The Middle East feminist revolutionWomen are not merely joining proteststo topple dictators,they are at the centre of demanding social change.
Naomi Wolf Last Modified: 04 Mar 2011 17:23 GMT
Women supporting women inevitably leads to women supporting revolution. In Tunisia and Tahrir Square, women were at the front and centre of organising and leading protests, demanding social change [GALLO/GETTY]
Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?
In both countries, women protesters were nothing like the Western stereotype: they were front and centre, in news clips and on Facebook forums, and even in the leadership. In Egypt's Tahrir Square, women volunteers, some accompanied by children, worked steadily to support the protests – helping with security, communications, and shelter. Many commentators credited the great numbers of women and children with the remarkable overall peacefulness of the protesters in the face of grave provocations.
Other citizen reporters in Tahrir Square – and virtually anyone with a cell phone could become one – noted that the masses of women involved in the protests were demographically inclusive. Many wore headscarves and other signs of religious conservatism, while others reveled in the freedom to kiss a friend or smoke a cigarette in public.
Supporters, leaders
But women were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements, from those of the 1960s to the recent student riots in the United Kingdom. Egyptian women also organised, strategised, and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.
The role of women in the great upheaval in the Middle East has been woefully under-analysed. Women in Egypt did not just "join" the protests – they were a leading force behind the cultural evolution that made the protests inevitable. And what is true for Egypt is true, to a greater and lesser extent, throughout the Arab world. When women change, everything changes - and women in the Muslim world are changing radically.
The greatest shift is educational. Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They are being trained to use power in ways that their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers - as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating; campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organisations; and running meetings.
Indeed, a substantial minority of young women in Egypt and other Arab countries have now spent their formative years thinking critically in mixed-gender environments, and even publicly challenging male professors in the classroom. It is far easier to tyrannise a population when half are poorly educated and trained to be submissive. But, as Westerners should know from their own historical experience, once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the massive cultural shift that follows.
The nature of social media, too, has helped turn women into protest leaders. Having taught leadership skills to women for more than a decade, I know how difficult it is to get them to stand up and speak out in a hierarchical organisational structure. Likewise, women tend to avoid the figurehead status that traditional protest has in the past imposed on certain activists – almost invariably a hotheaded young man with a megaphone.
Projection of power
In such contexts – with a stage, a spotlight, and a spokesperson – women often shy away from leadership roles. But social media, through the very nature of the technology, have changed what leadership looks and feels like today. Facebook mimics the way many women choose to experience social reality, with connections between people just as important as individual dominance or control, if not more so.
You can be a powerful leader on Facebook just by creating a really big "us". Or you can stay the same size, conceptually, as everyone else on your page – you don't have to assert your dominance or authority. The structure of Facebook's interface creates what brick-and-mortar institutions - despite 30 years of feminist pressure - have failed to provide: a context in which women's ability to forge a powerful "us" and engage in a leadership of service can advance the cause of freedom and justice worldwide.
Of course, Facebook cannot reduce the risks of protest. But, however violent the immediate future in the Middle East may be, the historical record of what happens when educated women participate in freedom movements suggests that those in the region who would like to maintain iron-fisted rule are finished.
Just when France began its rebellion in 1789, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had been caught up in witnessing it, wrote her manifesto for women's liberation. After educated women in America helped fight for the abolition of slavery, they put female suffrage on the agenda. After they were told in the 1960s that "the position of women in the movement is prone", they generated "second wave" feminism – a movement born of women's new skills and old frustrations.
Time and again, once women have fought the other battles for the freedom of their day, they have moved on to advocate for their own rights. And, since feminism is simply a logical extension of democracy, the Middle East's despots are facing a situation in which it will be almost impossible to force these awakened women to stop their fight for freedom – their own and that of their communities.
Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
This article was first published by Project Syndicate.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source:Al Jazeera
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A new law guarantees 64 seats to female candidates, meaning a 1,500 per cent rise in female parliamentarians.
Evan Hill Last Modified: 29 Nov 2010 01:30 GMT
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When the sun sets on Egypt's election for its lower house of parliament on Sunday night, most observers anticipate that the vote will have been marred by fraud and possibly violence, and that the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) will have again won the two-thirds majority it has held since 1979. The quota is only meant to last for two rounds of elections, meaning it will expire in 2020, but women running for the seats hope it will jumpstart a new paradigm in Egyptian politics. The decision to adjust the assembly's gender balance by fiat has been met with vigour - 380 women are competing for the newly available seats, expressing hope that their participation will help force Egypt's politics to reflect the powerful, public roles women have assumed over the past century. But in some ways, the new wave of female candidacies reflects the country's old themes: the perennial dominance of President Hosni Mubarak's NDP and the traditional, conservative role society has long envisioned for women. Society is changing Last week, at a forum for female candidates held in a hotel conference room in the upscale Cairo neighbourhood of Dokki, NDP candidate Mediha Khattab found herself fielding a raft of questions about how to preserve marriages in Egypt, and keep young men and women from divorcing. Khattab, although running for the first time, is a high-powered candidate with a background in health care. She is connected to Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne, has sat on the National Council for Women, and has served as the faculty dean of medicine at Cairo University. She speaks like a practiced politician, never directly contradicting a potential supporter to their face. When a hijab-wearing woman from the religious al-Azhar University asked Khattab, who wears a suit and no headscarf, if a law could be made to force the inclusion of a psychological counsellor in marriage contracts, Khattab chose not to answer directly.Society is changing, she said, and divorce is on the rise; girls don't get married to their cousins anymore. "We have to overcome this," she said. Futhermore, using legislation to carve out space for women in parliament does not guarantee that society will accept them as powerbrokers, Hassan said. "Women in Egypt exist in a protective system," she said. "The quota system is only put forth to send an image that Egypt is becoming more democratic, but in doing so it overlooks other problems." Other female candidates, though forced to deal with the effects of their gender on a daily basis, do seem less interested in being feminists than in getting elected and addressing what they see as other, major problems in Egypt. Quota law The first part - getting elected - is almost hard enough. The quota law has created two new seats for women in 26 of Egypt’s 29 governorates. In three that were deemed too large for only two seats, including Cairo and Alexandria, there are four spaces. In practice, this means that candidates like Khattab and and her competitors and peers are often running in districts that encompass four to six million people. With the Egyptian electoral law allowing for only two weeks of campaigning, this means it's impossible in practice for female candidates - at least without the infrastructure of a major party like the NDP - to promote themselves.
Amira el-Asar, a candidate with the new Reform and Development Party, laughed when asked how many people in her district in Cairo knew who she was. Maybe half of the four million, she said. Unlike rival female NDP candidates, who can appear in person and on campaign posters with male colleagues who are running throughout the country, Asar has maybe two allies in her party to join. Asar, who is something of a rarity in her country being unmarried and childless at 32, said she approved of the quota law, even if it amounts to social discrimination. "The good thing about it is that it finally recognises that the role of Egypt's women is not only the eastern role of wife and kids," she said. Although Asar's mother, especially, has supported her political efforts, her family fears that she is putting herself at risk of harassment, at the very least. "For a woman to go out and shake hands and say, 'This is me, vote for me,' that's difficult," Asar said. Still, she is making a strong effort. Lacking a car, she takes taxis out on the campaign trail, and she has recently started to ride Cairo's crowded and hectic public transportation system to meet more constituents. Asar's social liberal Reform and Development Party, founded in 2009 by Anwar Esat Sadat, the nephew of assassinated president Anwar Sadat, faces an uphill battle against the NDP this year, like almost every opposition party. Asar said she expects the NDP to commit fraud; for instance, by giving polling place workers envelopes packed with hundreds of ballots pre-marked for NDP candidates repeatedly throughout election day. But even though Asar said she expects NDP rival Zeinab Radwan to win, she will still try. "The average Egyptian is pressured and feels like the ruling party is responsible for it," she said. Political survivor The downtown Cairo office of the Nasserist Party is a fitting emblem for the state of the old political guard gone to pasture. Brown water damage leaks through the ceiling, empty offices sit quietly as though unchanged since 1966, and the only things shining in the place are the large busts of former president and famous Arab nationalist Gamel Abdel Nasser himself.Sowad Abdelhamid, a female quota candidate for the Nasserists and longtime figure in Egyptian women's issues, acknowleded that the state of the party is somewhat dim: Their finances are bad, and since 2005, they lack a single representative in parliament. But Abdelhamid is a survivor; politically active since the 1970s, she has worked in television and newspaper journalism and wrote a book on women's rights - "Women and Positions" - in 1990. While there is no "superwoman" who can cover the entirety of the districts they have been assigned, she said, the quota is still positive. "There has to be a role for women in parliament, considering that women make up over half the population," she said. "This is an experiment ... It is legitimate to have this temporary discrimination in favour of women".Like others, Abdelhamid believes the quality of the female politicians elected will shape Egyptian society's opinion of women in parliament over the next 10 years. "There need to be efforts on the educational, social and religious levels. Ten years is not enough to abolish the stereotype that politics is a man's game," she said. While the symbol of Nasser is a powerful rallying point anywhere in the Arab world, Abdelhamid said, she still realises that she is outgunned by the NDP. The few posters her campaign has mounted around her district have been mostly torn down, and the NDP candidates always seem to receive more media time and more speaking time at conferences, she said. "Anyone on the street can feel this difference from the amount of advertising, and the way state media focuses on the NDP's candidates," she said. "But we think it's about the 'how' and not the 'how much.'" Voter apathy For all of Abdelhamid's faith, though, she and other quota candidates face a steep road, not only because they are women in a patriarchal society, but because the average Egyptian long ago lost interest and faith in politicians of any gender.On a recent night in the Old Cairo neighbourhood of Egypt's capital, down a dirty main street lit up by blinking, multi-coloured lights and echoing with amplified voices from the nearby NDP rally, a group of young women gathered at the entrance to a snack shop - all wearing hijab - expressed little interest in Madiha Khattab, who had just spoken up the block. A 23-year-old lawyer who had just graduated from Cairo University and would only give her name as Hoda said, as many others have, that politicians come around for a few days during campaign season and then disappear forever. Hoda did not know who Khattab was and said she was not going to vote, for a woman or anyone else. "We are a republic, so the people should have the say, but all the power is in the hands of the leadership," Hoda said. The quota is a good law, she said; since Egyptians tend to prefer men in most things, even when looking for a law firm, putting women into politics is a necessary move. But in Egypt, if your vote doesn't count, it doesn't count for either sex. With reporting by Heba el-Sherif and Lara el-Gibaly. |
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>via: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/11/2010111813029420433.html
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Sidelining Egyptian Women after the Uprising
All the members of the committee writing Egypt's new constitution are men.
By A century ago, more than a million people marched in streets across Europe on the first International Women's Day. They called for an end to discrimination and for women to have the same rights as men to work, vote, and shape their countries' futures.
A hundred years later, women across the globe are still much more likely than men to be poor and illiterate. We earn only one-tenth of the world's income for doing two-thirds of the work. Women produce up to 80 percent of the food in developing countries, but own only 1 percent of the land in those nations.
In many countries, we're still told what we can do and even what we can wear. Women in Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, and Iran face harassment if they don't observe conservative religious dress codes. Muslim women in France and some parts of Spain now break the law there if they don traditional attire.
Women campaigning for their liberation are often met with derision, abuse, or worse. In Russia, the Philippines, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, and Nepal, leading activists have recently been murdered for speaking out. In China, Bangladesh, India, Zimbabwe, and many other countries, they are routinely detained and tortured.
Tragically, the international community largely ignores these facts. Women's inequality is treated as a regrettable but inevitable reality.
Over the past two months, millions of women have participated in the dramatic uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, demanding change. Many have led these movements as well, demanding an end to political repression and calling for systematic reform.
Both women and men have suffered under these repressive governments. But women have also had to endure discriminatory laws and deeply entrenched gender inequality. It's no wonder that they took to the streets. Or that they cheered loudly when Mubarak fell. Or that they wanted to believe the promise of a new dawn in Egyptian politics. But it remains to be seen how much will really change for Egyptian women.
Many governments--including our own--apparently only support women's rights when it's convenient. These rights are often used as bargaining chips in the struggle for control of the international agenda.
When negotiating with the Taliban seems politically advantageous, women's rights don't count. When the United States wants to strengthen its alliance with Pakistan, Washington is silent when that government gives autonomy to tribal or religious courts that victimize women. And the United States has supported some Iraqi militias, like the Badr Corps, that have attacked and killed women's rights activists.
And so it goes in Egypt. There, as the country begins to build a new future, women are in danger of being sidelined once again.
Following decades of discrimination and inequality under previous regimes, women are being denied a role in the creation of a new Egypt by both the caretaker government and the international community. Most recently, the military formed a national committee to write Egypt's new constitution. All its members are men.
If the international community truly cares about women's rights in Egypt, it must champion women's participation in every aspect of building new systems and institutions.
Instead, Egypt's interim authorities and the international community are exhibiting a sense of paternalism all too familiar to Egyptian women who have spent decades living under an oppressive government.
As existing governments scramble to change and new governments emerge, all must commit to respecting women's equality, both in law and in practice. Women will only have that equality if they can actively engage in all the negotiations and decisions taking place during this time of transition.
Fulfilling the promise of change in Egypt and elsewhere in the region--and the world--requires women of diverse backgrounds and political persuasions at the table as full partners.
Much has changed in the last century. And yet, many of the same problems remain. The call for equality, fairness, and respect was at the heart of the first International Women's Day. It still is today.
Widney Brown is Amnesty International's senior director of law and policy. www.amnesty.org
>via: http://www.otherwords.org/articles/sidelining_egyptian_women_after_the_uprising
WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN PALESTINE UNDER SIEGE
March 9, 2011 at 12:03 (Holidays, International Women's Day, Palestine)
On the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day Palestinian Women’s Rights Remain Under Siege
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