Malak Hifni Nasif who used the pseudonym Bahithat al-Badiya (Seeker in the Desert),

was born in Cairo into a literary family. Her father, who had studied at al- Azhar with
Muhammad Abduh encouraged his daughter's education. She graduated from the first
teacher training school for women in Egypt, the Saniyya School, where she later taught.
On Fridays she gave women's lectures at the Egyptian University and elsewhere, which
she published along with feminist essays in 1910. The present selection was one of these
lectures, delivered to hundreds of upper-class women, and addressing some of the most
sensitive social issues of the day: changing gender relations, the symbolic and practical
implications of women's garb, and the need for legal change in women's status. The
program listed at the end of the lecture formed the kernel of the more extensive set of
demands that she sent in 1911 to the Egyptian Congress in Heliopolis, a meeting of
(male) nationalists. Her life then took an abrupt turn when she married a Bedouin chief,
gave up teaching, and went to live with him in the Fayyum oasis west of Cairo. She
discovered he already had a wife his cousin and a daughter he expected her to tutor. Some
of the sufferings she experienced and observed were expressed in her writings. In 1918, at
the age of 32, she died of influenza.