[LINK] "The Middle East’s feminist revolution"

[rfmcdonald]

In the opinion section of today's Globe and Mail, Naomi Wolf made two plausible points about the role of women in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions and why they played those roles. Education and feminism destabilized the old order.

[W]omen were not serving only as support workers, the habitual role to which they are relegated in protest movements. Egyptian women also organized and reported the events. Bloggers such as Leil-Zahra Mortada took grave risks to keep the world informed daily of the scene in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.

The role of women in the great Middle East upheaval has been woefully under-analyzed. Women in Egypt didn’t just “join” the protests – they were a leading force behind the cultural evolution that made the protests inevitable. And what’s true for Egypt is true throughout the Arab world. When women change, everything changes, and women in the Muslim world are changing radically.

The greatest shift is educational. Two generations ago, only a small minority of the daughters of the elite received a university education. Today, women account for more than half of the students at Egyptian universities. They’re being trained to use power in ways their grandmothers could scarcely have imagined: publishing newspapers (as Sanaa el Seif did, in defiance of a government order to cease operating); campaigning for student leadership posts; fundraising for student organizations; and running meetings.

Indeed, a substantial minority of young women in Egypt and other Arab countries have now spent their formative years thinking critically in mixed-gender environments, and even publicly challenging male professors in the classroom. It’s far easier to tyrannize a population when half are poorly educated and trained to be submissive. But, as Westerners should know from their own historical experience, once you educate women, democratic agitation is likely to accompany the massive cultural shift that follows.

Social networking systems, she argues, with their much flatter hierarchies and lower costs to entry, let newcomers--like women--play important roles as coordinators.

The nature of social media, too, has helped turn women into protest leaders. Having taught leadership skills to women for more than a decade, I know how difficult it is to get them to speak out in a hierarchical organizational structure. Likewise, women tend to avoid the figurehead status that traditional protest has imposed on certain activists in the past – almost invariably a hotheaded young man with a megaphone.

In such contexts – with a stage, a spotlight and a spokesperson – women often shy away from leadership roles. But social media, through the very nature of the technology, have changed what leadership looks and feels like. Facebook mimics the way many women choose to experience social reality, with connections between people just as important as individual dominance or control, if not more so.

You can be a powerful leader on Facebook just by creating a really big “us.” Or you can stay the same size, conceptually, as everyone else on your page – you don’t have to assert your dominance or authority. The structure of Facebook’s interface creates what brick-and-mortar institutions, despite 30 years of feminist pressure, have failed to provide: a context in which women’s ability to forge a powerful “us” and engage in a leadership of service can advance the cause of freedom and justice worldwide.

Go, read.