The Open Door () is a 1960 novel by Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat. It won the inaugural Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. The novel, written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic explores a middle-class Egyptian girl's coming of age, against the background of the growing Egyptian nationalist movement before the 1952 Egypt revolution. The book was made into a 1963 Egyptian film directed by Henry Barakat with Faten Hamama, Mahmoud Moursy, and Saleh Selim. Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in ... =0804774390 Laura Bier - 2011 CONCLUSION The Legacies of State Feminism in an interview conducted a few years before her death in 1996, Latifa al-Zayyat told her interviewer that her landmark novel, The Open Door, hailed by critics as a poignant expression of the hopes and aspirations of a revolutionary generation, is now “an impossibility.”1 Over the last three decades, Nasserist narratives of modernity have been challenged by the failures of state socialism, the policy of infitah (open door policy) that began ... References