Kuwaiti Women Win 8% Representation Four Years After Winning Vote
May 21, 2009
by Bruce Nahin
|This piece is written by Bruce Nahin and is his opinion, not necessarily that of The New Agenda.
In Kuwait,women gained the right to vote and run for office in 2005 but failed in two previous elections to win seats in the 50-member parliament. Four women were elected in Saturday’s vote, according to official results read out by judges on state-owned TV on Sunday.
Kuwait has led the region in giving its people democratic rights. It has an elected parliament that wields considerable power, but the Cabinet is still chosen and led by a ruling family that holds ultimate power.
Radical religious politicians have fought against extending political rights to women. And at the same time, they have pushed for full implementation of Islamic law, or Sharia.
One of the women elected was Massouma al-Mubarak, who was also the country’s first female Cabinet minister. Her supporters celebrated with fireworks and drove her home in a motorcade of honking cars like Kuwaitis normally do after weddings. The 62-year-old political science teacher, who once complained that she could not vote while her male students could, scored the most votes in her district.
All of the female winners have Ph.D’s from the United States. Among them is economist and women’s rights activist Rola Dashti, who battled in court for political rights for Kuwaiti women years before the legislature approved the suffrage bill. The other two women are education professor Salwa al-Jassar and philosophy professor Aseel al-Awadhi.
Update: AFP reports that speaking at Bernard College, SOS Hillary Clinton commented on the Kuwaiti elections:
This did not come easily or quickly. Starting in the 1990s, I supported the women who were brave enough to stand up and say “women should be able to serve.” It took a long struggle, but the election of four women this Saturday is a major step forward for Kuwait, the region, and I would argue, the world.
Very impressive, considering women in Saudi Arabia can’t even drive cars – a start is a start and congrats to them all.
Attention Ms. Freaking Magazine: Take a look at Hillary Clinton if you want to find out what a goddamned feminist looks like.
Moderators — pls delete
Flora (fsteele) on May 21st, 2009 10:55 pm
and reply by email to 1950democrat@gmail.com
It was just a note to the current moderators.
Here, here!!!!
Janis,
Ms. Magazine and the old feminist guard should start focusing on women’s issues rather than everyone elses, if they want to be relevant to women. I believe that if Obama were white, with the same policy positions, they never would have put him on their cover and would be much more critical of his positions. For years, NOW and the old feminist guard have focused on fighting racism and gay rights as much as they have women’s rights. If you go to NOW’s website there is as much information and political activity around fighting racism and fighting for gay marriage as there is about women’s rights. These are worthy causes, but with all the problems women face, you would think that women’s rights organizations would focus on women, all women, of all races, cultures, classes and sexual orientations. But the focus would be on the oppression we face as women, not as gay, or black or white, etc..
Part of the problem is that for 35 years or more, the women’s movement has been criticized and accused of not being senstive enough to racism and homophobia, etc.. So now they bend over backwards to fight for these other causes in solidarity. Unfortunately, these other movements do not support them in kind. Al sharpton isn’t focusing on women’s rights. Al’s not marching in the streets over the rape epidemic, here, or in the Congo. Al only cares about rape when a white guy rapes a black woman. He doesn’t care about rape, or women, just racism. Nobody criticizes civil rights groups or leaders for failing to recognize the plight of women and girls, even the plight of black women and girls. The gay rights movement isn’t putting an once of energy into women’s rights either. Some of these groups may be supportive, but they ain’t doing nearly as much to help as the women’s rights groups do for them!
This brow-beating of the women’s movement has worked because women are taught to put everyone else first, and we are easily guilt tripped if we don’t. I think that putting Obama on the cover of Ms. was meant to demonstrate their support for black advancement and opportunity. In the same vein, they chose not to go to bat for Hillary, because of Obama’s race. I believe that if Hillary’s opponant were a white man, who engaged in the same level of sexism during the campaign, these women’s groups wouldn’t have been so muzzled in their defense of her. It’s sad, and I’m sure there are people who will think that I am out of line for saying this, but someone has to!
Likewise with any woman on the right- NOW goes after them with a vengence rather than being supportive of their struggles too- their political agendas have pulled them away from the struggle for women and support for breaking glass ceilings and the like
Bruce, ITA — and I would state further that the problem isn’t that NOW has to be supportive of every choice a woman makes. We tend to believe erroneously that we have to be like, total MFGBFFs before we can support a woman at all. That supporting a woman’s desire to do X is the same as endorsing her choice. And some women make choices I disagree with.
The problem is that NOW confuses supporting a woman making a stupid choice with condemning the patriarchy’s punishment of her. For example, okay fine. They disagree with Sarah Palin’s stance on some things. And because they disagreed with her legislative stance, they tacitly approved the resulting patriarchal abuse that was heaped on her. NOWHERE did they realize that if they approve of ANY man ANYWHERE (or any woman) viciously attacking a woman in a gender-based way anywhere, they were approving of men (or women) attacking women in gender-based ways everywhere.
It doesn’t matter if you smugly applaud when a right-wing woman is being sexually assaulted because she had it coming. The men who do that sort of thing can’t tell the difference. (BTW, for any male readers who are about to shrik that they are being stereotyped: if you aren’t a man who does that sort of thing, you have nothing to be offended over.) All they see is tits and a vagina, and that is what they are attacking. Do they think that rapists can tell the difference between abusing and raping the vagina of a colluding patriachal tool woman and raping the vagina of a gtood and upstanding vegan eco-friendly liberal woman or something?
It’s like attacking any other epidemci. You don’t only vaccinate your friends against smallpox and let everyone else you don’t like die of it and think you’ll ever do away with the disease. You have to vaccinate EVERYONE, which means that you have to go vacciinate even skinny, hot-looking anti-choice patriarchal bitch-tools.
Once these supposed feminists at NOW meet ANY rape AT ALL with silence and tacit satisfaction, they have lost the right to disapprove of it anywhere — particularly since they have been screaming to high heaven for DECADES that rape is a MALE problem, it is the responsibility of MEN, RAPISTS cause rape, women don’t get themselves raped, rapists rape them, and that we have to stop thinking of rape as something that happens to women but instead need to think of it as something that rapists actively do.
Which means that if a woman is subjected to rape or indeed sexual degradation and humiliation, you can’t appeal to her short skirt, her state of inebriation, OR HER POLITICS before determining whether it was wrong. A rapist raped, an asshole insulted, an abuser degraded. Any feminist worth their salt doesn’t need to find out the object of those verbs before disapproving.
NOW, apparently, never really bought into all that happy feminist horsehit they’ve been spouting all these years. Despite their protestations to the contrary, they DO believe that some women ask for it, and that rape and sexual degradation and abuse are something that it’s a woman’s responsibility to avoid rather than the single, individual choice of a rapist of abuser to engage in.
BTW, nor do I believe that garbage that says that Feminism Is About hoices, so we can’t disapprove of anything a woman does, ever. Some women are stupid.
But once anyone sexually degrades, humiliates, rapes, or otherwise subejcts ANY WOMAN ANYWHERE to ANY gebder-based discrimination, then if you believe at all that that sort of activity is wrong, you must stand against it.
Otherwise, as I said previously, you’re no better than the government who eradicates smallpox but keeps a little vial of it around in a lab someplace because it might come in handy someday. NOW thinks rape and sexual degradation are bad. Yeah, right. They seem to have figured out a way to use it (or take satisfaction in its use) to keep some uppity bitches in line.
Funny, because Susan Brownmiller’s watershed book about rape said the same thing about the benefits that MEN enjoy of rape, whether they do it or not: that is keeps all women everywhere in line. Looks like NOW has figured out a way for “feminists” to benefit from the threat of sexual violence and humiliation, too. Be one of us or else, when you’re raped, abused, or huiliated, you’re on your own. Fall in line or else.
The whole thing sickens me. I simply cannot believe that I lived through watching feminism turn into fluffing men, stabbing women int he back, and cheerleading sexual degradation. Holy effing Christ on a popsicle stick.
Not the movt of the 70′s is it? Back then this misogyny would never have been tolerated by feminists let alone participate in it
And yet they complain that it’s all the fault of the “younger generation” with their lip-gloss feminism. Y es, that ticks me off … but then, why sell out to appeal to them when you’ve spent the last ten years saying they would be the death of feminism?
At that point, isn’t it just all a marketing ploy to keep your magazine afloat no matter what?
(Rhetorical main-stream feminist “you” of course.)
Last I checked it wasnt the 20 somethings that run Ms, NOW, Huffington, etc But it is they that say that a woman is” fair Game” for sexists comments because of their opinion on a political issue
by the word” they” I meant Ms Now etc
No, I think I know what you meant.
I’ve just heard a lot of complaints by established feminists for a while that the third-wave lip-gloss kids ruined feminism. I think it’s not that simple. I think MOST political movements got co-opted and turned into “buy this product and you will be a member of XYZ tribe.” People who drive Hummers buy swirl lightbuls to proclaim their environmental awareness instead of ditching the guzzler and getting a used car that gets better mileage, or moving closer to work. It’s called greenwashing when it happens in that political arena.
Feminism ended up just one more casualty, another liberal corpse piled up on a landfill of cellphone faceplates, supermarket string bags, and “women’s nutrition” bars.
And yet they are happy to sell themselves out to these supposedly terrible children who have ruined feminism by putting their (demographically speaking) Dreamboat Fantasy Boyfriend on the front cover of the magazine.
Preaching to the choir, I know.
Janis,
Your comments are spot on! I agree that the feminist movement’s willingness to compromise feminist principles in order to remain in line with the “political correctness” of the left wing politics of the day has hurt the movement dramatically, particularly when its the left wing men setting the agenda and women’s rights and experiences are always the least of their priorities. Like President Obama said, “human rights are an ideal, not a priority”. I wonder if men of color were being treated the way women are worldwide, he would have the same perspective?
I disagree with Sarah Palin on almost everything, but I will and have been out-spoken about the unfair and misogynystic treatment she has received by many on the left.
I want NOW to fight against mysogyny in all quarters. I want them to fight for the white women who was raped by the black guy, just as hard as they fight for the black women who was raped by the white guy. I want them to fight against the AIDS epidemic amongst young black women, just as hard, if not harder, than they fight against the pay disparity between white coller man and white coller women. I want them to fight for the rights of Sarah Palin to run for public office free of misogynistic attacks, just as much as they do for any democratic pro-chioce woman. I want them to fight for the rights of any women running for political office to be free of sexist attack, regardless of the race of their male opponents. I want them to call out islamic misogyny without worry of being called racists. I want them to admit that much of contemporary islamic cultures in the world are more mysogynistic than western cultures, without making excuses for them, without fear of being politically incorrect, and without blaming the west for it.
Owning ones oppression of others and being moved by ones identification with it is an effective way of accomplishing or moving towards equality. MLK understood this and appealed to it quite effectively in regards to racism.
The women’s movement too often excuses the misogyny of some, but not others. Left wing men, as we saw with both Palin and Clinton, were given a free pass this lest election cycle. Black men are also given a pass by many feminists, unless their misogyny is aimed at black women exclusively. Excuses are often made for them and racism is sometimes proffered as an excuse for their misogynistic behavior. This is unacceptable and it is this way of thinking that has undermined the feminist movement, not the twenty somethings!
I want NOW to fight for women in all quarters, because if they do, they will be more effective in creating a more level playing field for my daughter and all of our daughters worldwide.
Kendall J: I would agree with all you wrote with one exception- it wasnt just left wing men who got a pass, it was left wing women too..check comments made by Steinem, NOW, MS,Huffington Feministing,and the MSM women reporters etc. Palinizing was not limited to one sex and frankly those supporters of Obama, male and female used the same stuff on HRC too.
I also want the women’s movement to value women as much as men.
It sounds so simple, but they clearly do not.
How many times have they held their noses and demand that we hold ours and vote for some male assh*le just because he’s a Democrat?
And yet how much equivalent slack do they give to women conservatives? Mainstream feminists are happy to flush their supposed principles down the toilet and “hold their noses” to vote for anti-choice Democrat MEN, but I can’t think of a single anti-choice WOMAN politician they’d give the same slack to.
They bend over backwards to cut slack for men because “we need allies!” and all that happy h*rseshit.
But they never seem to envision a moderate conservative woman as a potential ally worth compromising for. They’re acting like cowed wives who slide over in bed every time hubby shoves until they wake up clinging to the edge of the bed and wondering how the hell they got all the way over there. And to quiet the little voices that tell them all night long that they’re spineless losers who are getting used, then slit the throat of a woman who puts one toe out of line. “Look how tough and uncompromising I am,” they say then.
They act like elections are some sort of stuck pickle jar that they don’t have the little girly muscles to open, so they have to wander around and bat their eyes are a Mayun to get him to do it for them.
CLEARLY, they value men over women, in every single instance. It’s so horrifying given that I took them seriously for DECADES when they said that women were just as valuable as men and that women should put other women first. It feels like a kick in the stomach to have watched Ms and NOW turn into just another bunch of catty backstabbers who’ll fellate a man for getting one thing right while abandoning a woman to the flood for getting one thing wrong.
Those cretins never did believe all their rhetoric about how Women Count and Women And Human Beings and Rape Is Bad and whatever else they spewed. They never bought any of it. Everything they accused Phyllis Schlafly of, they believe, deep down inside. Every last one of them.
I do not believe that NOW or MS as ever endorsed a conservative woman candidate- but they certainly have endorsed a flock of sexist men- is the goal equality for women, breaking class ceiling as it was when I joined the movement as a kid while at UCLA in the early 70′s or is it something else now. I admit I was a liberal back then so perhaps I didnt notice- but as an older man now who still supports women’s rights but not the obama /democrat agenda, I see the mainstream movement moving away from women’s rights and placing those goals subservient to gay and black rights and other liberal issues and attacking women candidates because they are not liberal.
The unhappy fact is that if women are to break the glass ceiling they must put gender above all else and yes support a woman who they may not agree with to make it happen- like I did for Ginsburg- It is obvious the liberal male Democrats will not help a woman become president- if they would we’d have President Clinton now- instead they( not the GOP) were sexist and degrading against HRC( my candidate) so liberal women must unite , even in favor of a conservative- if this ceiling is to be broken- it now becomes a question of priorities, a woman president or supporting more of the same and getting the same results. Just a guy’s opinion…
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