Organizations and Conventions For Women's Rights

In 1975, the first United Nations World Congress on the Status of Women was launched. In August and September of 1995, the fourth such world conference on women, informally known as the "Beijing Conference" was held. In addition to sponsoring many workshops addressing specific issues or regions of the world, this last conference, themed "A Look At the World Through Women´s Eyes", developed a worldwide Platform for Action , an "agenda for women´s empowerment" to benefit all women everywhere. In 1979, the U.N. drafted the Convention On the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which is now ratified by most of the nations of the world. Clearly, women´s rights are of global concern.

In their article "Gender and Political Change", Julie Peteet and Barbara Harlow state that Middle Eastern women have been organizing for change "since the beginning of this century" (Peteet and Harlow, p. 4). Today, four of the 23 members of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Descrimination, which submits annual reports on the status of women worldwide to the U.N. General Assembly through ECOSOC, are from Middle Eastern countries, and most Middle Eastern states have ratified the CEDAW, including most recently, at the time this page was constructed, Lebanon, on April 16, 1997. Not surprisingly, as a result of the Islamic laws governing women in the Middle East, all but a very few states, those being Egypt, Israel, Tunisia, and Jordan, have ratified the convention without reservations. There exist a few multinational and "umbrella" organizations for women within the Middle East, such as, to address issues specific to Arab Women, the General Arab Women´s Federation, founded in 1944. Hovever, most women´s organizations in the Middle Eastern World are much smaller, purely national, and much more recently formed, generally in the 1980s. The Encyclopedia of Associations: International Organizations lists over 40 Middle Eastern organizations under the heading of "women", only a few of which claim more than 100 members or multinational standing. There presumably exist many more small underground or grassroots women´s organizations in the region. The 1995 Directory of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of Internatinal Affairs (PASSIA) lists a little over 100 Palestinian women´s organizations in Palestinian Israel and the Occupied Territories. Access to women´s organizations of the Middle East can be difficult for foreigners, as the issues they may be concerned with may require their actions to be somewhat secret, and written statements to be avoided. Where texts do exist, they may be difficult for foreigners to acquire, as internet access is limited. Texts may also be as yet unpublished or published in Arabic only.

Many authors on women´s issues in the Middle East cite a common assumption on the part of Westerners that feminist discourses of the Middle East either are or should be similar to those of Western women´s movements of the past or present. Activism towards women´s rights and liberties in the Middle East has often been accompanied, if not overshadowed, by movements concerned with colonialism, economic survival (Abdo, p. 31), education, poverty, and Middle Eastern peace. To Middle Eastern Feminists, these movements often cannot be separated from one another. A Middle Eastern woman activist might believe that liberation can be gained through a struggle for political goals not directly associated, in the eyes of a foreigner, with women´s issues, as was a common belief among Palestinian women involved in the intifada. According to Simona Sharoni in her article "Middle East Politics Through Feminist Lenses: Toward Theorizing International Relations from Women´s Struggles", says, "the complex (and usually concealed) relationships between gender, Middle East Politics, and international relations... could be explored and theorized through detailed studies of women´s struggles in the Middle East" (Sharoni, p. 6). Of the organizations not concealed, but found in the Encyclopedia of International Organizations, most are concerned with a wide range of issues; they are overwhelmingly not concerned with women´s sexual and marital rights, but with education, self-esteem, advancement in the workplace, communication among professional women, literacy, and women´s participation and role in society, and, especially in Israel, peace issues.

This is not to say that women´s organizations in the Middle East do not ever directly address the rights afforded or not afforded Arab women through religious law; the Arab Women´s Solidarity Association is a good example of one that does. States such as Israel, Turkey, and Egypt are in general the only ones that boast organizations offering women legal advice, support for battered or raped women, and representation or advocacy for women, but, as was said before, covert organizations in states that have few or no women´s organizations listed in the Encyclopedia of International Organizations, such as Iran, Lebanon and Algeria, undoubtedly do exist. Visible activism for the benefit of women, especially in the sexual realm, is still relatively new. For two years, from 1985 to 1987, a small women´s organization in Tunisia put out a magazine focused on issues of women´s sexuality and control over their own bodies (Peteet and Harlow, p. 6). 1991 saw the publishing of a book akin to the now familiar Our Bodies, Ourselves in Egypt. The future of women´s organizations and movements in the Middle East, and hence the future of women´s rights, is as yet unclear.

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