SOURCE: Cooke, Miriam. Review of Two Women in One, by Nawal El Saadawi. World Literature Today 60, no. 2 (spring 1986): 356-57.

In the following review, Cooke examines the oppression faced by Bahiah, the protagonist of Two Women in One.

The theme of Nawal el-Saadawi's at once powerful and programmatically feminist novel/text [Two Women in One] is contained in its dedication to young people, and particularly to young women. They must resist like roses, whose tender petals become “sharp protruding thorns [so that] they can survive among hungry bees.”

The reader meets Bahiah Shaheen as she is beginning to realize that her body, and the name it bears, contains two women: a docile, conforming medical student and a revolutionary artist. Whenever she hears someone say “Bahiah Shaheen,” she does not at once recognize the name as belonging to her but rather to her father, who “owned her just as he...