In the 1970s, Sisa Abu Daooh’s husband died when she was six months pregnant with her daughter. With a nearly all-male workforce, she wasn’t able to find employment. As a widow, she faced stigma that excluded her from resources. As a single woman, she encountered sexual harassment. Her family urged her to remarry, but she feared becoming dependent on a man who might reject her daughter. Sisa refused to accept the poverty, inequality and ridicule that society called her fate. Unable to access rights as a woman, she decided to live as a man. She shaved her head and wore men’s clothes and relinquished her female identity. Disguised as a man, she found work making bricks and harvesting wheat. When she could no longer work in the fields, she took up shoe shining. As a man, she was able to put food on the table. She protected her daughter from discrimination as a fatherless child, as her now motherless daughter had the male figure that gives a child a name, a reputation and visibility. After …![]()
