In 1935 a young Egyptian woman entered a beauty pageant and set off a national scandal. Fifteen years later, the same woman was leading a uniformed brigade through Cairo and shutting down a branch of Barclays Bank. Doria Shafik was born in Tanta in 1908, earned her baccalaureate at 18 as one of the first girls in the country to do so, and won a rare Ministry of Education scholarship to the Sorbonne, where she took a doctorate in philosophy with highest honors. Her two theses previewed everything that followed: a defense of ancient Egyptian art against Western dismissal, and an unapologetic philosophical case for the equal rights of women. She came home in 1940 wanting to teach at Cairo University. The dean refused to hire her, calling her too liberal.

Locked out of a classroom of a few dozen students, she went looking for an audience of millions. She edited a French-language magazine for the aristocracy, then launched Bint al-Nil in Arabic for working-class women, and turned its readership into an organization running literacy centers, an employment office, and a cafeteria. The high-society magazine funded and shielded the grassroots work. That network became a covert communications web, and in February 1951 she used it to put 1,500 women through the gates of parliament, shutting the legislature down for four hours. When the state tried her for it, her supporters packed the courtroom until the judge adjourned indefinitely.

• She won women the vote through an eight-day hunger strike staged inside the Press Syndicate building, where the country’s journalists could not look away, ending only when President Naguib put a promise in writing.
• The 1956 constitution granted it with a catch: women had to prove literacy to register, men did not. The rule precisely disenfranchised the poor working women who were her base while enfranchising the elite.
• Her 1957 hunger strike against Nasser’s dictatorship, held in the Indian embassy, drew no negotiation. She got permanent house arrest, her magazines banned, her party dissolved, and a state order scrubbing her name from the Egyptian press.
• She spent her last 18 years in near-total solitude, writing a novel about a woman enslaved by a man, and died by suicide in 1975. The New York Times finally ran her obituary in 2018.