A woman shows her inked finger after casting her vote in a constitution referendum in Cairo last week.
The protests that have swept Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya have brought Arab women out in numbers. No longer are they relegated to the sidelines. In Cairo, Rihab Assad, a 40-year old office manager, was astonished when she saw another woman with a megaphone shouting out chants to a largely male crowd, who echoed her calls. “To me,” said Assad, “this was something entirely new.”
Leil Zahra Mortada blogged about the events in Tahrir Square, braving possible arrest amid president Hosni Mubarak’s crackdown on Egypt’s Internet communications. Twenty-six-year old Asmaa Mahfouz became a leader of Egypt’s youth protest movement by using Twitter and Facebook: “I, a girl, am going down to Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone. And I’ll hold up a banner.”
Many in the West have welcomed the emergence of women at the forefront of the Arab Awakening. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautions that those who come to power “can’t leave out half the population.”
Yet the status remains of Arab women remains fragile. Saudi women still may not drive a car, and Iraq’s women have even less political influence now than they did under Saddam. “There are deep-rooted practices that will not change overnight,” Reem Naguib, an Egyptian woman studying in the United States, told the Los Angeles Times.
Outside pressure for women’s rights will have to continue from the West and from women leaders such as Clinton and UN human rights chief Navi Pillay. But it’s an encouraging time for Middle Eastern women: for the first time they’ve been welcomed as colleagues in the struggle for democracy.
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