At Tahrir Square, we broke the barrier of fear. Once that barrier is down the people can do anything.
— HODA ELSADDA, professor, University of Cairo
Change is one part nerve, two parts knowledge and three parts tenacity. The new revolutionaries know that you have to speak your truth and use the law of the land to hold the state accountable for changing the status quo and then be prepared to wait out the naysayers.
But the process begins with finding the nerve to conquer fear. That’s what happened on Egypt’s Tahrir Square during eighteen remarkable days in January and February 2011 that transformed both the Egyptians who rose up during that raucous, dangerous, joyful revolution, and Egypt itself. This is a country that traces its history back eight thousand years; it’s where the pyramids that were built about forty-five hundred years ago still stand watch, evidence of a rich and storied past. Characters like Alexander the Great and Mark Anthony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar left their impressive marks on this place. Its ancient history also boasts equality among the sexes: women could own and sell property, make their own contracts, marry and divorce, receive inheritances and pursue legal disputes in court. Some, like Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII, among others, became pharaohs. Contemporary Egypt is a contradictory place that has embraced equal wages for women and maternity leave but also enforces draconian personal status laws that favour men over women in marriage, divorce and inheritance.
The women of the Arab Spring want change in their personal lives, but first they needed to knock out the dictators.
Hoda Elsadda was chair of Arabic studies at Manchester University in England when the first hints of an uprising began in Tunisia. The early rumblings of change rolled into Egypt in October, and as soon as it looked as if the seeds of a similar revolution could germinate there, she took a leave of absence from her job and went home to Cairo. “I had to be here,” she told me as we sat in her book-lined office in Cairo exactly one year after the hated Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign. “I couldn’t stay away from Egypt when the changes we’d hoped would come for forty years were potentially on the doorstep.” By the time Mubarak was ousted, on February 12, 2011, she knew what her own next steps had to be. “I went back to England and resigned from my job, because now was the time to shape the future of Egypt—I wouldn’t be anyplace else.” She moved to Cairo and took a job as professor of literature at Cairo University.
Elsadda was no stranger to protests, but the ones she’d been in before the Arab Spring were events with five hundred people surrounded by ten thousand police. In Tahrir Square the protester numbers kept swelling; by the end of the first day there were more of them than police. “I’m fifty-two years old. I wanted to show my support but was undecided about actually going to Tahrir Square, so I decided I would think about joining the protesters later.” In the meantime, her nieces were calling to ask her to go with them to the square. Her brother said to his daughters, in no uncertain terms, “Don’t go.” She knew of friends who were literally locking up their children so they would not go.
Like others, she was drawn to the protest by activists like Asmaa Mahfouz, twenty-six, who put a message on her Facebook page about a week before the now-famous date of January 25, 2011. It read, “I’m making this video to give you one simple message. We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25. If we still have honour and we want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down on January 25. We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental rights. Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference!” All Egyptians should come, she exhorted, “for freedom, justice, honour and human dignity.” And she added, “Whoever says women shouldn’t go to the protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honour and manhood and come with me January 25.”
Elsadda decided to go to the square on January 28, three days after the protest began. “We went—all of us together, the whole family—and we stood together for eighteen days. It was a kind of euphoria. I met all my old friends—the usual suspects in the human rights movement, the women’s movement, plus people you’d never expect, like my own brother, who became a born-again revolutionary.”
It wasn’t all fearlessness. She says she awakened every morning with some part of her dreading going to the square. “I had no illusions about the level of violence the state would use. But once there with all the others, I felt totally safe. I felt we were part of history, we were changing Egypt. We were taking a stand. It was very exciting, like an adrenalin high.”
She describes the value of being connected by a common cause: “It makes people better than each one was.” Although the revolution is now described as the social network revolution and the youth revolution, Elsadda says it was neither. “It was the Egyptian people together who did this.” There were young and old people, some who had never seen a mobile phone joining hands with Twitter wizards. Women with their faces fully covered worked alongside secular women. “There is normally a huge gap between the rich and the poor in Egypt,” says Elsadda, “but this was eighteen days of solidarity. We shared food and water; we were united by a common cause. It tells you a better future is possible.”
She says the success was based on a single factor: “We broke the barrier of fear. There used to be so many taboos. Once that barrier is down, the people can do anything.”
~
They got rid of a dictator, but the old regime was still intact a year later when we met. “The objectives of the revolution have not been fulfilled,” Elsadda told me. “But now we have to give it time.” Justice and equality for all Egyptians is the goal, but women are working on changing the personal status laws, which contribute to such bizarre contradictions in women’s circumstances. On the one hand, the laws control the personal affairs of women; for example, a man can divorce his wife simply by saying, “I divorce you.” After fifty years of marriage, a woman can find herself out on the street. On the other hand, the country’s labour laws are among the best in the world for women and at state institutions, such as the university where Elsadda works: there, the percentage of women on the staff reflects the proportion of women in society.
Egypt’s personal status laws are derived from Islamic codes that dictate the rules of marriage, divorce and inheritance. This legal structure is distinct from the rest of the Egyptian legal system, which is based on French civil law. During the past decade, the government has reformed some of the more egregious gender inequities in these laws, but women still face discrimination.
In 2000, when a no-fault divorce law was proposed and passed, a woman had to give up her financial rights, return her dowry and exempt her husband from any future financial obligation in order to get a divorce. Although a man could have a divorce simply by stating the desire, the so-called reform means a woman has to go to court, and she needs to prove physical harm as a reason for the collapse of the marriage. “You need a broken leg and a witness to the attack, and then you need to wait six to eight years in court,” says Elsadda. And the no-fault law contains a provision that was also a setback for women’s rights: women no longer have the right to travel abroad without the husband’s consent. What’s more, Muslim women are prohibited from marrying Christian men, and non-Muslim women who marry Muslim men are subject to Islamic law. The women who marched and shouted and stood in solidarity with the men on Tahrir Square thought that these unfair laws would be negotiable in the new post-Mubarak Egypt. But they were in for a nasty surprise.
It was during the demonstrations that followed the eighteen-day revolution—particularly on March 8, International Women’s Day—that women’s issues were brought into sharp focus on Tahrir Square. The hostility and violence unleashed against women protesters on March 8 shocked everyone. Women were harassed verbally and physically by menacing groups of men who accused them of adopting Western agendas and going against the cultural values of Egypt. Female protesters were dragged from the square and subjected to brutal “virginity tests” by the military—some of them in front of a crowd, others reportedly in a kitchen at the nearby military headquarters.
Samira Ibrahim, twenty-five, had travelled from her small town in Upper Egypt—an eight-hour train ride to Cairo—to attend the protest. When we sat together in a café in Cairo a year later, her emotional scars were still in evidence. Clearly agitated, she fidgeted as we talked, checked her mobile every few seconds and spoke at a staccato pace. “They forced me to remove my clothes,” she said. “When I struggled, they beat me. They used electric shocks on me, and it was an officer who did the virginity test [using his fingers to find out if her hymen was intact]. I felt like I’d been raped.” Sexual violence was the tool men used to silence these female human rights defenders on the front lines.
Ibrahim is a petite woman, barely five feet tall, with cover-girl good looks and wearing model-like makeup. She turned up in jeans, with an animal-print scarf wrapped around her head in the new fashionable “big hijab” style that swirls fabric into a crownlike headdress, and carrying a shoulder bag with a slogan on it that read, “No to emergency laws, no to military rule, no to criminalizing strikes and protests.” She was feisty and furious at once. She’d made headlines when she decided to sue the military for the assault on her. And again when she won the civil case she’d brought against them. Although she was told by the military commander in charge of the men who assaulted her that the soldiers would not act that way again, the assurance wasn’t enough. According to Ibrahim, the soldiers’ description of the assault on her—claiming that a doctor had examined her hymen—wasn’t the truth. “It was an officer who sexually assaulted me,” she says. “They wanted to humiliate me. I wanted to make sure they don’t get to do that to anyone ever again.” So she lodged a complaint against the military. “I’m not afraid of them,” she said. A month later, the military tribunal pursuing her complaint acquitted the officer accused of administering the virginity test. But Ibrahim isn’t through with them yet. She wants justice and says eventually she’ll get it by pursuing her case using internatonal law.
The line in the sand that the men drew at Tahrir Square on International Women’s Day is something the women protesters, who had stood with them through the revolution, are still coming to terms with. Elsadda says there may be an explanation for the vicious male backlash: “We followed the Western model of modernity in every way except the family. Even in the Nasser regime in 1956, when women could do everything in the public sphere, the private one was not touched. In the seventies, a woman minister in the government was actually stopped from leaving the country at the airport by a husband who felt she should stay at home. Until recently a woman needed her husband’s permission to get a passport.”
As for violence against women, Elsadda says the level is about the same in Egypt as it is in most other places. But, she cautions, changing Egyptian attitudes toward women isn’t easy.
“What I want for Egyptian women is the same thing I want for the country—equality, autonomy and fair personal status laws,” she tells me.
Although most people accuse the military of forsaking their support of the people in Tahrir Square and blame the fundamentalist Islamists for the government’s failure to fulfil the objectives of the revolution, there are two things that the revolution has accomplished for women: a sense of empowerment and bringing more women into politics. “History says women are part of the revolution, but once the political pie is divided up, the danger is that women will be excluded,” Elsadda warns. After the protests, she joined a political party for the first time in her life. She thinks that the main challenge for women today is guarding against the backlash coming from all sides.
She raises a very interesting and little-known fact about Egyptian politics, which she calls the First Lady Syndrome. “One of the key obstacles that women’s rights activists will face in the months and years to come is a prevalent public perception that associates women’s rights activists and their activities with the ex–first lady, Suzanne Mubarak.”
The fundamentalists argue that Egypt has to deal with the negative consequences of Mubarak’s corrupt regime, one of them being the part his wife played in destroying the values of the Egyptian family. In particular, critics point to her role in endorsing legal modifications of the personal status law, which undermined the stability of the family. As head of the National Council for Women (NWC), Suzanne Mubarak was the one who pushed these laws through parliament. Trying to expunge any sign of the former president’s wife’s activism is part of the argument against women’s rights going on in Egypt today.
The laws that were passed or modified since 2000 (the divorce law, the citizenship law and the guardianship law), as well as setting a quota that guaranteed women sixty-four seats in parliament, are now described by fundamentalist men as evidence of Suzanne Mubarak’s anti-family agenda. They claim that “all the laws that were passed with the backing of Suzanne Mubarak were politically motivated to serve the interests of the ruling elite,” says Elsadda. “Already, this public perception [from fundamentalists] is being politically manipulated to rescind laws and legislative procedures that were passed in the last ten years to improve the legal position of women, particularly within personal status laws. These laws are deliberately being discredited as ‘Suzanne’s laws,’ or more pejoratively as ‘qawanin al-hanim’ [referring to Mubarak’s wife as a woman with an entourage and part of the ruling elite].”
She says the question people need to ask is this: Were these laws politically motivated by a corrupt agenda of a corrupt regime or did they arise out of years of work by women’s rights activists? Can they rightly be described as “Suzanne’s laws”? If the answer is no, as Elsadda would argue, what’s going on? Why does the new regime want to discredit the work the activists have done?
Women’s organizations had begun to worry about the way Suzanne Mubarak was co-opting their issues when she created the National Council for Women in 1995. She’d been at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and had come home ashamed of how far behind Egyptian women were. The activists say she might have had the best of intentions in establishing the council, but it soon became a way of controlling what advances women could make. Elsadda explains, “The NCW competed with existing women’s organizations, sought to appropriate women’s activism and work and tried to monopolize the movement by speaking on behalf of all Egyptian women. NCW members were disproportionately represented in local, regional and international media and forums. Women’s rights activism became linked with the projects of the first lady.”
This is the conundrum women the world over invariably face—whatever progress they make, there always seems to be some self-appointed organization ready to claw back gains either in the name of God or to “protect family values.” Women need to be wily in the ways they make change. Like Hangama Anwari in Afghanistan, who cleverly positioned her survey on polygamy to catch out those who are defying Islam rather than being critical of a custom approved by the Quran. And Judge Owuor in Kenya, who cautioned the lawyers on the judicial reform case, advising, “We need to sneak the law into the middle of the code and presume most MPs won’t read the whole thing. Or wait for a day when the members who are against it are not in the parliament.”
The women in Egypt are attempting similar manoeuvres to protect the gains they have made in the face of those who want to annul them. They’re lobbying the newly elected members of parliament, keeping their demands in front of the people, and are fully prepared with research data to take on those who claim the gains they made in recent years are tainted by the old corrupt regime.
There’s a new generation of Egyptian women who have come into their own in the sunlit days of the revolution. Women like Mazn Hassan, the executive director of Nazra for Feminist Studies, a women’s organization that aims to bring gender equality to Egypt. The mandate at Nazra is to attract young women and a new generation of activists and researchers who can establish and entrench women’s rights in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. For them the time for promises is over. They want action and are prepared to do the heavy lifting to get it. Their goal is to examine the obstacles to women’s advancement and create nothing less than a societal debate on women’s issues.
Before the revolution, Hassan says, “the government ran the women’s movement. It was for upper-class women. Now we’re writing a new history in Egypt and women need to be there in that history.” Originally from Saudi Arabia, where she says there are two spaces—the public one for men and the private one for women—Hassan believes women in Cairo have a sense of the street, and their attitudes are different. “Women are changing their traditional role of being nice, modest, married mothers to being involved in the public life of the country.” She feels the patriarchy has to be thrown off, and among the new activists of Cairo, there is a lot of support for her views. When I visited the Nazra office, I was surprised to find women and men there in equal numbers. Hassan says the movement needs men as well as women to make change in Egypt, and if they can make effective change, she believes that the sexual equality revolution will spread to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait as well.
One of the things she is relying on is a new project called the Women and Memory Forum, which researches and documents the role played by women in the region’s cultural and intellectual history. Hoda Elsadda is one of the founders of the forum and says the research they do examines historical and cultural data from the Arab world with gender sensitivity. They are carefully constructing a database of women’s accomplishments and a library of their work in order to establish a baseline for Arab women to go forward.
Hassan says it helps women today to see how women’s rights issues played out in political and ideological struggles in Egypt that go back to the early stages of nation-building in the nineteenth century, when women asserted their views and contributed to Egypt’s modernity. In 1899, when Qasim Amin published a seminal text on the history of Egypt, Tahrir al-Mar’a (Liberation of Women), he was stating facts that governments still need to hear today: that the backward status of women was the reason for the backwardness of the country, and that improvement of the status of women was a prerequisite for the modernization and progress of the country.
More than a hundred years later, in 2002, the United Nations issued a report with the same advice. The UN Arab Human Development Report was written by a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals and highlighted three “deeply rooted shortcomings which have created major obstacles to human development.” These three deficits? The lack of freedom, education and the empowerment of women. The report’s authors called for “the complete empowerment of Arab women, taking advantage of all the opportunities to build their capabilities and enabling them to exercise those capabilities to the full.” The UN Arab Development Report issued three years later, in 2005, carried the same message: “Gender inequality is generally recognized as one of the main obstacles to development in the Arab region.”
Many assumed that the women of the Middle East had broken the ties that have bound them to second-class citizenship when they bravely sallied forth in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and elsewhere. Their slogan was “We will not be quiet.” Women such as Tawakkol Karman, who led the protests in Yemen and won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her work; Lina Ben Mhenni from Tunisia, whose blogs in French, English and Arabic kept the country informed during the uprising; Razan Ghazzawi, a Syrian who tweeted news updates and was detained for two weeks; and Zainab Alkhawaja, who stood her ground against tanks at Bahrain’s Pearl Roundabout—all helped crush the stereotype of the subservient Arab woman and paved the way for reform, insisting that women’s rights are human rights belonging to every citizen.
When Karman, who founded an organization called Women Journalists without Chains, received the Nobel Prize, she delivered a warning with her address: “The democratic world, which has told us a lot about the virtues of democracy and good governance, should not be indifferent to what is happening in Yemen and Syria, and what happened before that in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, and happens in every Arab and non-Arab country aspiring for freedom. All of that is just hard labour during the birth of democracy, which requires support and assistance not fear and caution.” Then she tossed a bouquet to her Arab sisters “who have struggled to win their rights in a society dominated by the supremacy of men.”
The message is that although women in Saudi Arabia are lashed for driving a car, and on Tahrir Square they were arrested as whores while marching for liberation, and in Iraq they can be stoned to death for being seen with a man they aren’t married to, the process of change has started. Women in most of the Arab world are still denied equal status with men, and the fundamentalist politicians on the rise want to keep women down, but the message from experts worldwide that becomes louder with every passing year is that women are the way forward, the route to ending poverty, improving the economy and stopping conflict.
In Egypt, Elsadda told me that getting rid of a dictatorial regime was the first step. Now, she says, they need to make sure there is more space for a women’s movement and for the participation of women. If all the studies around the world are correct, that will mean a more prosperous Egypt.
Like others, she is perplexed by the number of fundamentalists who won in the first democratic election in her country in fifty years, but she feels that the enormity of the change the revolution has brought to Egyptian society is bound to need a period of time for adjustment, for rethinking the way the society will operate. For that reason, she estimates that it will take at least two or three years to achieve the goals of the revolution.
That said, the changes for women in Egypt and elsewhere have already begun. In Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, women’s rights are still highly contested, but the movement to alter thinking that is thousands of years old is burgeoning. The extremist mullahs in Afghanistan are being cornered by women reformers and invited to talk. The laws in Pakistan—the hated Hadood Ordinances that called for four male witnesses to prove a woman didn’t cause her own rape, for example—have been challenged by women’s groups and are slowly but surely being moderated.
Women are still caught by the tripwires of religion and culture in the villages, but the chiefs and religious leaders are beginning to listen to scholars who claim that the sacred texts do not support the oppression of women. The education and health care of women is top of mind in many more villages today than it has ever been before. And it’s women themselves who are driving that change. For instance, in Lebanon women started Jismi.net (jismi means “my body” in Arabic), whose aim is to deal with issues related to the body and sexuality that have been considered private matters and taboos that shouldn’t be discussed. The launch of that website is as significant as the publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1969. Forty-three years later, it’s a repeat performance in the Arab world, but this time it’s for men as well as women. The traffic on the site is extraordinary: young men claiming all they know about sex they learned in porn magazines and women saying the only thing they’ve been taught about their bodies is how to use sanitary pads.
Isobel Coleman says that in 2010, when her book Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East, came out, some people said, “What change? These countries will never change.” It seemed to her critics that the thugs in power and the fundamentalists at the gate would forever oppress women.
But when I interviewed Coleman a year later, she said, “There has been revolutionary change, profound demographic change, and women are at the forefront of many of these changes. Across the broader Middle East, women are the majority of college graduates.” She cited impressive numbers: 70 percent of graduates in Iran are women, 63 percent in Saudi Arabia, 55 percent in Egypt. “Even though there are enormous barriers in the workplace, women are determined to make change. Many are members of Islamic movements and wear the head scarf, but you can’t conflate that with them wanting to return to the traditional private role for women. They’re actively promoting change—seeking jobs, engaged in the future of their countries. They’ll be a big part of driving change in that part of the world.” And that was before all the events of the Arab Spring.
Women have a natural facility with grassroots movements, shared leadership and collegiality, skills that contribute enormously to the anatomy of change. A classic example comes from Canada during the emotionally tumultuous months when the Constitution was being patriated in the early 1980s and the old Bill of Rights, part and parcel of Canada’s colonial past, was being replaced with a homegrown Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Canadian women saw the patriation as an opportunity to enshrine equal rights for women in the new charter. The iconic former editor of Canada’s largest-circulation women’s magazine, Chatelaine, Doris Anderson had left her editorial post and taken up the presidency of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, an arm’s-length body established by the government to push change for women forward. From her desk in the nation’s capital, she led the charge to include women in the process of patriation and constitution writing. She organized a women’s conference to gather input from every region of the country and to inform delegates about progress or lack of it on the Charter. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the government cancelled her conference.
Anderson realized it was a strategic move by a federal government that was tiptoeing through the delicate proceedings hoping to bypass the demands the women were making, so she made a move of her own; she went public and resigned her post. What happened next was vintage grassroots politicking. The newspaper columnist Michele Landsberg, who seemed to have the ear of every woman in the country, wrote brilliant commentaries about the situation and kept her readers up to speed while alerting women about the next steps. Women across Canada, who had been following the proceedings, decided that no one was going to cancel their conference and told Anderson they’d meet her in Ottawa on Valentine’s Day 1981 and go ahead even if they had to have the meeting in a café.
They formed an ad hoc committee and hit the telephones to call women together for what turned out to be a history-making event. Women came from all regions of the country: urban and rural women, Aboriginal women, francophone women, women of colour, older and younger women. They took buses, trains, planes and cars to Ottawa. They wanted to send a message to the government that they wouldn’t be dictated to. Women politicians such as Flora MacDonald and Pauline Jewitt joined together across party lines and used their parliamentary authority to book a room in the House of Commons for the conference. More than six hundred women turned up, and by the end of a single day had reached consensus on the key changes that needed to be inserted in the Charter document to ensure women’s equality.
That conference forced the government to listen to women—half of Canada’s population. It also led to Sections 15 and 28 being added to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Those are the sections that guarantee women and girls protection from discriminatory laws, government regulations and government programs. The Charter says, “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” With Sections 15 and 28, the document established unequivocal equality rights for women and girls.
Marilou McPhedran, one of the authors of Section 15, says this constitutional effort wasn’t a one-off bit of activism: “It was the culmination of a decade of social mobilization of women and resulted in new tools available to use in the legal arena.”
Then women’s organizations needed to learn to use those new tools, and the new Charter protections needed to be tested in the courts in order to set legal precedents. Since the existing women’s groups certainly couldn’t afford the legal fees of constitutional challenges headed for Canada’s Supreme Court, the solution was to form an organization that could fund and fight such cases. That led to the birth of the Legal Education and Action Fund, known as LEAF, in 1985. Its mandate was to make real the paper guarantees of equality that women had fought for and won in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That meant conducting education and awareness-building programs for judges, lawyers, the public and the police so that the equality guarantees got up off the paper and entered into people’s daily lives.
Two groundbreaking cases came up almost immediately. One established that sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination, and the other that discrimination on the grounds of pregnancy is also a form of sex discrimination. Until those cases were heard, there was actually some doubt about whether a woman could complain about sex discrimination to a human rights commission or in the courts and get the appropriate hearing. Similarly, if a woman had been fired from her job because she was pregnant, there was no guarantee that the Charter would work for her. Those sound like self-evident principles of fairness today, but in fact they were the first steps in extending the protection of the law to many women from many walks of life.
~
As much as women prepare the research, deliver the documents and demand change, there continue to be obstacles to equality, some of them from unexpected places such as the United Nations. The UN is supposed to be the epitome of change-making institutions, responding to the needs of the people and holding meetings among nations. At the fifty-sixth meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, held in February and March 2012, the opposite was true. The pathetic report filed after the Status of Women meeting ended in failure sends two clear messages: the UN has serious problems, and women are still easily betrayed.
The focus of the 2012 meeting was to find ways to ensure that rural women would be fully empowered to reach their potential. Rural women make up one-quarter of the world’s population and are vital economic agents who, if empowered, could unleash improvements to reduce poverty and boost food security, so ameliorating their situation was the goal of this conference.
Typical for conferences of this nature, the participants had already met through e-mail exchanges and had shared research and decided which measures they wanted the meeting to endorse. But to their immense surprise and disappointment, none of the agreed-on reforms were approved. The session ended without a conclusion. Why? Because the meeting got derailed by delegates unnerved by the subtext of many reforms, which was about women having control over their own sexuality: the promotion of reproductive and sexual health, family planning and reproductive rights, and the elimination of harmful practices, such as early and forced child marriage. Some of the delegations had decided to repudiate the terms that had already been agreed on and ignore the legal reforms and services that had been prepared in advance, in spite of the colossal expenses incurred to house and feed the delegates for nineteen days in New York City.
The executive director of UN Women, Michelle Bachelet, said the delegations were unable to overcome “a disappointing inability to reach consensus.” The chair of the conference, Marjon Kamara from Liberia, put it more bluntly: “I will not hide my great disappointment that we have found ourselves in this position. If we really want to tell the truth about it, I’m not sure that we all came with a spirit of compromise.”
At the end of the conference, delegations from twenty countries rose to express their regret: the Norwegians spoke for many when their representative said they could not accept the use of religious, cultural and moral concerns to block negotiations on documents that would protect women’s rights and, in some cases, save thousands of lives every year.
But in no document, on no website, in no press release does the commission state who opposed what or why the meeting ended in failure. The debacle brings new impetus to the need for women to make changes themselves. Indeed, education allows women to know what the law says and doesn’t say, and as illiteracy rates drop in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan and in much of Africa, where women’s rights are still challenged, new knowledge is giving women the power to speak out. As for Iran, a country that boasts a high literacy rate but draconian measures to keep women subservient, its homegrown Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi says, “Iranian women may very well be the force that brings down the oppressive regime that controls Iran.” And the world watches with bated breath each time Iranians go to the barricades, hoping that this will be the time they break through.
At the Nobel Women’s Initiative Conference held in Montebello, Quebec, in May 2011, Ebadi told a story about dealing with the authorities in Iran that likens the change process to catching flies with honey. “The legal status of women is very discriminatory, and this has been the result of bad laws that were passed against women after the revolution.” The slightest criticism of the law or practice of government in an Islamic country is considered critical of Islam and labelled heresy by the government. Anyone who fights for human rights, especially women’s rights, is caught in that heresy trap. “You cannot speak of logic with Islamic fundamentalists,” Ebadi says. “Their prejudice won’t permit it. So I bypassed religion and found common ground with the government. My strategy is this: I ask the government to perform the obligation it accepted when it acceded to the UN conventions on human rights and to enforce them. When I tried to defend women’s rights, they said, ‘Get out of here, you feminist, you liberal, you defender of human rights.’ So I started with the Rights of the Child—a document the government had signed and had to go along with. By the time the government knew I had tricked them, it was too late.” She reminds the women from Islamic lands to choose their words carefully, to avoid any terms that could be found insulting to Islam and to never, ever suggest that Islamic laws are bad. “Don’t talk in a way that Islamists won’t accept you or call you a non-Muslim or non-believer. It weakens your struggle. The fundamentalist Muslim women were against me when I started. Sometimes I thought I was alone. But thirty-two years later, the women who opposed me are on my side—sometimes they are even more radical.”
~
A lot has changed. Gloria Steinem cites a classic example of lost opportunity due to gender blindness. “One of the great debacles during the Vietnam War came about because when the peace talks began in Paris, the U.S. government thought the Vietnamese weren’t taking the negotiations seriously because they sent a woman.” Twenty years ago rape wasn’t a war crime; violence against women wasn’t on the development agenda. Now it’s included in the planning of every government and NGO intending to offer humanitarian aid.
What the world is also making inroads in today is improving the welfare and education of girl children. That new emphasis was sparked a dozen years ago when NGOs such as World Vision hosted events that brought girls together to dream bigger dreams and plan better plans. Now the girl has become the poster child for turning the economy in the village around. Consider this: based on World Bank research and UNESCO education statistics, the estimated economic cost to sixty-five low- and middle-income and transitional countries of failing to educate girls to the same standard as boys is a staggering US$92 billion each year.
Numbers like that speak volumes. And they have become the basis for marketing programs that aim to alter the lives of girls. Plan International’s Because I Am a Girl initiative has become a social movement to unleash the power of girls in the developing world. It has attracted a host of well-known supporters, and the money is flowing into the projects for education and health care as never before. Why? Because according to Plan International, when a girl is educated, nourished and protected, she shares her knowledge and skills with her family and community. But more than that, she builds a powerful sense of self-esteem and self-confidence, which can change the status of a nation.
Another outside-the-box campaign is Walk a Mile in Her Shoes: the International Men’s March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault and Gender Violence. The popular marches in Canada and the United States are most often led by men wearing red stilettos. Though its organizers were criticized initially for mimicking the way women dress, the march was soon seen for what it was: an opportunity to bring attention to a topic most people don’t want to talk about—gender relations and sexual violence. Actors and journalists, radio and TV personalities, sports heroes and firefighters lead the marches and invariably tell hilarious stories about walking a mile in four-inch heels but also deadly serious stories about stopping violence against women. As the organization’s motto says, “First you walk the walk, then you talk the talk.”
The march also sends the message that it’s time men as well as women talked about sexual violence. Some people still don’t want to know it exists. Others say the statistics are rigged. Still others—the victims—often want to hide from the memory. The marches are doing what women’s groups have tried to do for decades—shine a hot light on the problem and get the community talking about it. Watching goofy six-foot-four-inch male broadcasters walking down the streets of Toronto wearing red stilettos has a way of doing precisely that. The organizers also hand out pamphlets for preventive education and community services available for anyone who needs help.
Marketing savvy is playing an increasingly important role in the lives of game-changers, who can now mobilize and message with lightning speed, as they did during the Arab Spring. Experience has taught them to spot an absurdity at a thousand paces and react to it before the press conference is over, as they did in Afghanistan when President Karzai “pardoned” a woman who was in jail because she had been raped.
In February 2012, the mother of all David and Goliath stories was splashed across the newspapers and broadcast almost incessantly on radio and TV in the U.S. when the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation dumped its annual donation to Planned Parenthood. The brouhaha blew up because the juggernaut that is the Komen Foundation, the ones who created the pink ribbon campaign to cure breast cancer and raised more than $1.9 billion since its inception in 1982, was beating up on Planned Parenthood, an organization that received grant money from Komen to provide mammograms for poor women in the U.S.
Here’s what happened. On January 31, 2012, the Komen Foundation announced that it was cutting its funding to Planned Parenthood. According to its own press release, the foundation said it was because Planned Parenthood was under investigation by Florida representative Cliff Stearns, the staunch anti-abortion campaigner who runs an aggressive propaganda machine to annul Roe v. Wade, the court case that secured abortion rights for women in the United States and established a woman’s right to control her own body. Stearns claimed that he was trying to find out if Planned Parenthood was using public money to fund abortions. Some thought he was in cahoots with a newly hired member of the Komen Foundation who had similar views about abortion rights. The truth is that although Planned Parenthood and their affiliates do fund abortions, the money they have received—$680,000 per year—from the Komen Foundation is used to provide about 170,000 clinical breast exams and 6,400 mammograms mainly to low-income and minority women. The foundation board had recently made a resolution that any organization under investigation could not receive their funding. No one knew why the board of directors had made such a decision or how they thought it applied to Planned Parenthood. But everyone suspected that the funding cut was a direct assault on abortion rights.
Overnight it became a headline story of epic proportions. Critics hurled accusations of political interference. Pro-choice groups denounced what they regarded as more of the same old attacks from anti-abortion groups. Insiders noted that Planned Parenthood was the only grantee among two thousand other organizations whose funding had been cut off because of the new policy. Some foundation board members resigned.
It was a self-inflicted body blow to the organization that had been founded and has operated with the best of intentions. Its website tells the story of the woman whose name it bears, Susan Komen, who fought breast cancer with her heart, body and soul. Throughout her diagnosis, treatments and endless days in the hospital, she spent her time thinking of ways to make life better for other women battling breast cancer instead of worrying about her own situation. That concern for others continued even as she neared the end of her fight. Moved by her compassion for others and committed to making a difference, Nancy Brinker promised Susan, who was her sister, that she would do everything in her power to end breast cancer forever. Reading the story of these two sisters devoted one to the other and best friends is heartbreaking in itself. Sister Nancy, whom Susan called Nanny, tells the story of the last time she saw her beloved sister.
After my sister was released from M.D. Anderson [Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston], I tried to come home every other week for a visit. One particular Sunday afternoon on the way back to the airport, Suzy spoke to me again about doing something to help the sick women in the hospital. This practically tore my heart out because here she was, hardly able to manage a whisper, and she was worrying about other people. I couldn’t bear it.
When my father pulled up to the curb, I quickly kissed them both good-bye and jumped out of the car. I was just about inside when I heard a funny sound that sounded like my name. I stopped in my tracks and turned around. There was Suzy, standing up outside the car on wobbly knees, wig slightly askew.
With her arms outstretched, she said gently, “Good-bye, Nanny, I love you.” I hugged her so hard I was afraid she might crumble. And then I ran to catch my plane.
I never saw my sister alive again.
Funds of $1.9 billion get attention. So do decisions to drop Planned Parenthood. Controversial decisions often make headlines in the short term, but, as the old Armenian saying goes, “The dogs barked; the caravan passed by,” the attention usually quickly dissipates. Not this time. In keeping with the new activism by and about women around the world, American women rose up to protest the bizarre treatment of Planned Parenthood. They appeared at rallies decked out in pink T-shirts that read “Women’s Health Matters.” They carried placards that said “Stop the War on Women” and “I Stand with Planned Parenthood.” It was an astonishing show of support.
A who’s who of celebrities soon joined the protest. The kids’ novelist Judy Blume sent a Twitter message that said, “Susan Komen would not give in to bullying or fear. Too bad the organization bearing her name did.” Representative Jackie Speier of California announced, “Komen’s decision hurts women. It puts politics before women’s health.” The comments roared in like a storm. So did the donations to Planned Parenthood. More than $3 million for its breast cancer program was donated in the first forty-eight hours after the news of the Komen cut broke. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said he would give $250,000 of his own money and match every dollar that Planned Parenthood raised up to another $250,000. Oil tycoons donated money, and so did indie rock bands.
Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh wrote in Salon magazine, “The overreach by the Komen foundation, while surely intended to strike yet another blow on the side of antiabortion activism, succeeded instead in waking a powerful constituency—armed with precisely the language and emotional heft they [American women] have been lacking for too long.”
Facebook exploded with support for Planned Parenthood, and radio stations were inundated with callers demanding a retraction of the foundation’s decision. And three days after the announcement of the cut was made, the women of the U.S. got an apology and a retraction.
On Friday, February 3, Nancy Brinker, the president as well as founder of the organization, said, “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.
“Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.”
~
This kind of protest demonstrates the power that women have to alter their own lives, to gain control over their own bodies. And now there’s another tool in the arsenal for protest—the Internet. A call for action can come almost instantly after an incident, via cyberspace, containing all the data you need, including e-mail contacts, phone numbers and mailing addresses, and even a form letter so you don’t have to worry about composing your own.
Here’s an example. Women Living Under Muslim Laws, along with a group known as Violence Is Not Our Culture, often instigate calls for action. Sometimes it’s because a woman has been jailed without trial or a government has ruled unfairly toward women. Activists are accustomed to receiving such calls on their computer screens and following through with action. When the government of Afghanistan was planning a meeting in Bonn, Germany, to discuss the so-called peace process, an action call went out from WLUML on November 24, 2011, saying,
In the wake of the exclusion of Afghan women from the “peace process” at the Bonn Conference taking place on the 5th of December 2011, WLUML vigorously denounces:
• the ethical incoherence of States that engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan under the fallacious pretext to protect “poor oppressed Muslim women living under the burqa,” and now prevent them from participating as full-fledged citizens in the peace process in their country, all while engaging with their oppressors
• the moral responsibility of these States, which are delivering Afghan women, bound and gagged, to the very same Taliban and warlords they pretended to save them from, just a few years ago
• the political short-sightedness of alliances, such as with Taliban and warlords, which fearfully remind us of other past historical compromises that cost so many lives
• the fallacy of the so-called “democratic process” taking place in Germany, but without the “untermensch” of the day: Afghan women
They provided e-mail contacts for the government representatives and each of the delegates. Responses poured in from around the world. Before the conference even began, its agenda and delegation list were changed to include women who would speak up about women’s rights.
The Stop Stoning Forever campaign is another case example. Women Living Under Muslim Laws teamed up with Violence Is Not Our Culture and Justice for Iran to announce the release of a new publication, Mapping Stoning in Muslim Contexts, a report that named the fourteen countries where the punishment of stoning is still in practice, either through judicial (codified as law) or extrajudicial (outside the law) methods. Mapping reports carry a surprising amount of weight in the form of naming and shaming the countries that still condone stoning.
Historically, stoning has been used in many religious and cultural traditions as a form of community justice or capital punishment. Although there is no mention of stoning in the Quran, the practice has come to be associated with Islam and Muslim cultures. WLUML says laws that rendered stoning a legally sanctioned punishment emerged with the revival of political Islam during the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Sharia law, the Islamic legal system, says that men will be buried to their waists and women to their breasts for the execution and that the stones thrown must not be so large as to kill the person quickly. The death is to be slow and painful. WLUML reports that women are stoned far more often than men. In Afghanistan recently, a twenty-nine-year-old woman called Amina was stoned to death for adultery. The man accused with her was lashed eighty times and freed.
When a woman has been sentenced to be stoned to death, the joint campaign puts out an action call. Women and men around the world respond with letters to the judiciary or government official sent by e-mail and fax. WLUML claims that public pressure has decreased the number of executions and that several punishments have been cancelled or postponed after their calls for action are made public. However, in places like Afghanistan, the sentence is usually carried out without judicial authority and therefore escapes the protests that these women are prepared to stage.
WLUML says stoning poses a serious threat to both women and men living in Muslim societies today. Sexual relationships outside marriage, along with same-sex relations, are criminalized in most codified interpretations of sharia law. Any sexual relationship outside a legal marriage is considered a crime punishable by a hundred lashes if the accused is unmarried and death by stoning if married.
~
Whether as activist reformers or public policy–makers, women have learned that the quickest way to establish their own space is by running for parliament and occupying the same space as men. Afghan member of parliament Fawzia Koofi, who plans to run for the presidency in the next election, says, “There’s pride in being a member of parliament; there’s a sense of success. Initially in Afghanistan there was a lot of resistance from men because our arguments were asking for changes in the law. The men tried to stop us by cutting the microphone when one of us was talking in the parliament. They don’t do that anymore. We’re strong. We won’t go back or give up. It’s time for them to give up.”
Farida Shaheed says there are plenty of encouraging changes in Pakistan too, such as more young professional women making strides in the workplace and more girls getting an education. “On the other hand, a great conservativism is permeating Pakistani society. We need to be vigilant, make sure we are going forward, not moving backward, where everything is determined by superstition and what someone else says.” Still, she thinks women have come a long way from feeling their place has been ordained, that they are stuck with their lot in life and simply have to live with it. “Women need to come together so they can be each other’s supporters and fight for equality rights. What we discovered in Pakistan is the fewer women who enjoy their rights, the faster the state can take those rights away from you. And it can happen very quickly.”
~
One can’t help wondering what it is that stops men from embracing changes that would improve the economy and stop conflict. The thing is, people become habituated to what they have, and having a woman who takes care of you, a woman you can control, a woman who gets nothing in return, feels normal and essential to men who have never known a different life. They are perplexed by the criticism and afraid of what change will do. Some men truly cannot picture that their lives will be better if they treat their daughters, sisters, mothers and wives as fully human. Establishing rights has historically been a long, slow and sometimes confusing process.
Joanna Kerr shares an interesting interpretation about the way her own male colleagues in South Africa and elsewhere, who are mostly human rights champions, view the changes in attitudes toward women and girls. “They tell me, ‘It’s so in our face, in our private space, because we all have mothers or sisters or wives or girlfriends and the kind of relationships that are being transformed through gender equality come up against our histories, our hearts and minds. It gets inside our skin in such a way, it creates discomfort.’ ” She says the struggle for women’s rights is not the same as the struggle to end racism, or even the fight for gay rights, because somehow gender equality feels different. “All of us have ideas about how women and men and girls and boys should behave. And gender is the most significant identifier of how individuals interact with each other. If you have never met someone before and you didn’t quite know whether the person was a male or a female that you were speaking to, you feel uncomfortable because you don’t know what social rules to apply. Whereas when we don’t know their nationality, their ethnicity, their social class, we still know how to interact. But gender, the rules of gender, are so deeply, deeply imbued and embedded in all of us that when we start changing the rules we don’t quite know how to behave.”
It is a recognizable dilemma. But one that society needs to come to terms with. There are consequences for not taking women seriously, as Gloria Steinem says: “If you leave inequality in the home, you’ve left the model for racism and class there as well. You can directly measure the degree of democracy in society by the degree of democracy in the home. You can predict the degree of violence in the street or foreign policy by the amount in the home because everything is normalized in the home.”
History is on the side of women’s empowerment, which is one of the great moral imperatives of our time. And now that the international economists have pointed to enhancing women’s rights as the ticket to financial heaven, institutional change is likely to speed up. Certainly young women—teenagers and twenty-somethings—are poised to make their demands known and to take action if they aren’t met.
One hundred and sixty young girls in Kenya are knocking on the door of change and are about to make history by suing their government for failing to protect them from being raped. Young women like Asmaa Mahfouz in Egypt are suggesting that the men join the movement to emancipate women, and so is Mazn Hussan.
In Afghanistan, Noorjahan Akbar and Anita Haidary have launched the most powerful change agent that Afghan women have ever known with their organization Young Women for Change. They have also invited men to join the movement. Gloria Steinem thinks their stories are the art of the possible. She says, “Women are certainly the way forward. Men are also the way forward. Progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.” If Akbar’s and Haidary’s plan to emancipate the women and girls of Afghanistan and throw off the restrictive aspects of old customs takes flight, they could alter the future for 15 million people.
I told Akbar that the women in Cairo said they had breached the barricade of fear, and I asked her if she had as well. She has a small voice that matches her delicate frame, but she speaks precisely. “I am still afraid very often. I think anyone who has joined YWC has had fear because people who dare to speak out against injustice face backlash, and any new idea is bound to be rejected before being accepted, especially if it challenges societal norms and rules. However, I deeply believe in the equality of humankind, and I know that regardless of how tired, depressed or afraid I am, I will not give up on myself or the millions of women in Afghanistan who can be equal, who deserve to be treated equally. When we rise for what is right, what is our right, when we have a truth we’re willing to stand up for, we have nothing to lose.”
From Asia and Africa to the Americas, these women and their sisters and mothers are showing the way forward. They aren’t victims, they’re victors. Like 3.5 billion beautiful rosebuds, half the world’s population is about to bloom into the future.