“I’m 19 years old, okay? I am here to fight!” a girl insisted furiously, yelling into the camera while a crowd of protestors gathered around her. “To fight for my freedom and for my country!”
The girl was one of many in a montage that kicked off Because Our Cause is Just, a short documentary film by the Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP) illustrating the women’s rights movement in the Middle East. From one scene to another, Middle Eastern women, both young and old, marched and led crowds of protestors. They punched the air with their fists and rallied men and women with their cries for democracy, the key demand during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. Government officials and fellow protestors threatened them with force, but the women did not stop fighting for their right to political and social equality.
They did not cease to fight, because in the end, their cause was just.
The State of Women’s Rights in the Middle East
More American women than ever are filling up lecture halls and jumpstarting careers, giving college-age girls a sense of our capabilities. Around the world, many women our age also have the same confidence in their abilities, leading them to pursue their right to education and to work. But for many women, this pursuit often comes at a steep price, especially in countries where men dominate women in nearly all aspects of life. From legal barriers to violence, these women fight against roadblocks that are largely nonexistent to the average woman in the United States.
This scenario plays out over and over again in the Middle East. After the Arab Spring uprisings, where ordinary citizens fought for democracy, new governments were elected, but women were still left out of politics. What’s more, they were still blocked from making everyday decisions that are considered a given for American women. In many countries, girls couldn’t choose who or when they wanted to marry, sit in the same side of a room with men, or even drive a car, in the most extreme cases.
Women’s rights activists in the region were shocked, especially because many of them had actively started movements that were key in toppling some of the most corrupt leaders. They had chanted slogans with loudspeakers to their mouths and faced the most brutal violence imaginable while standing side by side with men. The fact that women were starting to surpass men in many areas, like education, didn’t seem to matter either as it became clear that women were still considered secondary citizens—beneath men.
“One of the things that some people aren’t as aware of is that in many countries in the Middle East region, women are actually more educated. But where there is a very big discrepancy is their labor force participation,” explains the Women’s Learning Partnership’s Senior Program Officer for Advocacy and Communications, Catherine Harrington, in an exclusive interview with Her Campus. “So you have, in many countries, these large numbers of women getting higher level degrees but then sometimes as low as a 20 percent workforce participation rate.”
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Where Have the Media Gone Wrong?
The disconnect between women’s abilities and their standing in many Middle Eastern countries inspired Because Our Cause Is Just, a film that Harrington helped co-produce as part of the WLP’s Stand With Women Who Stand for Democracy Campaign. In just 36 minutes, the WLP and Rainlake Productions go over the situations women face in the Middle East and North Africa regions. But the film also aims to shed light on another issue: the lack of specific, detailed dialogue about obstacles keeping these women from obtaining the same rights as men.
Western media’s coverage of the Arab Spring and, to a certain degree, their coverage of issues we face in the West, constantly glazes over these obstacles. While news outlets did mention that women headed many of the protests, the media reported mainly on the fight for democracy, but not necessarily on how inclusive this democracy would be.
“The media focus in the West seemed to be on democracy, which of course we want, but there was a lack of urgent attention to the serious threats [to women] that were developing,” says Harrington. “There were always journalists doing good work; however, there is very little space in mainstream media for issues pertaining to women’s rights. There’s been a strong tradition of orientalism or ‘othering’ Muslim women, so the stories that get a lot of play are those like that poor young woman in Afghanistan whose nose was cut off, or Malala Yousafzai, who was shot.”
Because Our Cause Is Just: The Beginnings
Harrington and the WLP’s partners noticed the media’s lack of women’s rights coverage in 2012 when they released From Fear to Freedom, their first feature film that investigated domestic violence around the world. From Fear to Freedom served as a base from which Harrington and the WLP’s Middle Eastern partners could create Because Our Cause Is Just, drawing attention to many of the gains and losses of women’s rights activists in the region.
“[The Arab Spring] provided a lot of opportunities, and with those opportunities and the power vacuum, a lot of threats,” explains Harrington. “One potential really serious downside is that there were some major achievements that were reached by women’s rights activists, but this is something that is not as presented in the media here and people aren’t aware of it. One example is the women’s right to divorce in Egypt, which was a huge right that was achieved somewhat recently, and the banning of female genital mutilation.”
After From Fear to Freedom, activists wanted another film. This inspired the WLP to set out and document women’s rights movements during and after the Arab Spring. Though most of the organization’s previous work centered on providing classroom and workshop materials to educate people on women’s rights issues, Harrington and her colleagues latched on to film as a way to quickly grab their audience’s attention.
“We wanted to raise public awareness to influence political decision-makers, but also to directly reach people of influence, because, lets face it: the foreign policy [of the U.S. and Western E.U. governments] does inform and affect the region,” says Harrington. “If people want to support democracy, if people in the region have sacrificed and blood has been shed to achieve democracy, you better have an understanding that you’re not going to be able to achieve that unless you include women, whose rights are also linked to minority rights.”
Even new political parties that came to power, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, went back on promises to give women and minority groups the same rights as men. While women were facing better situations in some countries like Tunisia and Morocco, extreme religious groups had taken over and continued suppressing women.
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What We Can Learn From Women in the Middle East
Here, Harrington gives a minor comparison between women’s rights in the Middle East and in the U.S. As the debate on women’s reproductive rights, political rights, and more rages on in America, some gaps appear and show the improvements can still be made even here. While American women enjoy significantly more freedom than most women in the Middle East, they are still underrepresented in the workforce and constantly face obstacles that block their needs from being met.
“I would say that fundamentalists and extremists [of all kinds] everywhere, because of the universal history of patriarchy that existed and the way in which many religions developed over time,” says Harrington. “When it comes down to a variety of issues, reproductive rights being one of them, you see women’s rights and control over their body and their ability to engage fully as equal citizens being compromised across the world.”
But there is hope. In the Middle East, a new generation of women’s rights activists is now used to pushing against ideas that women are inferior to men. Many of these women, like those seen in the film, aren’t afraid to speak to a crowd about their demands, and they definitely aren’t afraid to take to the streets with signs and banners in their hands to protest. These scenes make the WLP optimistic for the future, an optimism that they believe American women should also adopt when they look at the women’s rights movement in the Middle East today.
“There are plenty of young women [in the Middle East] who think of themselves as activists and they engage on these issues and feel strongly about them,” says Harrington. “Your educated, progressive counterpart exists in all these countries as well, so I think that’s another really good thing for people to think about because it’s illuminating for some people here. We do tend to be somewhat isolated and there is a lack of media attention to it, but there are young women that feel strongly that they want to fight for a secular society.”
But for that fight to go on, we too must engage on issues that mean a lot to us as women.
“I know that with Hillary Clinton as the past Secretary of State, Melanne Verveer as global ambassador for women’s issues, Susan Rice in the UN [who is now at the NSC, it shows that the U.S.] truly cares about those issues,” says Harrington. “But they need to make sure that whenever there’s an opportunity with any political party that comes into being, whether it’s the Muslim Brotherhood or any other political party, that they should use all the leverage that they have to talk about the importance of women’s rights.”
Besides encouraging politicians to engage in dialogue on women’s issues, ordinary citizens must also talk to each other, says Harrington. Especially, as the film shows, because the fight for women’s rights is just.
“When we’re talking about advancing women’s rights and political participation, it’s right and it’s just,” Harrington says. “But one of the things that we like to talk about is the fact that when you’re looking at development and at security, countries cannot achieve the levels of development and stability that they want if women aren’t involved.”
The Women’s Learning Partnership is based just outside of Washington, D.C., with independent partners in more than 20 countries, most of which are in the Global South. You can view Because Our Cause Is Just online in English and in Arabic. Or, come to the WLP’s next screening at BloomBars in Columbia Heights on Tuesday, August 20th!
Loved the film? Then make sure to spread the word about Because Our Cause Is Just and the Women Who Stand for Democracy Campaign! Like the WLP’s Facebook page or post a tweet with the hashtag #WithWomen4Democracy.