Is a flawed election better than no vote at all?

Remember this post and also this one relating to the legislation passed in Afghanistan in April which obliged Shia women to sexually submit to their husbands once every four days and to obtain her husband's permission before leaving the house? Remember the Shia women who had rocks and sticks thrown at them, were called "un-Islamic dogs" and received death threats for daring to go out on the streets and demonstrate against this barbaric legislation that many described as being "worse than the Taliban"?

I thought I would take this opportunity to expand on the post by CaptainJako who writes for a very good blog "Frank Owen's Paintbrush" which has kept me both informed and entertained during my 6 months out of the UK.

Back in April we were almost willing to give President Hamid Karzai the benefit of the doubt when he claimed not to have fully read the legislation before signing it and he confirmed that it would be reviewed and amended prior to elections. It seemed that the international pressure from world leaders, including Gordon Brown and President Obama, prevailed over the demands of the Shia clerics claiming to have influence over the voting intentions of the Shia community in Afghanistan.

The amended legislation was quietly signed into law earlier this month. But President Karzai didn't really live up to his promise: the amended legislation is just as abhorrent and allows men to withhold food and maintenance from their wives if they do not sexually submit to them. Back in April, the Guardian reported that Gordon Brown urged President Karzai "You cannot have British troops fighting, and in some cases dying, to save a democracy where that democracy is infringing human rights."

But where is the international condemnation this time?

The elections will take place this Thursday against a background of alleged corruption, mounting violence across the country and of course, the unfortunate news that the British death toll in Afghanistan passed 200 earlier this week. It would appear that the international community does not want to speak out on behalf of Shia women this time around, for fear that it might upset the "smooth" running of the election.

I have three problems with this:

1. It doesn't look as if the election is going to run very smoothly anyway, with the BBC reporting today that voting cards are being offered for sale and that thousands of dollars are being offered in bribes to buy votes;
   
2. If there's any time to raise concerns that a country's Constitution has been violated and that international human rights have been breached, it's during an election campaign when the country is at its most politically engaged; and
   
3. The women who fall victim to the new legislation may not even be able to vote in the elections. Because most polling stations will be operated by men, it is unlikely that women will feel comfortable turning up to vote - even if their husbands and fathers permit them to do so. Unfortunately, there are very few women-only polling stations and very few policewomen to carry out the necessary body searches upon. It's unclear just how many women would need to be recruited in order to have enough women-only polling stations, but some news outlets are reporting as many as 42,000.
   

So is a flawed election better than no election at all? With only 2 days until the election and with Ramadan starting very soon thereafter, let's just hope that Gordon puts the pressure back on in October and that the brave Afghan women do not give up hope and do not give up the fight for their freedom.

What Labour women should know about feminism

A friend of mine, a couple of years ago, when asked what she would like for Christmas, requested some books on feminism. It was time, she decided, to get up to speed with what feminism meant in today’s society. The present giver looked for such books and could find none, just works from the seventies and eighties.

If you are interested in feminist and cultural history, these are great. But if you want a look at feminism in the noughties, they are not much help. For although we have much to thank previous generations of feminists for – our great grandmothers secured the vote, our grandmothers made it normal to go out to work, our mothers could have the contraceptive pill, have an abortion if they needed one and own property without a male signatory – feminism has moved on somewhat. We need books that help us understand our place in today’s world, where women are free to behave badly, but are judged more harshly than men for doing so, where ‘having it all’ when it comes to work and the family, is possible, but at a price, and where dungarees are out and yummy mummies are in.

So I started thinking about what feminism means to me and my friends. Some of us, for example, have married, and some have not. Of the married ones some have changed our names upon marriage and some have not. I am a Ms, others kept Miss for as long as possible and others use Mrs with pride. We all work, some have children. We are financially independent. Some of us share our money with our partner, others don’t. Some of us wear high heels, some of us refuse to. The same goes for short skirts and strappy tops. Some of us do all the washing and cleaning in the household. Others of us share it. Some of us pay someone else to do it. But the more I thought about this the more I realised how much we had in common. After all, we all want to be treated equally, to be able to make our own decisions about life, to be able to feel safe walking down the street, to enjoy our careers and not to be judged by our marital status. And I realised that whatever decisions we make in our own lives, as long as we make them freely then we are all feminists, whether we use that word or not.

And in fact there are good books for my generation out there. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs is excellent. So are Manifesta by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards and Full Frontal Feminism by Jessica Valenti. But these are all by Americans. I wanted to do the same from a British perspective.

The result is my book, published this month, The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism. It looks at areas that occur in our everyday lives and ponders upon what this means from a feminist perspective – from who washes the underwear to what jobs you apply for, from whether vibrators should be shaped like a penis to why we need more public toilets.

The issue of feminism is hugely political, but it is not necessarily party political. My Labour politics inform my thinking, and therefore the book, at all times. And my definition of feminism is largely focussed on the concept of choice, a key New Labour concept (and of course a key Thatcher one, though I reject her use of it). But one of the problems with Labour is that it gets bogged down in thinking about feminism as being just about childcare, working hours, health and carers, and in thinking about feminism in terms of the dungarees and placard that typified British feminism thirty years ago. But as all noughtie girls know, women’s live are about far more than that. Those issues are important, of course, but we also care about defence, about transport, about farming and about foreign affairs. And we no longer conform to the dungaree stereotype.

I’m hoping my book helps bring together feminists from across the political spectrum. But above all I am hoping that Labour women, and men, read it, and realise that in feminism, like in Labour politics, although there are disagreements and factions, we ultimately have more in common than we have apart, and that by accepting this we form some common goals to work towards.

La Burqa

In 2004, the government made school uniform, truly "uniform" when it prohibited the wearing of any religious symbols (including headscarves, turbans and skullcaps) in all state schools. A large number of students who defied the ban and continued to wear such items were subsequently expelled and forced to pay for private tuition instead. The law excluded and isolated the very people that it intended to liberate. I think we are about to experience a severe case of deja vu.

Just what France needs: a commission to "study the extent of burkha-wearing." President Sarkozy isn't going to wait around for the results though, announcing yesterday that "burkhas are not welcome here."

This move by Sarkozy is not entirely surprising, considering the decision of the Conseil d'Etat last year to deny French citizenship to a Moroccan woman on the grounds that she insisted on wearing a burkha. Whilst praising the decision, minister Fadela Amara described the burkha as a "prison." Yesterday, Mr Sarkozy went further to describe such women as "prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity" -- an insult to the fashionistas methinks, lots of women spend absolute fortunes on their "netting."

When I first moved to the Middle East, I was shocked when I first saw women wearing a niqab with an eye veil so that the entire face is covered, even the eyes. It was difficult for me to imagine that there was a human being underneath the black chiffon. It was certainly very strange to be browsing through the clothes in TopShop alongside women in burkhas.

After 4 months living here, the burkha now seems very normal to me and I find it very beautiful. I met with one of our client's key business representatives a few weeks ago -- she is a woman and of course, she wears a burkha.

My message to Mr Sarkozy: you cannot change someone else's culture for them and you certainly cannot change it overnight. By banning the burkha, you may well be taking away the one thing that actually liberates Muslim women in France. Without the burkha, some women may not leave their homes at all.