Sabiha al-Shaykh Da'ud

Sabiha al-Shaykh Da'ud, who lived from 1912 to 1975, was an Iraqi lawyer and women's rights activist regarded as Iraq's first female law graduate, enrolling at the College of Law in Baghdad in 1936 and studying seated apart from her male classmates. She and Zakia Hakki became Iraq's first female judges, appointed in the years 1956 to 1959. From the 1940s she held leadership roles in the Iraqi Women's Union, directing two of its constituent organizations before rising to vice president in the early 1950s, and her research on the Iraqi women's movement became the principal source for Doreen Ingrams' book The Awakened, described as the first extended English-language treatment of the movement.