Hello, I'm Frank Turner.

Welcome to Tales from No Man's Land, a podcast that accompanies my album, No Man's Land.

It's about 13 women from history, who you probably haven't heard of, but definitely should have.

Their stories are fascinating, moving, funny, and most importantly, worth celebrating and sharing.

This episode of Tales from No Man's Land is about Huda Shaharawi, a pioneering Egyptian feminist leader

and the founder of the Egyptian Feminist

Union. When I was writing the record, at a certain point I realized I was in danger of

only writing about people from Europe and the UK and North America, and I wanted to make

sure that my scope included people from all over the world. I was chatting to some of my

friends, many of whom are also history nerds, and an Egyptian friend

of mine mentioned Huda's name, which wasn't one that I knew. So I started reading up on her

and quickly realized just how important she was to the history of feminism in Egypt and the wider

Arab world in general. Huda was born in 1879 and raised in an upper-class Egyptian family.

And when she was 13 years old, she was married off to a much older cousin and raised in a harem,

which was the segregated women's quarters of the household.

Despite all of this, she managed to find a way to educate herself and gain some degree of independence.

In the lead up to the First World War, she was active setting up some of the first social services for poor women and children in Cairo,

and she led demonstrations against the continued British presence in Egypt after the war had ended.

But her most famous moment was in 1923 when she arrived at Cairo Station on a train returning from a feminist conference in Zurich,

and removed her full face veil in front of a crowd at Cairo Station,

which sent a shockwave through the Arab world and was a radical step forward for women's

rights in Egypt. She became known towards the end of her life as the lioness, which I used as

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