8vo. 244 pp. frontispiece portrait, introduction by Munir al-Qadi, drawings by Yahya Jawad, upper corner of half-title & tile page slightly cut without loss, previous owner's name inscribed on half-title page, otherwise copy clean and in good condition, modern hard back binding, al-Rabita Press, Baghdad, first edition, 1958.

Synopsis

Sabiha Dawud was Iraq’s first female lawyer and a prominent women’s rights activist. Her father Ahmad al-Shaikh Dawud was among the Iraqi leaders arrested during the 1920 Iraqi revolution and subsequently exiled. Her mother, Na’ima Sultan Hamuda, was also politically active: in 1920
she led a Baghdad women’s committee to support the revolt, and in 1923 she was one of the founding members of the Women’s Awakening Club.
Dawud was one of the first girls to receive a public education in Iraq. In 1936, she became the first female to study law at Iraq’s College of Law,
though she was forced to sit separately from her male classmates. She was active in the Iraqi Women’s Union, a nationalist women’s organization.
She was a director of two of its constituent organizations since the 1940s, and became vice president of the Union in the early 1950s. Her history of the Iraqi women’s movement was used as the main source of ’The Awakened’ by Doreen Ingrams,the first extended English-language treatment of the women’s movement in Iraq.