Articles
Feminist Advocacy, Family Law and Violence Against Women: Introduction
Early in my tenure as Secretary General at the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), I traveled with a small group of women to some forty towns and villages around Iran. We wanted to find out what would be most useful to the women themselves. What were their priorities? What were their most important challenges and needs? In every town or village we went to schools, factories, farms, homes, prisons, city councils, teachers’ associations – anywhere to learn about women’s lives and the challenges they faced. The experience was often excruciating, sometimes exhilarating, but always instructive. In Abadan, I talked to a woman of twenty who had killed the sixty- year-old husband who had raped her repeatedly since she had been given to him in marriage at the age of nine. On a dusty, winding street in Yazd, we passed a woman who was crying. We stopped the car and asked …
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Women’s Learning Partnership’s Project on Family Law Reform to Challenge Gender-Based Violence
An international network of 20 autonomous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) based primarily in transitioning and fragile states, Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) is dedicated to enhancing universal human rights and gender equality, strengthening civil society, and empowering women to be active citizens and actors of change in their societies. Our mission is to transform power relations and promote justice, equality, peace, and sustainable development by strengthening the feminist movement. We work to overcome histories of political and social authoritarianism and topdown hierarchical leadership, which are replicated in social and family relationships, often with women and girls at the bot¬tom of the order. WLP aims to bring about lasting change toward eliminating gender-based violence (GBV) and promoting universal human rights, equality, and political participation through a multi-level approach, starting with culturally and contextually adapted curriculum in 20 languages that is freely available to all via our website (www.learningpartnership.org), …
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Women’s Human Rights: From Global Declarations to Local Implementation
Introduction Since the adoption of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the effect of international conferences, laws, resolutions, and consequent documents on rights on the struggle for women’s human rights at regional, national, and local levels has been a matter of debate and controversy. In my view, they have been and continue to be indispensable to promoting women’s human rights, but to be made practicable they must have popular support; that is, the ways and means of using them must be based on the exigencies of the social and cultural contexts in which they are to be applied. In this article, I recount the story of our work for women’s rights in Iran in the 1970s, partly as an historical reflection—because I believe we cannot go forward without understanding the past—but also as a case study of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI) and its role …
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Trespassing With Fatema
Fatema and I began our work together in 1984 as contributors to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. She wrote the Morocco chapter and I, Iran’s. We stayed in touch through the Sisterhood Is Global Institute that Robin founded with the seventy writers of the book, but we did not meet in person until the MESA conference in 1993, where Miriam Cooke had organized the plenary on women’s human rights with Fatema, Nawal El Sadaawi, and me as speakers. Fatema and I immediately connected. We were similar in temperament and held shared views on status of Muslim women. We regretted that there were so few Muslim women visible in international debates on the women’s movement. We found incomprehensible the nearly complete neglect of religion which to us was a powerful factor in shaping the values that impacted women’s lives. We also shared a love for music …
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A Personal Remembrance of Fatema Mernissi
Fatema Mernissi, the Moroccan sociologist widely known as a pioneer in Middle Eastern Women’s studies, passed away this week. It is difficult for me to speak of her – a friend, ally, and colleague of over two decades – in the past tense. I first met Fatema at the Middle East Studies Association Conference in November 1992. Fatema, Nawal El Sadaawi, and I were speakers at the first and only MESA plenary ever dedicated to gender. It was an exhilarating time, just after the fall of the Soviet Union. There was a brief era of global peace and all things seemed possible. We were upbeat about the Middle East, about women, about human rights. Fatema and I connected instantly. She brought me the gift of her extraordinary compatriots Amina Lemrini and Rabéa Naciri, co-founders of L’Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc, which became one of the five founding partner organizations …
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The World We Seek: Human Rights in the 21st Century
Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) began as an idea at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Witnessing the enthusiasm and energy with which 35,000 NGO representatives reviewed the status of women’s rights around the globe and discussed strategies for achieving full rights for women, a group of us came together to deliberate the future. The Beijing conference and its antecedents had already taught us that the status of women had been fundamentally the same throughout history and across the world. Everywhere, men had easy access to the public sphere, women did not; men were trained, educated, and encouraged to work for equitable pay, women were not; men were able to recognize and celebrate their masculinity and take pride in their gender, women were not; men were praised for being outgoing, aggressive, articulate, and forceful, women were not; men were applauded for creativity, …
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Iranian Women’s Voices
In the flood of news and information that surrounds us every day, we may take for granted the constant ripple of voices around the globe whose struggle to be heard often ends in violence, imprisonment or death. Ironically, it is only the new information age that is allowing many of those voices to be heard for the first time; voices that were previously muffled by oppressive regimes. What an outside audience may see as sudden bursts of political activism often reflects years of dialogue and refusal to be silenced. We should make every effort to recognize and document the long-term efforts of grassroots activists in building such movements. Such a document is a new English translation of the book, Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality: The Inside Story. Women’s rights activist Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani captures the essence of the monumental grassroots struggle for rights in Iran, and locates …
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Reflections on Women’s Security in Iran
The late Mhabub ul Haq, the founder of the UN Human Development Report, captured the essence of human security when he said, and I quote, “In the last analysis, human security means a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, an ethnic tension that did not explode, a dissident who was not silenced, a human spirit that was not crushed. The imperatives of this human security have become universal, indivisible, and truly global today.” In the past, human security was defined mainly in terms of state security. A half-century of international dialogue on rights, development, and peace, however, has led us to broaden our understanding of the concept of human security by placing the individual person at its center. In this construction, human security is different from human rights writ large and more than the conditions arising from the interactions of states or of state and …
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Democracy Courage Tribute Acceptance Speech on Behalf of the Iranian Women’s Movement
I am proud and honored to accept this award on behalf of the Iranian Women’s Movement. It is a special honor to receive the award from the right honorable Kim Campbell whose life’s work and her personal conduct represent all that I and scores of others around the world aspire to. I am thankful to a kindred spirit and supporter of the Iranian women’s struggle, Hafsat Abiola, for kindly reading this message. The Iranian women’s movement today is heir to over a century of activism and sacrifice. In its latest incarnation, it is a movement without leaders—a movement without offices, or special locations. It is within every woman’s heart and is carefully nurtured in every home across the land. The movement seeks freedom and justice. It stresses humane values. It commits members to do as their conscious dictates. It stresses that the road we travel is as important as our …
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Freedom Leads to Empowerment: Promoting Women’s Leadership and Financial Independence
Women’s empowerment is a process. It involves raising consciousness, building skills and reforming unjust laws that limit women’s education, participation in decision making and economic independence. I.M.O.W. Global Council member Mahnaz Afkhami is president of Women’s Learning Partnership, which strives to empower women by practicing and promoting their leadership and self-sufficiency. The United Nation’s International Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights recognizes that “in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy [his/her] economic, social and cultural rights, as well as [his/her] civil and political rights and freedom.” How do we create the conditions the International Convention stipulates? Let me begin by recalling the memory of a battered woman I met in a village in Iran in 1978. This was before the revolution, shortly after …
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