THE time will eventually arrive, if the world survives, when International Women’s Day (IWD) is little more than a historical curiosity — a reminder of the bad days when more than half of humanity struggled against its relegation to a subsidiary status. But it could be a long time coming.
More than 110 years after the concept emerged in the US and Europe, and almost 40 years after it was adopted by the UN, IWD serves as an annual reminder of persisting inequality between the sexes almost everywhere. The tremendous progress in some geographical jurisdictions must be weighed against regression elsewhere.
Afghanistan stands out as an exceptionally regressive entity since the Taliban took over and proceeded to demonstrate that their mentality had not shifted far from the appallingly retrograde attitudes of their initial incarnation in the 1990s.
Schooling for girls is sporadic at best, universities are out, and curbs on women’s employment have crippled aid and health initiatives. Just last month, there was a crackdown on contraceptives, ostensibly viewed as a Western conspiracy to restrict the Muslim population.
It’s impossible to ignore echoes of a similar mentality in the US, where the judicial trampling of the right to abortion has been followed by campaigns against contraception. There’s much greater scope for pushback in the US. But the tendency, often couched in mumbo-jumbo, reflects the traditional misogyny broadly seen as common to many belief systems.
How long will women have to march for their rights?
Yet, there are vast differences within them. Girls’ education, for instance, was never quite restricted in Iran, although rights women had previously been accustomed to were curbed in other ways. The most visible was the insistence on a head covering — never quite as drastic as the Saudi injunction that effectively decreed invisibility, but nonetheless strictly enforced by the Iranian variant of a ‘morality police’.
That dam broke in the aftermath of the murder last September of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman hauled up because her hijab supposedly defied the norms of the clergy. It unleashed a wave of protests, beginning in Amin’s hometown Saqqez, that engulfed Iran, and sporadically continue despite a despicable counter-wave of repression that stretches from executions to mass incarceration and torture, including alleged sexual assault of suspected female activists.
One of the upshots has been the dereliction of the obligatory hijab; even many of those who are reluctant to dispense with it, support the right of their sisters to choose otherwise. And the authorities seem reluctant to enforce their injunction any longer. They also seem to be perturbed of late by instances of the mass poisoning of schoolgirls, hundreds of whom have been treated in hospitals for a still undefined malady. Even Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described it this week as an “unforgivable crime”.
The same could be said of the actions of the Iranian state, especially its crimes against women.
In fact, degrees of misogyny appear common to all faiths. Obscurantist adherents of Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism, for instance, can hardly be exonerated. But Abrahamic faiths remain globally dominant, and to varying degrees many of their followers consciously or otherwise categorise women as inferior to men.
Just 120 or so years ago, such attitudes were more or less universal, but they have substantially been remedied in some parts of the world. Elsewhere, it’s impossible to ignore a steep regression, not just in Afghanistan and Iran but stretching to parts of eastern Europe and the American heartland, where the dystopian fantasy of The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t quite a reality but no longer seems all that far-fetched.
Pakistan decidedly falls into the regressive camp, as demonstrated in recent years by the annual controversy over the Aurat March. There was never anything resembling a golden age, but the pall that descended with the advent of the Ziaul Haq dictatorship has never completely been lifted. It is reflected not just in the mediaeval mentality of the Taliban and their ilk or the misogyny of Imran Khan, but also in the attitudes of those who deplorably decided that a retrograde Haya march must take precedence in Lahore this year over women agitating for their human rights.
It’s worth remembering, though, that the currents of history can shift with little warning. The women who marched out of desperation in Petrograd on International Women’s Day in 1917 had no expectation that their protest would spark a revolution that overthrew czarism within days and paved the way for an earth-shaking new order a few months later.
The instigator of IWD, German socialist and Bolshevik comrade Clara Zetkin, would probably have appreciated the ‘zan, zindagi, azadi’ slogans that have lately been ringing out in Iran.
Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2023
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