Almost as soon as the Egyptian satirical press came into being, negative visual images of Egyptian women began to appear in the popular press: sometimes the images were of evil temptresses and harlots; of domineering, aggressive, and obsessed wives, and sometimes of overly westernized modern women - not sufficiently Egyptian; not sufficiently Islamic. The criticism crossed boundaries of age, social affiliations, marital and economic status. Although important changes in the content and context of the debate on women's roles and rights in Egyptian society had taken place in the Egyptian public sphere, debates which culminated in the 1920's with the formation of women’s organizations, as well as educational and legislative reforms, in the imagined caricatured world created by men and directed mainly to a male audience, women were still being belittled, laughed at, and reduced to objects of ridicule. Skimming through the satirical press of the Interwar Years, one might have assumed there was no ideal Egyptian model of womanhood; only impure, unworthy, unwomanly, malicious, debased ideas of women. The stereotypes demeaning Egyptian women can be read, and have been partially debated by some researchers as mainly reflecting an Islamic-Egyptian reaction to Western stimuli. In other words, since this imagery was constructed in the context of Egypt's efforts to modernize and compete with the West, the caricatures of women have been discussed as reflecting Egyptian-Islamic tendencies to cling to the past in an attempt to block change and preserve the status quo. At the same time, Egyptian social institutions and customs hindered women's ability to create alternatives to men's images of them. The artist's role was considered male, and the tools of the pictorial image were built and operated by men. Men were the producers and controllers of art, and their graphic representations perpetuated a male-centered view. However, as this paper will show, visual satirical imagery in the Egyptian press (mainly from al-Lata?if al-Musawwara, Ruz al-Yusef and al-Kashkul al Musawwar) reveals a close resemblance to western visual debates on women's rights – such as the nineteenth century French satirical reaction to social changes accelerated following the French Revolution, or the American imagery of the suffrage campaign (1907-14). Hence, the Egyptian visual imagery demeaning women should be contextualized as part of a phenomenon which crossed boundaries of space, society, culture, and religion - a gendered reaction to social change, and not necessarily an Islamic nor an Egyptian one.