Women Writing the Revolution During the decades leading up to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, women writers, like their male peers, addressed many of the central issues that ultimately spurred on demonstrators both young and old. Senior writers such as Salwa Bakr, Radwa Ashour and Ibtihal Salem dealt with issues of political corruption and oppression and also explored the very intimate repercussions upon women’s psyches of the failures and abuses of the Mubarak regime. While they have received much less attention in the literary field than their older peers, the women of the 1990s generation of fiction writers have likewise been exploring the momentous social and emotional toll upon women that came about either directly or indirectly because of the Mubarak regime. This includes severe economic hardship for the middle classes, abject poverty for the lower classes, and a new religious conservativism that has challenged women’s participation in various aspects of social life outside the home. This paper explores the fiction of writers Naglaa Alaam and Manal al-Sayyid and examines how these women have carried the torch of the previous generation but also have sought, through a new focus on women’s imaginative worlds, to forge a new path in using fiction to explore and critique women’s roles and status in Egyptian society. This paper relies upon literary analysis of short stories by both writers, interviews with the writers, and ethnographic observations of the Cairene literary scene.