Sabiha al-Shaykh Da'ud (1912–1975) was Iraq's first female law graduate and a prominent women's rights activist. She and

Zakia Hakki Zakia Ismael Hakki ( ar, زكية إسماعيل حقي; born 18 November 1939, d. 22 August 2021) was a Feyli Kurdish lawyer who was appointed Iraq's first female judge in 1959, becoming the first woman of an Arabian nation to be appointed as a ...

became the first female judges in Iraq respectively in 1956–1959.

Life

Da'ud's father Ahmad al-Shaikh Da'ud was among the Iraqi leaders arrested during the

1920 Iraqi revolt The Iraqi revolt against the British, also known as the 1920 Iraqi Revolt or the Great Iraqi Revolution, started in Baghdad in the summer of 1920 with mass demonstrations by Iraqis, including protests by embittered officers from the old Ottoman ...

and subsequently exiled. Her mother, Na'ima Sultan Hamuda, was also politically active: in 1919 she encouraged Gertrude Bell to provide education for girls, in 1920 she headed 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.Noga Efrati
The other ‘awakening’ in Iraq: the women’s movement in the first half of the twentieth century
‘’British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies’’, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp.153-173 Da'ud 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 The Iraqi Women's Union (IWU) was a women's advocacy group founded in 1945 which lasted until the Iraqi government crackdown on leftist organizations in the late 1950s. Throughout the course of its operation, the IWU focused on advocating on behal ...

, 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 Doreen Ingrams (24 January 1906 - 25 July 1997) was a British writer and colonial figure whose pioneering survey-work in South Arabia led to a memoir, ''A Time in Arabia'' (1970), and to "The Ingrams' Peace," a truce between warring tribes in the ...

, the first extended English-language treatment of the women's movement in Iraq.

Works

* ''Awwal al-Tariq Ila al-Nahda al-Niswiyya fi al-'Iraq'' (The Beginning of the Road Towards Women's Awakening in Iraq)

References

Iraqi women lawyers 20th-century Iraqi historians 1912 births 1975 deaths 20th-century women lawyers 20th-century Iraqi lawyers {{Iraq-writer-stub

Life

Works

See also

References