Arab women have made progress, then have stopped doing so. They have proven that they are as capable as Arab men, or more so, in education and handling responsibilities. However, they are continuing to lack rights and equality. I have followed the efforts of Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak for two decades or more and I know a lot about similar efforts by the wives of Gulf leaders. However, I have followed the work of Jordan's Queen Rania and Syria's Asma al-Assad more closely. There is no one prettier or smarter than these two women and I hope that they succeed in securing equality for their gender, not just in Jordan and Syria, but in every Arab country. I got back to the topic, or rather the topic has gotten back to me, when I read about women in the US and Great Britain via opinion polls, reports and investigative pieces in US and British newspapers, which I receive every day. In the US, during the worst decade in memory (the era of George W. Bush), Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin appeared on the scene as competitors for the presidential nomination. Sonya Sotomayor was appointed to the Supreme Court, while the number of women in the two houses of Congress rose from 13 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2008. The decade saw women's salaries reach 77 percent of those of men, after this figure stood at 73 percent in 2000. Female university students made up 57 percent of the total (the results for female Arab students were much better than for males). Now, one out of every five American wives has a higher income than her husband. The Pew Research Center said that most American wives were not working in 1970. However, this trend has changed and most wives work today, although the rate of married women between the ages of 30 and 40 has declined, from 84 percent in 1970 to 60 percent today. These last figures cannot be considered progress, as the percentage of teen pregnancies has grown, along with single-mother households. The number of “families” of same sex couples has also risen. The Pew study in the United States coincided with a study by the Office for National Statistics in the UK, which revealed similar figures about the progress of British women. After only four percent of women had a higher income than their husbands in 1960, this figure now stands at 19 percent, or 2.7 million women. The figures also showed that 120,000 men were househusbands in 1984, but over the last 15 years, this figure has grown to 214,000. Then again, the number of women who do not work but only care for families fell during the same period, from 2.7 million to 2 million. After reading the above, I tried to search for information about Arab women. The first topic I encountered was not intended as part of my search. It was about the phenomenon of suicide among female domestic workers in Lebanon. I read a frightening report by Human Rights Watch, which said that between the beginning of 2007 and August 2008, 95 female domestics working in Lebanon died. Of them, 40 committed suicide and 24 fell from a high place, i.e. it was either suicide or murder. Subsequent reports, up to 2009, have shown that the trend continues. Personally, I have full confidence in HRW, from which I obtained a report that records the names of those who died or were killed. In addition to the above, there were cases of death by beating or strangulation and 14 deaths from natural causes, such as heart attacks, etc. The “simplest” fact of the story was that female domestics are not given a weekly day off. I will not delve into the details any further; the report is a condemnation of all Lebanese and I am one of them. I will only say that if this is what foreign domestic women deal with in Lebanon, it is also what they face in every Arab country and perhaps this applies to dealing with women in general. In the Los Angeles Times, there was a painful story about an Ethiopian woman who was killed in the recent Ethiopian Airlines disaster. I later telephoned my friend from HRW, Sarah Leah Whitson, who works in the Middle East division. She sent reports about the custodianship of women in one Arab country and their being raped in another country, or losing their citizenship in yet another. I will skip over the details, so as not to re-open any wounds. Can I say something here that would be “news” to readers? We all know that Arab women face a type of injustice that does not affect men. There are those who exploit women in the name of religion, which is innocent of this crime. There are those who deprive women of their freedom in the name of traditions that are as obsolete as their minds, or resort to traditions to justify “honor” crimes whose perpetrators go unpunished. I also read about the story of a 16-year-old Turkish girl who was buried alive because she spoke to boys. In such a climate, the least of women's problems is that their income is lower than that of men in the same job, i.e. something that their western counterparts complain of. If we review what Arab (and Muslim) men have done to their religion, their nation, people and families over recent decades, we find that women do not only deserve equality, but also the chance to manage society and the state, because they cannot do any worse than men have. [email protected]
