Some good things said here, by Rula Qawas, from the University of Jordan. Most notable is this connection that she makes in the interview:
“Women’s studies is an internationally recognised, multidisciplinary field of teaching and research that seeks to understand the social construction of gender and the historical and contemporary mechanisms that promote or limit women’s development as full participants in society,” she said…Moreover, there is a need to acknowledge that women’s rights are about human rights, added the articulate and highly-regarded professor.
This conclusion, that women’s rights are related to human rights, is a very astute one (read the whole article, by the way.) Countries and societies where the rights of women are limited, usually there is also a limitation on human rights. Wait a minute, some people say. The United States didn’t grant women the right to vote until the 20th century, but we’ve been mostly good on human rights from the beginning, right? Bill of Rights and all of that?
Eh, not so much.
First, before I elaborate on that last statement, let me define human rights vs. women’s rights.
Human rights: the rights to protection of freedom of speech and expression, the right to peaceably protest the government, the right to publish, see, display, and purchase art and literature, the right of privacy, the right to vote, the right to life and security (right to live without being murdered/persecuted by government), right to property, right to due process of law, etc, etc.
Women’s rights: rights within marriage (against domestic abuse, polygamy), rights to divorce (in misogynous countries/governments, this is a right only reserved to the man), right to full or partial custody of her children– as determined fairly by the courts, right to vote, recognition of full citizenship by the government, right to seek employment and to be fairly compensated, right to the same caliber/time of facilities, academic and recreational, as men; the right to same level/caliber of health-care as men, right to individual autonomy (ability to travel/use facilities and not be required to be accompanied by a male relative), right not to be segregated unfairly from men, etc, etc.
In fact, up until 1868, and even after that, the Bill of Rights was interpreted by the Supreme Court to only apply to the federal government’s relationship with the citizens, not the state’s relationship with the citizens.
How ironic, that the Bill of Rights, which was put into the constitution in the first place by the anti-federalists, who insisted it because they were afraid that the rights of the citizens would be trampled on by the federal government, and that the individual states would lose power! Instead, the Supreme Court actually gave all the power to the states to trample all over the rights of their citizens for years by interpreting the Bill of Rights as only applying to federal relations with the public. Needless to say, the rights of women in the 19th century, during that time, were nonexistent in the law, along with the rights of slaves, minorities, and even the right to vote was denied to those who did not own land.
Other silly rules such as dress codes (women, for example, could be arrested for showing their ankles in public), were also enacted by the individual states at their own whims, with not a peep from the federal government until after the civil war, when the 14th amendment passed, one of three passed in the aftermath of the war.
It declared that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” By 1873, justices argued in dissenting opinions that the words meant that the Bill of Rights should apply to the states. In 1897 the court first applied part of the Bill of Rights to the states, overturning the 1833 ruling that the “just compensation” clause in the 5th amendment did not cover a citizen in relations with the state, because each state had adopted its own constitution, was the reasoning. It was in 1925 (1925 ladies and gentlemen! 1925!) that the SCOTUS said that the 1st amendment of free speech, religion, and peaceable assembly applied to the states.
Notice the dates, I put them in there because they are important.
Women’s groups prior to and during (and after) the civil war, were some of the most important voices calling for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet, these women’s groups came to a conclusion from their efforts: why are we, they thought, agitated for the rights of slaves, when women have yet to agitate for their own rights, the right to be counted as a full citizen? Not only was this in the United States, it also occured around the same time in Britain, as well as other democracies undergoing change during the industrial revolution. It was then that women started pushing for the right to vote. As the cry grew louder, so did other callings for human rights, as the world sped into the 20th century– women could still not vote in 1900, just as the new influx of immigrants were being persecuted against with slander, libel, and hate crimes; and workers grossly exploited during the industrial growth and expansion. Women marched and picketed for these rights too– rights to adequate and free education for children, the prevention of child labor, and transparency of the government, among many other issues of the age. As these reforms were enacted, shortly after that time, women gained the right to vote in America and Great Britain.
In fact, the push for civil rights in the 1960’s was also followed by a push for women’s rights as well– the same salaries as men, the ending of discrimination against women in the workplace, as well as sports and schools, the right of women to become officers in the United States military (shockingly, and shamefully, something that they were only given the right to do in the 1970’s!).
As well, in history, when human rights has regressed, and governmental/societal oppression increased, so has the rights/attitudes towards women suffered.
In Nazi Germany, as the Nazi war machine was stoking it’s own furnace, art, dissension, freedom of speech, and the human rights of the Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, and minorities were repressed and thoroughly and blantantly violated. So, too, was the status of women in a great decline in Nazy Germany: “the perfect German woman”, or, rather, the perfect “Aryan woman” was gentle and kind and beautiful and blonde, and stayed in the home and raised the children, rather than pursuing an occupation, or an education.
The same thing is reflected in Russia. When the communist revolution first took over, women were given many rights that they did not yet have even in the democracies of the age (don’t take this to mean that I advocate communism– I don’t, far from it. But it is a true fact that for a short period of time, women gained many new rights under the communism). However, this was not to last. After Lenin was deposed of and gone (and even under his “reign”), the rights of women began to backslide, especially with Stalin took over. As with many extremely Marxist/Communist/Socialist regimes, the government became extremely paranoid and repressive, and as human rights declined and the lives of citizens were darkened by famine and government mismanagement of resources, as well as the threat of Stalin’s vicious politics and the secret militias/police, the rights of women went right back down the drain.
These days (and for the most part, rightfully so), democracy and democratic ideals is associated with a strong priority on human rights. That is why the connection made by Rula Qawas is so critically important– and true.
Moreover, it is particularly important to note where she is speaking from, and why she is defending Women Studies as practiced in modern countries around the world. Why, she is speaking from the Middle East, where the rights of women, as well as human rights, have some catching up to do.
Her comments sync perfectly with that of the famous Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi, a professor of sociology at the University of Mohammad V in Rabat, and best-selling author of many books including The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, and Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society, as well as her personal memoirs Dreams of Trespass: Tales of Harem Girlhood, and Scheherazade Goes West, both of which I highly recommend (click on the titles, they lead to their respective pages on Amazon, where you can purchase them, if you so desire.) In Dreams of Trespass, she speaks of Morocco, democracy, human right and women’s rights in a long, but very informative footnote which I shall quote in its entirety here. The footnote is next to a passage in where Mernissi’s grandmother predicts that polygamy will be outlawed in Morocco. Yasmina, Mernissi’s maternal grandmother, was one of eight concubines in a rural harem, and throughout the book denounces the domestic harem and polygamy. Mernissi adds this footnote to her Grandmother’s hope that polygamy will be outlawed:
“In fact, the law never did change. Today, almost half a century later, Muslim women still are fighting to have polygamy banned. But legislators, all men, say it is shari’a law, religious law, and cannot be changed. In the summer of 1992, a Moroccan women’s association (L’Union d’Action Feminine [French, translated it means: The Union of Women's Action, or Activism] whose president, Lahfa Jbabdi, is a brilliant sociologist and journalist) that had collected one million signatures against polygamy and divorce became the target of the fundamentalist press, which issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for the women’s execution as heretics. Indeed, when it comes to the status of women, one could say that the Muslim world has regressed since Grandmother’s time. The fundamentalist press’s defense of polygamy and divorce is in fact is in fact an attack against the right of women to participate in the law-making process. Most Muslim governments, and their fundamentalist oppositions, even those that call themselves modern, keep polygamy in the family law codes, not because it is particularly widespread but because they want to show women that their needs are not important. The law is not there to serve them, nor to guarantee their right to happiness and emotional security. The prevailing belief is that women and the law do not belong together; women ought to accept man’s law, because they cannot change it. The suppression of a man’s ‘right’ to polygamy would mean that women have their say in the law, that society is not run by and for men’s whims alone. Where a Muslim government stands on the question of polygamy is a good way to measure the degree to which it has accepted democratic ideas. And if we do take it as an indicator of democracy, we see that very few Muslim countries are up-to-date on human rights. Tunisia and Turkey are the most progressive.”
The ultimate point of this? That it is in the best interest of men, especially in the Middle East, to promote the equality of women under the law, and through education, and the changing of societal constrictions and misogynous taboos. It is in the best interest of everyone.
Power dominates– and when the power of a corrupt government rules by elites, usually results in gross human rights violations, and the suppression of women.
Yet the elevation of rights of women to a priority is connected with the elevation of human rights in general, improvement in the quality of life, and with greater “democratic” ideals, also seems to come better economic conditions, if the success of Europe and the United States is any indication. In fact, the more economically viable an economy becomes, the more suppression of a government is resisted by its public, and the more it loses its political legitimacy– such as in the case of the collapse of the Soviet Union (a gross generalization to be sure, but a significant contributing factor).
This is also demonstrated today in the fact that most oppressive regimes are also the poorest. Quality of life, period, is directly related to how women’s issues are received and acted upon by a nation-state.
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