Marie Assaad (1922-2018) was a prominent social worker, an advocate for women’s rights, an environmentalist, and most importantly, an inspiration to generations of women. Within the framework of an oral history archive of Egyptian women established by the Women and Memory Forum, she recounted her life story as a journey towards freedom and resistance to injustice and discrimination. Her story is punctuated with insights on how she overcame obstacles, how she was affected by particular forms of injustice, and how she succeeded in transforming her anger and frustration into positive actions. In a memorial held in her honour, her dissenting voice was recognized and celebrated. Narrating/representing memories of dissent is potentially a powerful act of subversion and resistance, particularly during times of turmoil and conflict. At the same time, oral historians as mediators and interpreters of memory are confronted with ethical challenges regarding their role in the construction of personal and cultural memory. In this paper, I will engage with Marie Assaad’s personal memory as a political memory and argue that the ethics of representation is a political question rather than a moral question.