Based upon ethnographic research, this paper provides a genealogy of women’s activism within anti-authoritarian movements in Egypt during the decade preceding the Egyptian revolution of 2011. I focus on the significance of this period to the ways gender struggles transpired during and after the revolution of itself. I explore the dynamic whereby women’s activism and grievances related to gender and sexism significantly shaped and inspired anti-authoritarian movements and workers strikes during this period, yet women activists did not explicitly articulate demands for gender justice and/or feminism. This paper provides insight into how gender justice struggles emerged within anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist struggles even though these struggles were not always visible or explicitly articulated. This paper then illustrates the limitations of singular feminist analysis that isolate gender as a category of analysis from broader political movements and material realities and looks for “women’s struggles” in an isolated political sphere. As many Egyptian feminists have been doing all along, I argue for an analysis that can account for the ways everyday life engagements with multiple, co-constituting structures of oppression (such as socio-economic class, gender, and authoritarianism) help explain the conditions, and the grievances, that inspired the participation of many women in political activism of this period. Overall, this paper takes up the following dilemma: Egyptians needed to come together under one unified slogan. This argument, however, can inadvertently reinscribe notions of certain forms of subjectivity as being more “superficial” or less “primary” than others—that is, capable of disappearing or becoming irrelevant when things “really” get serious. Like many gender justice activists, I have felt uneasy about how the women workers’ movements apparently left gender-based demands aside during the strikes of 2005-2007 as well as the ways the dominant narrative among Egyptian revolutionary movements which asserts that women activists “left gender aside” during the 18 days. Yet I have felt similarly frustrated that at other moments, gender is focused upon as a singular, isolated category and is centralized almost too much—as in the dominant U.S. and Egyptian corporate media representations of “sexualized violence against Egyptian women” that ignore the significance of state violence, authoritarianism, corruption, imperialism, and so on in producing sexualized violence. These collective reflections inspire challenges related to both recognizing why women might choose to prioritize other aspects of struggle over gender while simultaneously recognizing that all the intersectional strands are at play.