Chairs an emergency Arab Feminist Union meeting in Cairo protesting the UN partition of Palestine, giving her final public speech.
On 10 December 1947, only two days before her death, Huda Sha’arawi chaired an emergency meeting of the Arab Feminist Union in Cairo in response to the United Nations decision to partition Palestine.[3] News of the UN General Assembly’s vote on 29 November 1947 had shocked Arab public opinion, and women activists gathered to articulate a collective feminist protest.
Presiding over the meeting, Sha’arawi delivered what contemporaries remember as her last public speech.[3] She condemned the partition plan as an injustice to the Palestinian Arab population and linked the cause of Palestine to broader struggles against imperialism and for self‑determination in the Arab world. Resolutions issued by the gathering called for solidarity with Palestinians and urged Arab governments to resist the decision.
This event highlighted the political breadth of Sha’arawi’s feminism. She insisted that women’s emancipation could not be separated from questions of colonialism, territorial dispossession, and international law. By framing opposition to the partition as a women’s issue, she affirmed Arab women’s right to intervene in major geopolitical debates, not just domestic social policy.
The emotional intensity of the 10 December meeting, coming at the end of nearly three decades of leadership, left a deep impression on those present. It symbolized Sha’arawi’s lifelong commitment to activism until her final days and underscored the Arab Feminist Union’s role as a political as well as social actor in the late 1940s Middle East.