Customer Reviews

The Hiden Face of Eve : Women in the Arab World

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The Hidden Face of Eve is a collection of short essays on female suppression in Egypt including female circumcision and the imporance of the hymen in society. Saadawi is a female doctor in that region. She begins by describing her own circumcision which was forced and traumatic and done when she was a very young girl. She goes on to describe many cruel things that she saw as a doctor including botched circumcisions and mutilations done to brides to get a good bleed on the wedding day and prove that the woman had a hymen. Each chapter is kind of a mini-essay on some topic off of these themes. The chapters feel as if they are meant to stand alone. There is a lot of overlap from one chapter to the next, and the book feels more like parts than a whole.

If the subject matter is what you are looking for then you will get a lot of it here. Much of what Saadawi is saying is anecdotal and based on what she saw or had heard of as a doctor rather than gathered statistical data. This makes sense in that this isn't the type of information that lends itself to surveys. Much of it deals with really private and painful experiences. It might be good to temper this with a more mathemathical approach so that this would bring the feeling for the people involved but there would be big picture objectivity from elsewhere.