So many analyses of Arab political thought in the wake of World War II recount how progressive forces are captured by what Roel Meijer (2002), following James Scott (1999), has termed “the hegemony of authoritarian modernism.” We see this story told in some of the works that recount how early liberals “betray” the liberal cause by taking up Islamic themes in the work of Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot (1977) and Nadav Safran (1961). Another version from the left bemoans the abandonment of progressive communist movement by activists who subsumed the interests of workers and an internationalist outlook to nationalist and Arab nationalist causes and the emerging military regimes. Meijer’s own work on Egypt asks the question of “why so many prominent intellectuals joined the new regime in the second half of the 1950s, even though most of them had laid the ideological and institutional foundations for a pluralist civil society in the 1930s and 1940s” (2). The answer he gives focuses on the tension between two trends: one that sought to develop the democratic potential of civil society and another that sought to unify social forces in the name of national strength and development. The tension, Meijer tells us, is ultimately resolved in the favor of an authoritarian state-led modernization. A similar story is told in regard to Arab feminism during this time. As Badran succinctly puts it “what had been born out of independent feminist activism in the mid-1940s had come by the 1950s and 1960s to be harnessed by states to serve their purposes” (1995, 250). Arab feminism becomes state feminism. My aim is not to refute this general narrative—since it is certainly generally true. But it has never been the case that all feminism has been state feminism and we know that state feminism begins to decline in the 1980s. My contribution will examine early gendered critiques of authoritarian state-led modernization in the Egyptian context. These critiques are put forth from multiple ideological directions, from liberal feminists (such as Doria Shafiq), to socialist feminsits (such as Ingi Aflatun and Saiza Nabarawi), to what might be termed Islamic feminists (such as Zaynab Al-Ghazali).