From Iraq to Afghanistan to the US, basic freedoms for women are being eroded as governments start rolling back existing laws.
Just a few months ago a ban on Afghan women speaking in public was the latest measure introduced by the Taliban, who took back control of the country in 2021. From August the ban included singing, reading aloud, reciting poetry and even laughing outside their homes.
The Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, which implements one of the most radical interpretations of Islamic law, enforces these rules. They are part of a broader set of “vice and virtue” laws that severely restrict women’s rights and freedoms. Women are even banned from reading the Quran out loud to other women in public.
In the past three years in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken away many basic rights from women who live there, so that there’s very little that they are allowed to do.
From 2021, the Taliban started introducing restrictions on girls […]
Misogyny is very much on the rise in America as well, witness the end of abortion rights, and of course the election of prime time misogynists such as Donald Trump.
There is no polite way to put it: the status of women, for a very long time, endorsed by politics and religion and enforced in horrific ways, from witch burning to rape culture……. the status of women has been slavery. It’s barely 100 years since it’s occurred to our democratic government to allow women to vote, and barely 150 years since women could own property or manage their own money. Black men were given the vote considerably before the suffragettes demanded it for half the human race as well.
Women have been rising and coming into power, demanding equality instead of second class status, and there is a big backlash. Everywhere. Those of us who have been working as feminists for so many years see it very clearly.