Women producers, directors, and stars were surprisingly prominent in Egyptian cinema through the 1940s, until the 1952 revolution, like the French Revolution, dealt a blow to what it viewed as an effeminate ancien regime. Dismissed as apolitical, reactionary and poor imitations of Hollywood, women's melodrama was in fact a successful and poignantly political movie genre. In movies made by Assia, Asmahan, Leila Murad and Umm Kalthum, marriage and family became the arena for political debate about the future of Egyptian society. In a decade where the Muslim Brotherhood reached a peak of popularity by focusing politics on questions of domestic morality, it is no surprise that men found great interest in what superficially appeared to be women's movies. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the woman's melodrama was among the most popular movie genres in Egypt. A survey of films made in the first decade of Egyptian sound cinema (according to Mahmud Qasim's Dalil al-aflam), suggests that fully half of the movies featured female protagonists, and a clear majority were love stories and stories of marriage and/or remarriage. This paper uses three movies, Layla Murad's Laila, the Country Girl (1941); Asmahan's Love and Revenge (1944); and Umm Kalthum's Fatima (1947) to advance an argument that these musical melodramas refracted political issues much as the screwball comedies analyzed by Stanley Cavell did in the United States, and as French melodrama of the early 19th century did in Peter Brooks' classic study, The Melodramatic Imagination. In each of these films, the political debate implicit in the plots revolved around efforts to reconcile seeming opposites: tradition and modernity, East and West, poor and rich, female and male. In contrast to post-World War II backlash against women's move into the public arena in France and the United States, Egyptian women's melodramas remained fairly optimistic about the prospect of resolving conflicts. Indeed, the paper concludes that women's melodramas allegorically prefigured the 1952 revolution and the Nasserist vision of Egyptian modernity.