Reading a new book about Egypt’s overblown “marriage crisis” at the beginning of the 20th century suggests that similar fears today may also be ungrounded.
In 1932, Fikri Abaza, a young Egyptian editor and lawyer from a prominent family, gave a lecture at the American University in Cairo in which he announced his intention of remaining a bachelor. He had proposed to four women, he said, and four fathers had rejected his proposals on financial grounds.
The next day, the young man’s lecture was the “talk of the town,” American University in Cairo professor Hanan Kholoussy tells us in her book For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt. Yet Abaza’s complaint was hardly unprecedented. As Kholoussy documents, it was emblematic of a debate that raged in early 20th-century Egypt around the supposed increase in bachelors. That debate has striking parallels with one going on today in Egypt, where another “marriage crisis” is supposedly looming — one in which it is the rising number of “spinsters” that most troubles observers.
I say supposedly because in both cases, “crisis” may be an overstatement. The “marriage crisis” of today, like the one back then, might have more to do with public anxiety over sweeping societal changes than any catastrophic threat to the institution of marriage.
More than 70 years after Abaza’s public complaint, in the summer of 2006, Ghada Abdel Aal — a then-27-year-old pharmacist — started writing a blog with the tongue-in-cheek title I Want to Get Married. In her first post, she writes: “Stay with me and I’ll tell you about my tribulations, so that you’ll know everything we [unmarried women]put up with.”
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