During the Great War, the hardworking women of Britain toiled in the factories and fields of England, replacing the men who had been called up to fight. Through their diligence, they proved to the government that women could serve their country, and consequently women gained greater freedoms and independence, starting with the right to vote. So the usual story goes. We are presented with this Cinderella story in schools and newspapers, but was it actually true? Is it not usually the case that revolutions or moments of great change usher in more conservative periods afterwards?
In class last week we discussed how the concept of femininity during the war altered very little. In fact in reinforced all the uber-feminine stereotypes: lithe, blonde, beautiful women as caring nurses, and matronly ladies as mothers, feeding the nations soldiers. The role of wife and mother became glorified. Although the number of women in paid employment increased from 4.93 million to 6.19 million (De Groot), the vast majority of new workers were actually teenagers, expected to enter employment shortly. In fact, there was a real fear of women’s roles changing. After the war, women who stayed in work were seen as taking men’s jobs. They were told to go home: "The idea that because the State called for women to help the nation, the State must continue to employ them is too absurd for sensible women to entertain." (The Daily Graphic) Britain was, in many ways, actually more socially conservative than before the war, and more often than not the view of a woman’s role had not changed. An article in the Times on 2nd December 1918, summed up how little views of women had changed: "Girls [leave] school knowing all about William the Conqueror in 1066, but very little about the method of preparing a first-class steak and kidney pudding."
This really resonated with me due to some reports I had been reading about the recent Middle Eastern revolutions, about women being told to go home after helping with the protests. We in the west are so quick to be supportive of people trying to gain their own freedom, and rightly so. But the idea that these ‘rebels’ are all westernized, believe in human rights, the rule of law, and democracy: this is not necessarily true.
Take Egypt, one of the more sophisticated countries that has undergone a recent uprising. It was primarily a revolution of the unemployed but reasonably educated middle class, (and in a real sign of the times, a Google employee became a hero after creating a Facebook page that riled against the murder by the secret police, of a businessman who had protested).
Vanity Fair had sexy spread on the young Egyptians who had supposedly overnight transformed their nation:
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| Vanity Fair Caption: PICTURE: Freedom Fighter
WAEL GHONIM, 30, ON THE ROOF OF HIS HOME, IN GIZA.
The uprising started off leaderless. But in the whirling days of winter, it swiftly anointed a figurehead: Google executive Wael Ghonim. Back in June, the father of two had created a defiant Facebook page, “We Are All Khaled Said” (see slide 4), after seeing images of an Alexandria businessman’s disfigured corpse—the result of a vicious assault by Egyptian authorities, part of a regime that for years had used blunt force to silence critics. Ghonim’s ammunition for his campaign against state-security abuses: a stream of photos, videos, news—and a summons to his nearly 400,000 Facebook followers to attend a Cairo protest on January 25, in what amounted to a pre-announced revolt. Two days later, Ghonim was arrested and held for 12 days, at times blindfolded, handcuffed, and interrogated. Upon his release, he was hailed as the online hero of the movement. He went on to warn autocrats and dictators in neighboring nations in a 60 Minutes interview: “You should freak out. You seriously should freak out.” Ghonim insists that a single tweet he posted in February best summed up the cause: “Revolution 2.0: No one was a hero because everyone was a hero.” |
The women presented are young, hip, good-looking and educated:
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Gigi Ibrahim, 24, on a rooftop overlooking tahrir square, in cairo.
A self-proclaimed citizen journalist, Ibrahim rejects the commonly held belief that participation and reporting should be at odds. “Citizen journalism is activism,” insists Ibrahim, who spent much of her adolescence in Anaheim, California, and studied political science at the American University in Cairo. She is in some ways typical of her generation—”Twitter is huge for me; I get most of my news on Twitter”—and yet is also an extraordinary exemplar of a new order of political operative and advocate. Through her tweets and Facebook posts, she has sought to evoke, in real time, the experience of the protests. “These are our weapons,” she says, brandishing her smartphone. |
For some reason this Vanity Fair piece reminded me of that “Victory” speech by George Bush about Iraq in 2003, 'mission complete': hopeful, arrogant, assumptive. Think I’m a doom-monger? Here are some of the stories that have surfaced in a post- Mubarak Egypt:
8 March 2011:
Egyptian women's protest for equal rights turns violent:
April 7 2011:
Egypt’s Revolution is Leaving Women Behind
March 2011:
At women's march in Egypt, men prove women's point by scolding, shoving, beating, groping them, and telling them to "go home where they belong"
As with the First World War, it seems that in Egypt the men were happy to let the women help out when it was needed – protesting in Tahrir square replacing working in factories – but after the job was done, their presence in a public capacity was no longer desired. Women were excluded from the official body that formulated the amendments to the constitution that were approved on March 19, 2011. Human Rights Watch has expressed serious concern about the place of women in Egyptian society.
Who was it who said that history was just the same thing happening over and over again?
I am reminded of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, where a woman history teacher remarks:
“History is women following behind with a bucket”
Except of course, they get no say in the mess they have to clean up. That used to be the case in the West, as World War 1 demonstrates. It still is the case in certain parts of the world, particularly the Middle East.
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