The uprisings sweeping the Arab world haven’t only toppled dictatorships. Gone, too, are the old stereotypes of Arab women as passive, voiceless victims. Over the past few months, the world has seen them marching in Tunisia, shouting slogans in Bahrain and Yemen, braving tear gas in Egypt, and blogging and strategizing in cyberspace. Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz, 26, became known as “The Leader of the Revolution” after she posted an online video call to arms, telling young people to get out onto the streets and demand justice. In Libya, women lawyers were among the earliest anti-Qaddafi organizers in the revolutionary stronghold of Benghazi. Arabs were bemused that the Western media was shocked — shocked! — to find women protesting alongside men. “There was this sense of surprise, that ‘Oh, my god, women are actually participating!’ notes Egyptian activist Hadil El-Khouly. “But of course women were there, in Tahrir Square. I was there, because I’m Egyptian. Everyone was there. You really felt we were all one.”
But the bliss of revolutionary dawn never lasts. When Tunisian women’s groups held a post-revolution rally to demand equality, thugs disrupted the gathering, yelling “Women at home, in the kitchen!” And on March 8, a march in Cairo to commemorate International Women’s Day ended in violence, with gangs of men groping protestors and telling them to go home. “It was a horrible irony, that on International Women’s Day, a march for women’s rights could face that kind of egregious harassment in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a symbol of freedom,” says Priyanka Motaparthy, a research fellow in the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. “It was an incredibly violent way of trying to scare [the women] out of the public space.”
Women are good for revolutions, but historically, revolutions haven’t been good for women. In 1789, French women took to the streets to protest against high bread prices and the excesses at Versailles. They helped topple the monarchy, but within a few years, the revolutionary government had banned all women’s political clubs. In Iran, women came out in force to march against the Shah in 1979; Ayatollah Khomeini rewarded them by requiring the veil and curbing their legal rights. And now, as Tunisians and Egyptians hammer out the nature of their nations’ futures, women are being required to fight for their rights in a whole new way. “There is no turning back,” says Margot Badran, Senior Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C., and the author of Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. “The violence [against the March 8 protestors] has only strengthened resolve.”
The participation of women during Tunisia and Egypt’s transitions to democracy remains a crucial litmus test of the revolutions. Exclude women, and the whole concept of sweeping away a privileged political caste crumbles. As Moroccan activist Saida Kouzzi observes: “If these countries continue to neglect the rights of the great majority of their citizens, then what good do these revolutions do?”
For women activists in Egypt and across the region, the spirit of the Arab revolutions means women’s rights aren’t special interests, but are intrinsic to the people’s demands for social justice and democracy. “It’s important to see women’s rights as political rights,” says Mozn Hassan, director of the Cairo-based group Nazra for Feminist Studies. “Women’s activists have to change their dynamic, and engage with larger political issues. But we don’t expect it to be easy. Tahrir Square was a utopia, and society doesn’t change in fifteen minutes.”
See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.
See the Cartoons of the Week.
