I use the 1966 Egyptian film, My Wife Is a General Director, to discuss the achievements and limitations of state feminism in Nasser Era Egypt. It tells the story of an ambitious working wife who got promoted to the position of the general director of a public agency -- only to realize that, in her new role, her husband is one of her subordinates. To evaluate the progressiveness of its message regarding women’s role, I examine it in a comparative perspective assessing its message against that of a Hollywood movie released in the same period: Kisses for My President, a 1964 film about a wife who was elected president of the United States, with her husband finding himself in the place of what would have typically been the First Lady. I argue that the Egyptian film is significantly more progressive with regard to women’s role in public compared to the American film, which was produced during the same period. Despite the important limitations of Egypt’s state feminism during the Nasser era, its emancipatory discourse still provided an empowering tool for many ambitious Egyptian women. One manifestation of this empowerment is that women were able to fall back on the state-endorsed discourse in the face of traditional voices that feared and resisted the idea of women’s liberation.