Over the years at AUC I have often been invited to chair a meeting or introduce a speaker or discuss a lecture, but this is the first time I have ever been asked to open an exhibit. Tonight it is my pleasure, on both professional and perhaps more significantly personal grounds, to be sharing in this event. As director of AUC's newly established Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, I am pleased to co-participate with the New Woman Research Center, the Sony Gallery, and the AUC Press as we launch Hind Wassef and Nadia Wassef's edited book "Daughters of the Nile: Photographs of Egyptian Women's Movements, 1900-1960." The exhibit represents a selection of photographs from the book, which chronicles the local articulation of feminisms and emerging women's movements through what the editors describe as the "mirror of the memory." To quote:

"These photographs are historical documents containing multiple and contradictory meansings...we project on photographs what we want to see. In some cases they challenge our stereotypes, in others they affirm them. In all cases they present a social history-a cataloguing of lost moments."

Although the exhibit has chosen photographs more for their quality of production and aesthetic value rather than chronology, the original project of the book spans the period from the early 1900s to the 1960s. The editors chose to terminate this chronicle in the 1960s because "it was a time when opposition parties and organizations of a political nature were shut down, signifying a 'ruptured momentum'.

Yet it was during that moment of ruptured momentum that I first came to Egypt and AUC. And over the years it has been my good fortune to meet many of the women represented in the photogrphs of this exhibit-Lili Doss, Ceza Nabarawi, Marie Assad, Aziza Hussein, Ragia Ragheb, Moufida Abdel Rahman, Aida Guindi, Inji Aflatoun, and Gazbia Sirry, to mention a few. And over these past four decades through my encounters with the different generations of students-who are the heirs to these earlier women's struggles-my own feminist consciousness has been and continues to be shaped. I am grateful for that.

Tonight we celebrate the many Egyptian women who have enriched our lives through their commitment and struggle to create a more just and equitable society. And if you will allow me I would like to take a moment to personally thank a woman who as a graduate student back in the 1960s mentored me into an understanding of her society and the challenges facing women, who was the first to take me out of Cairo to a community in Middle Egypt and let me experience rural life in transition as the ASU was replacing traditional village authority, and who, two years ago, was the first person to contribute from her pocketbook to our fledgling Institute for Gender and Women's Studies. This is the first public occasion I have had to thank her. Thank you, Marie Assad.

Fittingly, I close these remarks by quoting a few lines from the forward to the book "Daughters of the Nile," written by Marie Assad, Aida Guindi, and Aziza Hussein:

"As with the women represented in this collection, we are united by common goals, even if our paths to their achievement differ. We knew many of the women in this book through out commitment to social service, and we are proud to see Egypt's history through their actions. Indeed it is time for nations to read their histories through women's participation in the development of their countries. This collection is not only for the women it honors, it is also for those who share a curiosity about the past and future, irrespective of gender, race, religion or class." And, I might add, national origin.