I use the film Al Bab Al Maftouh (The Open Door) to reflect on women’s rights and their intersection with the anti-imperial cause in post-1952 Egypt; and on whether the woman’s question was solely the state’s business where women’s rights were given to women rather than taken by them, or a battle that women fought independently from the state. Or more than that. This film is both similar to -- and distinct from -- other films made in the 1950s and 60s about women’s issues and gender relations. It depicts women’s emancipation as part of Egypt’s liberation, and essentially as part of a liberation that was championed by the post-1952 state, a state that, as Laura Bier argues, sought to “mobiliz[e] women in the service of national development” and nation building, which required a “restructer[ing] of gender relations” (3-4). Watching The Open Door from today’s vantage point forces as to ask certain questions, as we witness post-2013 Egypt ruled by an oppressive state, whose policies and practices have had a devastating impact on women and the feminist cause, and whose excessive and unchecked power is often attributed to the systems of oppression that the 1952 military regime first established. It is hard to watch. The Open Door today and not wonder if this is pure propaganda given that the 1952 regime, despite its anti-imperial discourse and actions, was tyrannical, ts authoritarianism already consolidated and no secret by 1963 (the date of the film’s release). It crushed its opponents and left no space for a once vibrant feminist activism that used to be independent from the state before 1952. I argue that The Open Door’s message should not be simply dismissed as pure propaganda for the regime because the context we are living through today is still different from the context that the film’s contemporaries lived through.