On October 10 it will be 100 years since Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, determined to win the battle for the vote. Just 15 years later, British women had the suffrage for which they had shouted and sung and starved and marched.
But there is one country left where women are still engaged in that struggle. Only in Kuwait are women specifically still denied the vote. Only there are women in the demeaning situation of living where there is at least partial democracy — a national assembly elected by popular vote — but the vote is solely male.
”This is unique,” says Fatima al-Abdali, a journalist and environmental engineer in Kuwait. ”Even in Bahrain, in Qatar, in Oman, women can vote. We have had a democracy for 40 years, but still women don’t have this right.” It seems all the more ironic because women in Kuwait are taking up directly appointed political posts, including that of ambassador and deputy secretary in the ministry of higher education.
Ever since Kuwait decided to start elections for the national assembly in 1962, women have been lobbying for their rights, and over the past decade the campaign has grown in urgency. Women in Kuwait are now no strangers to street protests. In a country of only two-million, the suffrage activists have managed to call more than 1 000 women out to demonstrations. They have also brought legal cases to the highest courts, suing the minister of the interior or the speaker of parliament for failing to register their votes.
”We invade the registration centres, and then we file cases because they don’t allow us in,” explains Zainab al-Harbi, a leader of the main organisation that campaigns for women’s suffrage, the Women’s Cultural and Social Society. All the cases so far have failed, but one is still pending in the constitutional court. Mock ballots have also been staged — the last during the elections two months ago — in which fake polling booths are set up so that hundreds of women can place votes for real candidates.
After the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, women thought that they would get the vote on the rise of patriotic feeling that came their way because of the admiration for the part that they played in the resistance to the Iraqi occupation. And indeed, the invasion did seem to help to change the popular feeling about women’s suffrage, just as the first world war is credited with having changed popular feeling about women’s suffrage in Britain.
But men’s goodwill towards women’s political enfranchisement, even for patriotic reasons, can never be taken for granted, and a bill to give women the vote in 1992 was defeated in parliament. ”After the invasion, everything seemed ready to change,” says Abdali. ”Our case was strong. Maybe we took it for granted. We thought we would get it automatically. But we were shocked. Then we thought it would be put right in 1996. And then there was another killing blow in 1999.”
The vote in 1999 was the closest yet — the suffrage bill was defeated by only two votes. Dr Ebtehal Ahmad, a lecturer in literature at Kuwait University, says: ”I cried like a baby when the proposal was thrown out the last time.”
Suffragettes in Britain found that, long after they felt they had won all the arguments, the vote was being used as a bargaining chip in the games of politics. This is exactly what is happening to Kuwaiti women. The government is headed by the Sabah family, but laws must be approved by the national assembly. The emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah, keeps promising support for a suffrage bill, but his ministers keep failing to push it through.
”If our government was really serious about women’s political rights, it would have done something. They are not serious,” activist Zainab al-Harbi says bitterly. But the national assembly is divided – 21 of the 50 members are identified by observers as Islamists, 14 as government supporters, three as liberals, and 12 as non-partisans. In such a finely balanced situation, the government is clearly reluctant to push a controversial measure. ”The government is in a weak position with the fundamentalists right now,” says Ahmad. ”They get political benefits from keeping them happy.”
Yet given the vibrancy and justice of their campaign, why don’t we hear more about the struggle of the women of Kuwait? Why aren’t they given more support by women from other countries? Many women in the west seem to believe that it isn’t a great idea to be too vociferous in support of women’s rights in Muslim countries, in case we should be seen to be interfering in a culture that we don’t understand.
But the women activists in Kuwait see their situation as something created not by their religion, but simply by the same bog-standard patriarchal chauvinism that has dogged women in all cultures and all times. ”When they say to us, it is not in Islam that women should have political rights, we say, what about Jordan, what about Turkey, what about Iran, what about Egypt? Aren’t the women there Muslim, and don’t they vote?” says Abdali.
Indeed, women got the vote in Jordan in 1974, and in Iran in 1963, Egypt in 1956 and Turkey 1930 — just two years after women did in the UK.
Abdali believes international pressure and support is essential for their cause. But Harbi is fiercely proud of the ability of Kuwaiti women alone to achieve their goals. ”We don’t need others to help. We don’t have a problem campaigning and lobbying for our rights,” she says. Still, even she believes that exposure of her government to international media interest and pressure from other governments would only help. ”If every time there was a meeting between a senior official here and a senior official from another country — yes, Britain and the United States, too, if they would keep raising it — then that would help.”
Although they are yet to get the vote, women in Kuwait are in other ways quite liberated. They have long enjoyed the right to education — more than 70% of university graduates are now women, and Abdali says proudly, ”It is impossible to find an illiterate Kuwaiti woman.” They have complete freedom of dress and movement, so they can walk down the streets in a veil or jeans, and they can drive and travel without men giving them permission or escorting them, which is certainly not the case in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. What is more, Kuwaiti women can work in any field, so that more than a third of the workforce in Kuwait is now female.
So the situation of Kuwaiti women, in its contradictory mixture of growing power and continued powerlessness, is not so different from other cultures. This idea that there is no fundamental separation between the feminist movements of different countries is dear to most of the Kuwaiti women I spoke to.
”Women can learn from each other all over the world,” says Dr Ahmad. ”There are some cultural differences, but the feminist movement is always at core very similar. Every country goes through bad patches with regard to women’s rights. Look at your own culture — there was a time when women were burned as witches.”
She believes that a far more effective dialogue would spring up if women listened more to one another directly, rather than being taken up by the images of women promoted by men. ”Here, we should lose the image that western women have no values and no morals, and western women need to get rid of the picture of the oppressed victim living in a tent.”
The words of such women, who are fighting an unfinished battle for their political rights, should remind us not only how lucky we are that British women fought so hard and for so long so many years ago, but also how our own feminist movement has still not achieved all the goals that women dream about. Feminists in Kuwait are quite definite that they do not just want to aim for a carbon copy of the situation of western women.
”In the west, you have political rights, but you do not necessarily have everything,” says Ahmad succinctly. ”For instance, I do not like how women in the west are viewed if they stay at home to take care of their families. They are underrated. The situation for such women here is better.”
This recognition that political rights are not the only thing that women need for full emancipation is something that also touches women in the west. Here, feminists are more and more conscious that the route to full equality does not lie just in joining existing establishments, but also in changing them. As it is, women are still too often pressed into imitating male behaviour both at work and at home, rather than trying to create a new kind of balance, and that condemns them to continued inequality.
As Fatima Abdali says: ”There is no society yet where women have all the power that men have. I go to Britain, I go to the United States, and I see that in every society women are always second. Men in every country control the culture. In every society, history was written by them and the future will be made by them.” But it is also true that some women have changed history, and that the future may belong to women like Abdali.
Women and votes: A brief history
New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote – in 1893.
Three countries deny both men and women a vote – Brunei, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In the US, native American women and men who lived on reservations were not granted citizenship, and thus the right to vote, until 1924, four years after other US women.
Puerto Rican women did not win suffrage until 1929, when it was granted only to ”literate women”. They won universal suffrage in 1935.
In Australia, white women won the vote in 1902. Aboriginal women, and men, had to wait until 1967, when they were granted full citizenship.
In South Africa, white women won the vote in 1931, Indian and ”coloured” women in 1984, and black women in 1994.
In Denmark, men and women were both given the vote in 1915.
France saw a gap of 98 years between male and female suffrage. Men got the vote in 1848 and women in 1944.
Swiss women were only allowed in voting booths in 1971.
Bahrain is the most recent country to give women the vote – in 2001.
Sources: The Atlas of Women, by Joni Seager; Inter-parliamentary union, www.ipu.org – Guardian Unlimited Â