Although the West tends to nod to ancient Greece when remembering its cultural heritage, there is at least one important cultural movement whose roots are firmly buried in ancient Egypt: Feminism.
Ancient Greek women – with the exception of the Spartans – had virtually no rights. In fact, they weren't even regarded as citizens, were excluded from many public spaces and were basically seen as the property of their fathers and husbands.
Even though Spartan women were an exception to this practice, their rights and freedoms still fell far short of those afforded by ancient Egyptian women. You see, in Ancient Egypt, men and women were regarded essentially as equals.
"From our earliest preserved records in the Old Kingdom on, the formal legal status of Egyptian women - whether unmarried, married, divorced or widowed - was nearly identical with that of Egyptian men," a professor of Egyptology Janet Johnson told Al Jazeera.
So, thousands of years before Women's Suffrage was a thing in Europe and America, Egypt had things more or less figured out.
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