Cairo, prioritizing nationalist issues over feminist concerns. In 1945 she received the Order of Virtues. Feminism At the time, women in Egypt were confined to the house or harem which she viewed as a very backward system. Sha'arawi resented such restrictions on women's movements, and consequently started organizing lectures for women on topics of interest to them. This brought many women out of their homes and into public places for the first time, and Sha'arawi was able to convince them to help her establish a women's welfare society to raise money for the poor women of Egypt. In 1910, Sha'arawi opened a school for girls where she focused on teaching academic subjects rather than practical skills such as midwifery. Sha'arawi made a decision to stop wearing her traditional hijab after her husband's death in 1922. After returning from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome, she removed her veil and mantle, a signal event in the history of Egyptian feminism. Women who came to greet her were shocked at first then broke into applause and some of them removed their veils and mantles. Within a decade of Huda’s act of defiance, all Egyptian women stopped wearing veils and mantles for many decades until a retrograde movement occurred. Her decision to remove her veil and mantle was part of a greater movement of women, and was influenced by French born Egyptian feminist named Eugénie Le Brun, but it contrasted with some feminist thinkers like Malak Hifni Nasif. In 1923, Sha`arawi founded and became the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union. Characteristic of liberal feminism in the early twentieth century, the EFU sought to reform laws restricting personal freedoms, such as marriage, divorce, and child custody. Even as a young woman, she showed her independence by entering a department store in Alexandria to buy her own clothes instead of having them brought to her home. She helped to organize Mubarrat Muhammad Ali, a women's social service organization, in 1909 and the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women in 1914, the year in which she traveled to Europe for the first time. She helped lead the first women's street demonstration during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, and was elected president of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee. She began to hold regular meetings for women at her home, and from this, the Egyptian Feminist Union was born. She launched a fortnightly journal, L'Égyptienne