Doria Shafiq (1908 - 1975) was one of the bravest and significant women’s rights activist of Egypt.
Shafiq, who studied at the Parisian Sorbonne, founded the the magazine Daughters of the Nile during the 40s and a little later the “Union of the Daughters of the Nile”. In July 1951 she stormed the parliament in Cairo together with hundreds of other women to push trough the female suffrage. Three years later she went on hunger strike to protest for the right of women to run a political office. Revolutionary Leader Nasser, with whom she had initially worked together, placed the belligerent women’s rights activist under house arrest in 1957 when she demanded his resignation. He let all her publications be annihilated. In 1975 the completely isolated Shafiq commited suicide by jumping off the balcony of her apartment.
She now has been crossed out of the Egyptian textbooks for 2013/14 by the Minister for Education, Mostafa Mosaad. The reason: She was not veiled.