Current Analysis Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Peace Prize Highlights Tension in Iran The decision to award the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi, the intrepid Iranian human rights lawyer and former judge, took everyone by surprise—not least Ebadi herself. On the morning of October 10, when the award was announced, the Nobel winner was about to leave Paris, where she Ziba Mir-Hosseini • 9 min read
MER Article Afghan Women and Girls Still Held Hostage When asked what she desired most for Afghanistan’s future, “Nadia,” a Kabul university student, didn’t hesitate. “First, we wish the girls who live in the provinces would have schools -- not just grades one through five at most. Second, we wish that they would collect all the guns Zama Coursen-Neff • 11 min read
MER Article Afghan Women When we are hungry, nobody listens, but when we are fighting, they send us loads of firearms and artillery. Why? -- Zubaida (April 1998) Saba Gul Khattak • 11 min read
MER Article Women and the Palestinian Left Palestinian women played a major role in the intifada of 1987-93, but have not, so far, in the current uprising. In January 2001, the Jerusalem-based magazine Between the Lines asked Eileen Kuttab, director of the Women’s Studies Institute at Birzeit University in the West Bank, to talk about the wi Chris Toensing • 3 min read
MER Article Downveiling Veiling, particularly youth veiling, has captured the rapt attention of the Western media and scholarly community. Whether in France, Iran, Turkey or Egypt, veiling -- the adoption by women of Islamic dress (al-zayy al-islami) -- is often represented in highly ideological terms. Veiling has been explained as an assertion of Linda Herrera • 9 min read
MER Article The Rise and Fall of Fa'ezeh Hashemi Both politics and women’s political activities are radically different under the Islamic Republic of Iran from what they were before the 1979 Revolution. But one fundamental fact has not changed: Politics is still the domain of men, and women who enter the field tend to be related -- either by blood Ziba Mir-Hosseini • 11 min read
Current Analysis Caught in the Middle Women will be a key constituency in Iran's upcoming May presidential election, which is widely regarded as a referendum on the "reform" movement symbolized by President Mohammad Khatami. Though women voters can be found across the Iranian political spectrum, one group—women journalists—will continue to Persheng Vaziri • 5 min read
Current Analysis Afghan Girls' Struggle for Schooling When the first snows started to melt in March, schoolchildren in towns and villages across Afghanistan put on fresh uniforms, strapped satchels across their backs and headed off for a new semester. Despite disruptions in education from more than twenty years of fighting and civil war, education remains a high Jeanette O'Malley • 5 min read
MER Article Water and Women As the year 2000 approaches, humanity has passed an important milestone, one that has nothing to do with the new Millennium, but which may have many more consequences than the Y2K bug. On October 12, the world’s population officially passed six billion. While pundits debated whether this was cause f Sally Ethelston • 14 min read
MER Article Turkish Women and the Welfare Party After the victory of the Welfare Party in the municipal elections of March 1994, the newly-elected mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thanked the disciplined and devoted Islamist women who had campaigned door-to-door until election day. Islamist women also gave the same determined performance Nukte Devrim-Bouvard • 6 min read
MER Article Francophonie and Femininity Mary Jean Green, Karen Gould, Micheline Rice-Maximin et al, eds., Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pr Nada Elia • 6 min read
MER Article Migrant Women in Waged Domestic Work in Turkey “If we were to continuously work until 5 o’clock as hard as the employer wants, we would not be able to get to work the next day. No human being can work as much as that.” -- Domestic Worker Hayat Kabasakal, Işik Urla Zeytinoğlu, Ömür Tımurcanday Özmen, Alev Ergenç Katrınlı • 4 min read
