How long will women are going to fight in the trenches?

Afghan Women
A group of Afghan women in Kabul wait outside to receive food rations distributed by a humanitarian aid group on May 23. Photo courtesy –Associated Press

All kinds of things keep me up at night like a nocturnal owl. It has been happening more and more in the last couple of years. Last night was one such night. Earlier in the evening, I saw a set of photos of Afghan women in mandatory burqas and niqab as they were waiting for food ration that a humanitarian aid group was going to distribute. These particular photos were supposed to represent a claim about how the government of the supreme leader has taken all the right steps for the betterment of women in Afghanistan. By that they actually mean how women cannot participate in public life, cannot work in offices, cannot attend public universities, and how overall girls’ education has been curtailed. Now girls are also barred from getting formal education for three consecutive years. One photo was where women waiting in a single file were clad in blue burqa along with a niqab. This type of garment covers their entire body, hair and face from head to toe. Additionally, they have to wear gloves to conceal their hands. Only their niqabs has a net over the eye area so that they can breathe and see things within normal range. In the photo, the thing which frightened me the most is the women were guarded by an armed Afghan soldier. Why was the guard needed there at all? The women were there to get some food so that they could feed their families. I found that photo to be very disturbing to share here in my column.

Therefore, I chose the second photo to accompany my article where a group of women are sitting outside and waiting patiently for their turn to get their share. In the above photo, some of the women took the “liberty” not to cover their eyes. I was awestruck to see how beautiful their eyes are and it is easy to tell that underneath the cover they are beautiful women. But in public, they have to cover everything up to avoid men gazing at them. I tried to imagine 90-year old Gloria Steinem, who spoke on all fronts on social change, was sitting among these women. What would they be discussing? Is it going to be about the Taliban dress code or the gender segregation at universities and colleges? Or they will be sharing all the latest fashion trends, and how to apply waterproof mascara? Or would they be discussing which Bollywood stars had plastic surgery to further enhance their beauty for an upcoming movie?

If someone had told me that Gloria Steinem had plastic surgery — I was not going to believe it. Having done that, the iconic feminist would have broken every rule that she had fought so hard to preserve. Even if she was not a very “attractive” woman, she would not have opted for any kind of surgery to improve her look. But the fact of the matter is — Steinem did have some fat removed from her eyelid about a decade ago to enable her to wear contact lenses. I think for medical reasons even the sternest feminists would forgive her. About a month ago, I was looking through an old Time Magazine interview about her life’s work. In the photo that accompanied the interview, she looked every bit her age, all 77 years of them.

Gloria Steinem, a graduate of Smith College led the way for other women to stand up for their rights. She was motivated to speak up after witnessing legal and social discrimination against American women when she was in her thirties. Since then, she has generated international attention for bringing women’s issues into focus. For many years, she has been a “lone revolutionary” who indeed managed to raise awareness all over the globe about inequality that women face in male dominant societies.

Because of activists like Gloria Steinem and Wangari Maathai, women from the United States to Kenya were able to fight for their rightful place in their respective countries. To this day, women are fighting the government, patriarchal male, conservative females, and refusing to tolerate any kind of sexist abuse and harassment. The feminists and rights activists are combating their countries’ system that does not allow them the rights to express themselves freely.

Steinem’s work of the last 50 years is nowhere near done. As a pioneer of the women’s liberation movement Gloria Steinem continues to be active in her advanced age and a sought after figure in America. Led by Rebecca Walker (daughter of novelist Alice Walker) feminist activism is in its “third-wave.” The third-wave is dedicated to supporting “groups and individuals working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice.” Earlier third-wave women were Anita Hill, Jennifer Baumgardener, Amy Richards, and Carol Moseley Braun (first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate) to name a few. A diverse group of women like Jasvinder Sanghera, Lisa Robinson, Fatema Mernissi, Somaly Mam, Pragna Patel from across the globe are redefining feminism by standing up as human rights activists.

“Influenced by the postmodernist movement in academia, third-wave feminists sought to question, reclaim and redefine the ideas, words and media that transmit ideas about womanhood, gender, beauty, sexuality, femininity, and masculinity and other things.” There was definitely a seismic shift about how gender is viewed which gave rise to the concept “a gender continuum.”   

Reportedly, Gloria Steinem is happy that others are taking over and she no longer is in the forefront. Now the media can focus on others.

Let’s go back ten years from now when the Women’s Rights movement was going on full force — women everywhere were still facing injustices and horrible fate. Let us examine the case of Samira al- Nuaimi first.

On September 30th of 2014 on page 20 of Express India, (a trendy weekly on sub- continental news which comes out of Washington, D.C.) ran a very short story about an Iraqi woman – an activist, and a human rights lawyer Samira al-Nuaimi. She was publicly executed by Islamic State (IS) over her critical Facebook post a week ago. The report said, “The woman in her Facebook post criticized the IS for destroying religious and cultural places in Mosul.”

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein — Al-Nuaimi was seized from her home in front of her husband and three children by IS fighters. Then she was tortured for days before a public execution by a masked firing squad in front of a government building in central Mosul.

Was Al-Nuaimi’s life so devalued by the paper’s editors that the story ran in its International News page instead of a front page headline? Is a woman’s right to exercise freedom of speech so insignificant that the way she had to die is perceived as normal? In what kind of a twisted world are we living in the 21st century? When would discrimination against women end? How many more years will it take to achieve gender equality?

In 2012, on a New York City trip, I got to watch an HBO documentary called “Love Crime in Kabul” with a few of my friends of multi nationalities. The movie was produced and directed by an Iranian- American woman named Tanaz Eshaghian. The story is about 125 female inmates at Badam Bash women’s prison in Kabul, Afghanistan. Half of the prisoners were incarcerated for “moral crime” like falling in love. The authorities do not want Afghan women to end up like Lolita, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary – hence the confinement.

According to the authorities, women should not be embodied by any kind of romantic ideals for they fear like Anna and Lolita women would defy society. They are fearful that acting like Lolita is a “metaphor for the oppression of a totalitarian regime.” Therefore constraining them by any means is deemed necessary.

While watching the film, we all were very alarmed after the opening lines where a prison guard says, “If they were good women they wouldn’t be here.” The film is very skillfully done and it portrayed the defiance of the women who are locked up in a jail.

This group of imprisoned women was not accepting their fate from behind bars. Instead they were sending a message that the human heart for generations has fallen for someone who they feel attracted to. Just because they were born in Afghanistan — they are not going to give up on love. Love is the most powerful human emotion and without that how does one feel validated? The documentary restores one’s faith in love though some of these young women were thrown into the gutter for being guilty of loving another person.

These courageous young women stood up against their abusive families, against society — not because they were influenced by the Western culture but because love is the greatest thing you’ll ever experience. It is a very normal desire to love and be loved in return.

I had read stories like Infidel and the caged virgin, My forbidden Face, Beneath the veil, and Zoya’s Story where women characters claimed their stake in rigid societies. Some of the authors wrote under pseudo names and we could never see the faces of the young writers. However, it was a painful reminder of their circumstances.

A few years before the current Taliban took over a feature story about a group of desperate Afghan widows who took matters in their own hands made the front page news in the Washington Post. After losing their husbands to the decades old war, suicide bombing, or to some other cataclysms they found themselves without a home, or any means to support them. These destitute women then decided to seize government owned land. There they started to build their own community. One mud brick at a time — they erected their huts. When the authorities found out, they came and broke their dwellings. That didn’t stop them and in the dark hours of the night – they rebuilt again. They showed perseverance prevails.

A couple of months ago, my friend from college, Maryam and I were talking about her future plans to visit Iran. Over the past three decades she went home only a few times since the Revolution in 1979. She goes back to visit the graves of her parents and to see other family members who remain in Iran. From her initial visit to the last, she had to wear a headscarf which was the most unpleasant part of her trips — she told me.

My friend often confided in me how angry that made her feel; to give into some unreasonable demands of the Mullahs who were changing laws left and right in Iran. This new place where strict Islamic laws were enforced by the government did not resonate with her where she had spent her impressionable teenage years. She searched for the Tehran that she once knew intimately but found none.

Persia was once a symbol of modernity – to Maryam sweet home felt like a place where everything revolved around religion. Her spirit felt broken, and she felt somewhat depleted. Every place in Iran she had visited with her sister she craved for a balanced perspective but faced only disappointment. Many years have passed since but that feeling of loss lingers in her heart.

We cannot ever forget how women’s rights activists in Iran like Haleh Sahabi paved the way for others to march on. Sahabi’s story was well documented in the Western media and I remember seeing television footage as she was shoved and pushed by the security police as she tried to get close to her father’s coffin. He was a famous Iranian dissident.

All Sahabi wanted to do is carry and hold up a photograph of her father in his honor. The security force beat her very badly and later she died of a heart attack which was induced by the brutal attack on her.

That was the year where the “Iranian women showed they are all about substance and courage, and no man could be a match to their power of resistance,” according to Maryam. She now is encouraged and hopeful in seeing the scenes of Tehran’s streets where “despite the strict Islamic dress codes that existed in Iran all these years – women have shown that they are willing to go through anything but not to obey the government forced dress code,” she said.

Our lengthy conversation and follow-up emails also covered women like Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian journalist, human rights activist, and a lawyer who spearheaded the international campaign “One Million Signatures” to set the “legal inequalities of women” and demanded for the abolition of laws that discriminate against women. She was arrested and imprisoned for six years. Under intense international pressure the authorities released her after a year.

After the Islamic Revolution, Azar Nafisi, a Professor of literature at Tehran University got fired from her job for refusing to wear a veil. Subsequently she wrote her memoir “Reading Lolita in Tehran” about a teacher and her seven female students who got together and talked about their lives after the 1979 revolution. Together they had read Persian Classical literature, and great Western classics like Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.

The group chose Lolita because her story “symbolizes a man’s confiscation of a young girl’s life.”

Because of all the stories — now a lot of the oppressed women around the world refuse to be confined within the walls of their compound under hideous constraint.

In the Indian subcontinent, women and human rights activists are constantly fighting against repression by saying no more. The rights activists are doing great work in backing the women who have no voice.

In Bangladesh, rights activists such as Konkona Das, Hena Aktar, Sultana Kamal, Khushi Kabir are carrying on the work and legacy of pioneer Human Rights activist late Salma Sobhan (niece of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy.) Based on her model, they are leading the way with their relentless actions — fighting and protesting the existing rigid social system that is extremely harsh when it comes to women’s rights. These activists often come together in unity to fight social injustices in an effort to give women and young girls stronger voices.

Because of these courageous past and present women leaders in Bangladesh, the weaker voices today feel that they “somewhat” matter in our male-controlled society. Women activists and social workers give other women support that they must not be afraid in claiming their rights, because God made men and women as equal.

Society changes rules and laws.

In the past five years, and particularly during the recent student-led uprising to topple the Awami League government, it has been encouraging to see that even the younger generation girls are more aware of the discrimination around them. They now are conscious of their surroundings where eve teasing, obscene gestures, and vulgar comments directed toward them are a daily happening.


It was incredible to read that some adolescent Indian girls were fighting against sexual harassment by acting out a play in the streets of New Delhi. This was a brave and unique idea to showcase their talents as well as getting a message across that girls are not objects of sexual desire nor are they going to take anymore abuse and pestering. With their play they had demonstrated that they will do anything in their power to shame the culprits so that they stop with their street harassment once and for all.

Isn’t it about time that women and girls all over the world no longer hide out in the trenches? They need to come out and display their courage. They’ve waited long enough!

Zeenat Khan writes from Maryland, USA

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