Egypt Stands at a Crossroads for Women's Rights

The recent emergence of former TV presenter and democracy activist Buthaina Kemal as an outspoken female candidate for the Egyptian presidency is triggering discussion among international observers about the status of women in the nation’s political future.

According to Valerie M. Hudson, a World Politics Review contributor and political scientist at Brigham Young University in Utah, Kemal’s candidacy is a vital pronouncement that “women do not intend to be kicked to the side of the road in Egyptian politics.”

While her chances of winning may be minuscule, the very fact that Kemal is running represents “a push-back against a male political leadership in Egypt that would completely ignore women,” said Hudson. “It’s something that has to be done.”

The stature of women in Egyptian politics has suffered measurably since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak nine months ago. When Mubarak fell, so too did the country's system of quotas that, since the mid-1980s, had reserved roughly 12 percent of Egypt’s parliamentary seats for women, explained Hudson.

“The transitional government has kept such a quota for farmers and workers, but unceremoniously dropped it for women,” she said. “So I think that was the tip-off right there that things were not changing for the better for Egyptian women.”

While observers ponder an unfolding political landscape ahead of the first round of parliamentary elections later this month, Hudson noted the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose candidates will be running under the banner of the newly, and tactfully, named Justice and Freedom Party.

“The Muslim Brotherhood has said that it believes it is inappropriate for a woman to be the head of state in Egypt, so it has already laid down the gauntlet that it would like to see enshrined in law,” said Hudson, adding that while the Brotherhood will, itself, likely field several female candidates for parliament, “most are wives of party leaders.”

The obstacles facing women in Egypt, meanwhile, stand in stark contrast to what’s occurring in the country that launched the Arab Spring, Tunisia, where the once-banned Islamist party Hizb Ennahda was the major winner in elections last week for that nation’s pre-parliamentary Constituent Assembly.

While Ennahda is “still a bit of a wild card in terms of women’s rights,” Hudson asserted that women’s position in politics has advanced significantly in the aftermath of Tunisia’s own uprising.
 
Under rules put in place by the nation’s transitional Cabinet, parties participating in last week’s elections were required to field as many female as male candidates, she explained, adding that females also had to be threaded one-to-one on party lists, which means that if a party wins 10 seats, five go to women.

“This is historic,” said Hudson. “It has never happened before in an Arab country.”

The same can’t be said of Egypt, which, she said, “stands at a threshold of whether democracy for men also means preservation of women’s rights or the erosion of women’s rights.”

“I can predict, based on my research on this, that if it is the latter -- if it means the erosion of women’s rights -- then you will have increasing instability in Egypt,” said Hudson, “because the situation and status of women is a marker of the stability, peacefulness, prosperity and health of the nation in which they live.”

Valerie M. Hudson has written extensively on politics and gender for WPR. She is the author of the forthcoming book “Sex & World Peace.”

By Guy Taylor | 01 Nov 2011

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