People may think while reading Memoirs of a Woman Doctor that the narrator is stooping down to the level of men by abandoning gender roles, they may think that she is being disobedient and misogynist. "The first real tears I shed in my life .were because I was a girl. I wept over my femininity even before I knew what it was. The moment I opened my eyes on life, a state of enmity already existed between me and my nature" (Saadawi 10). I read this as being that she has a mutual hatred with her nature in accordance with her country's culture. .
When she breaks the traditions and becomes a doctor she begins a journey to reevaluate her core nature. She even goes into seclusion in nature to find herself. "For the first time there was nobody else with me, and I felt as if I was divesting myself of the covering layers which had accumulated over the long years of my past life" (Saadawi 41). In this line, I believe she is shedding her cultural obstacles that she had to struggle with to become who she really is. "I was confronted by my naked self and I began to examine what I saw in minute detail. I stripped myself bare of medical and scientific knowledge.of people I'd seen and known.and the battles I'd lived through over the years, which had finally led me up a blind ally in my thinking.and I began to feel" (Saadawi 41). In this passage, she is discovering herself all over again away from the time since she was going through puberty. The descriptions of her laughing, stretching and relaxing are her becoming comfortable with herself, searching for a peace within herself. She does not dislike herself or her femininity here, rather she is trying to find a new femininity that she was not aware of existing because of all the cultural restrictions which were mostly imposed by her mother. "My mother had always told me that a girl shouldn't laugh loud enough for people to hear, so my laughter had always faded on my lips before it made a sound" (Saadawi 43).
