From France to Kenya to India and Malawi, women are feeling more empowered to make their voices heard—and to demand gender equality. Happy InternationalWomensDay!
and Iraq, legislative quotas have guaranteed a significant female presence in parliament. Since 2003, Rwanda has consistently had the highest female representation, proportionally, of parliamentarians anywhere in the world. In Malawi and other African countries that don’t have the legislative mandates to help women rise, change is being fomented on the ground, through female chiefs who are empowering women and girls.
“There isn’t one type of woman in the Middle East,” says Lebanese actress and director Nadine Labaki, who made Academy Awards history last year by becoming the first female Arab filmmaker nominated for an Oscar, forWOMEN: The National Geographic Image Collection reflects women’s lives, with stunning photographs, interviews with luminaries, and tales from famed female photographers. It’s available October 22 where books are sold and at shopng.com/books.
The idea of progress on women’s rights is usually less about superficial markers like what a woman wears than about her ability to choose what to wear, and to control and make choices about other aspects of her life. Banda was Malawi’s minister of gender, child welfare, and community services and minister of foreign affairs before being elected vice president in 2009. She became president after the sudden death of her male predecessor and served from 2012 to 2014.
Malawi’s mostly rural-based population is deeply conservative, Banda says, and while some communities practice matrilineal succession or have women participate in the selection of a male chief, “the chiefs in this country, three-quarters of them are men, and they are chauvinistic,” she says, spitting out the word. “They are traditionally patriarchal like you’ve never seen! Eighty-five percent of our people are grassroots based, and so they are under those chiefs.
She has faced resistance, even death threats, from the subchiefs and village heads under her and from other chiefs equal to her in seniority. Her family cautions her, fearing for her safety. Other senior male chiefs, she says, told her that “this culture was left to us to continue to do this; who are you to change it?” As she puts it, “I said, ‘If you don’t want to do this in your area, it’s up to you, but in my area I don’t want this to continue, whether you like it or not.
In the 15 years since she became chief, she has annulled 2,060 child marriages, but she says that despite the laws of the state and her own people’s bylaws prohibiting the practice, it continues. “Yesterday,” she says, when asked about the last time she saved a girl from an early marriage. “And the day before that there was another issue around child marriage, so it’s still happening.”that is also in the Arab world and is home to about 11.
“If it weren’t for the revolution, the reforms may have happened but much slower,” she says. “They were catalyzed by the revolution and the fear of women that they would lose their place and rights.” Hamida and other rights activists are now pushing to change long-held cultural traditions rooted in religion around issues of inheritance. Tunisia’s inheritance law dictates that women inherit half of what men do, a custom that is widely adhered to across the Arab world, and challenging it means working against a religious establishment that bases the law on the interpretation of Islamic texts.
Now she and her veiled friends want to be heard. She believes that equality in inheritance contradicts sharia, or Islamic law, and is a “side issue” pushed by “bourgeois” women who don’t represent her. Islamism, like any other political ideology, is not monolithic, and even among supporters of a party such as Ennahdha there are a spectrum of views. Meherzia Labidi is an Ennahdha parliamentarian and former deputy speaker of the assembly.