In her book, Fi Athar Enayat al-Zayyat (In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat), Iman Mersal sets out on a quest to learn as much as possible about a little-known, talented female author who died young. Her quest quickly turns into a reflection on the challenges of writing while female at a moment and a place of major sociopolitical and economic upheavals. This paper draws inspiration from Mersal’s reflections on the misogynistic and self-serving attitudes of powerful male cultural figures towards al-Zayyat’s literary production. It examines the irony of the institutional marginalization of Egyptian women writers in the 1960s at a time when male authors were celebrated as “progressive” for publishing novels and short stories from the perspective of the “New Woman”. In doing so, this paper explores the many ways that the male gatekeepers of the cultural sphere in Egypt reflected the paradoxical ethos of the Nasserite masculinist state.