An Arab Spring for Women: The Missing Story from the Middle East

by Juan Cole and Shahin Cole | www.csidonline.org  huffingtonpost.com


  
The "Arab Spring" has received copious attention in the American media, but one of its crucial elements has been largely overlooked: the striking role of women in the protests sweeping the Arab world. Despite inadequate media coverage of their role, women have been and often remain at the forefront of those protests.

As a start, women had a significant place in the Tunisian demonstrations that kicked off the Arab Spring, often marching up Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, the capital, with their husbands and children in tow. Then, the spark for the Egyptian uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak out of office was a January 25th demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square called by an impassioned young woman via a video posted on Facebook. In Yemen, columns of veiled women have come out in Sanaa and Taiz to force that country's autocrat from office, while in Syria, facing armed secret police; women have blockaded roads to demonstrate for the release of their husbands and sons from prison.

In late January, freelance journalist Megan Kearns pointed out the relative inattention American television and most print and Internet media gave to women and, by and large, the absence of images of women protesting in Tunisia and Egypt. Yet women couldn't have been more visible in the big demonstrations of early to mid-January in the streets of Tunis, whether accompanying their husbands and children or forming distinct protest lines of their own -- and given Western ideas of oppressed Arab women, this should in itself have been news.

Politicians in the transitional government of Tunisia, for decades the most progressive Arab country with regard to women's rights, are determined to protect the public role of women by making sure they are well represented in the new legislature. Elections are now planned for July 24th, and a high commission was appointed to set electoral rules. That body has already announced that party lists will have to maintain parity between male and female candidates.

In such a list system, you don't vote for an individual but a party, which has published an ordered list of its candidates. If the list gets 10% of the vote nationally, it is awarded 10 percent of the seats in parliament, and can go down its ordered list until it fills all those seats. Parity for women means that every other candidate on the ordered list should be a woman, ensuring them high near 50% representation in the legislature. 




From CSID (Center for the Study of Islam and Development) 
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