus’s perspective, every single man in her life seeks to abuse or exploit her based on her female identity. Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero tells the story of Firdaus-an Egyptian woman on death row in the 1970s for killing a pimp-who suffers oppression and abuse from men for her entire life.
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