Jihan Sadat (born 1933), the second wife of Anwar Sadat, pioneered for women's rights in her country.

The woman who would become the second wife of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was born near Cairo to an Egyptian father and an English mother. Her father was a surgeon and her family was upper-middle class. Sadat was raised as a Moslem according to her father's wishes. She attended a Christian school for girls and a secondary school in Cairo. It was in Cairo that Sadat met her future husband, Anwar Sadat. Her parents objected to the idea of their daughter marrying a divorced revolutionary; nonetheless, Jihan and Anwar were married in May 1949.

Jihan was the devoted wife of a rising political man and mother of their four children, but she was more than that. Although while a teenager she had been almost obsessed with Sadat as a local hero, even before...