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THE STATUS
OF WOMEN
IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD Volume
69 No.
3 (Fall 2002)
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Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
| The position of women in the United States, and in many other
places
in the West, has improved dramatically in the last 50 years, so that
there
are fewer and fewer limits on what we can do and how we can live.
However,
there are many other parts of the world where this is not the case. In
some of these places, not only has the position of women not improved,
it has significantly deteriorated. Thanks to the tireless work of
women’s
groups worldwide, a number of the most flagrant violations of women’s
civil
and human rights now make the front pages of our newspapers— grim
publicity
that may prevent the worst from happening. A recent instance of this is
the case in Nigeria of Safiya Hussaini, who was accused of adultery and
sentenced to death by stoning. In March 2002, her sentence was
overturned
on a technicality, and there is little doubt that the reversal was a
consequence
of the world watching and caring about what was happening. But as this
issue goes to press, the fate of another Nigerian woman, Amina Lawal,
similarly
accused and sentenced, still hangs in the balance.
This case too is drawing international attention, including an appeal on Lawal’s behalf from Mexican President Vicente Fox and possible cancellation of the Miss World contest that is scheduled to held in Lagos this November. This issue of Social Research is devoted to essays on the position of women in developing countries. It is by no means comprehensive, nor could it be, given our space limitations. In my invitation to authors, I asked that they try to describe the current conditions of women’s lives in particular countries and regions and to comment n the role, if any, played by globalization, geopolitics, war, and, of course, history. As a result, the papers have a different character than those that usually appear in these pages, reading more like reports than reflections on complex ideas. Each article informs the reader about the ways women live in a particular place at this particular time, and how and why their situations may be changing. Together, these papers paint a picture of a continuing struggle abetted by the proliferating transnational groups linking women to each other and increasing the likelihood of change. While “feminism” in one location differs from what it is in another, universal threads do emerge in this picture, one of which is the complicated interplay between the global and the local. I would like to express my gratitude to Mahnaz Afkhami,
president of
Women’s Learning Partnership, who connected me to many of the women
writing
in this issue and who has been a continuing source of advice. Because
of
the pressure of her own schedule she found it impossible to write a
paper
for the issue, but instead organized and chaired the interesting and
important
discussion on human security that initiates the issue.
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Table of Contents
Notes on
Contributors
(at time of publication)
Mahnaz Afkhami is Founder and President of Women’s Learning Partnership, Executive Director of the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and former Minister of State for Women’s Affairs in Iran. Her numerous publications, among them Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation and Leading to Choices: A Leadership Training Handbook for Women, have been translated and distributed internationally.
Malathi de Alwis is Senior Research Fellow at the International Center for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, Sri Lanka. A founder of the Women’s Coalition for Peace in Sri Lanka, she is coeditor of Embodied Violence: Communalizing Women’s Sexuality in South Asia (with Jayawardena, 1996).
Shireen Hassim is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Politikon, for which she guest-edited a special volume on gender in 1998. She is coeditor of No Shortcuts to Power: Women, Politics and Policymaking in Africa, (with Goetz, forthcoming in 2003).
Mala Htun is Assistant Professor in the political science department at New School University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is the author of Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies, forthcoming in 2003 from Cambridge University Press.
Pinar Ilkkaracan is cofounder of several NGOs, including Women for Women’s Human Rights (WWHR) and New Ways. She is the author of several articles on violence against women, women in Muslim societies, women in Turkey, sex-workers, and women and sexuality. She is the editor of Women and Sexuality in Muslim Societies (2000) and The Myth of a Warm Home: Violence in the Family (in Turkish, 1996).
Kumi Naidoo, Secretary General and CEO of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, has led numerous education and social justice initiatives around the world. The founding director of the South African NGO Coalition, he has worked extensively in adult education and social and economic justice in South Africa, and has published several articles on NGOs, civil society, and youth and resistance politics in South Africa.
Charmaine Peireira is a writer, editor, activist, and researcher in Abuja, Nigeria. Her work on gender and women has been published in numerous journals and reports.
Jacqueline Pitanguy, a sociologist and political scientist, is Founder and Director of CEPIA (Citizenship, Studies, Information, and Action) in Brazil. Author of numerous articles and coauthor of several books, she is a Professor at the Pontificia Universidade Católica de Rio de Janeiro and a former cabinet member and President of the National Council for Women’s Rights.
Aruna Rao is a scholar and practitioner specializing in gender and institutional change whose most recent publication is Gender At Work: Organizational Change for Equality (1999). She is President of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) and coordinator of Gender At Work, a global initiative to establish a knowledge and action network for institutional change for gender equality.
Naomi Sakr lectures on the political economy of communication and communication policy and development at the University of Westminster, U.K. She is the author of Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East (2001) and a report on “Women’s Rights and the Arab Media” (2000).
Nayereh Tohidi is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at California State University, Northridge. She has written extensively on women and gender, democratization, modernization, and Islamism (fundamentalism) in the greater Middle East, especially Iran and post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Her recent publications include Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity within Unity (1998).
Meredeth Turshen is a Professor in the E. J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Her most recent edited collection is The Aftermath: Women in Postconflict Transformation (2002). She is Co-chair of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.
