In a national TV address Sunday, Saudi King Abdullah declared an end to the de facto ban on women’s suffrage. Beginning in 2015, women will be able to vote and run in local elections. This seemingly good news, heralded by the AP as “a major advancement for the rights of women,” overshadowed disturbing developments that [...]
On Sunday, 87-year-old King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced plans to allow women to vote, run for office in local elections and serve on the Shura Council, the 150-member king’s advisory board. However, the changes won’t take place until 2015, and some skeptics think the king will rescind the order by then. Regardless, the move [...]
Last week, the Ms. blog reported on the alleged rape of a Bangladeshi garment workers at a Classic Fashion garment factory in Jordan. Classic Fashion has roughly 5,000 employees–mostly guest-workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India who come to Jordan to earn more money than they could at home. The factory supplies garments to big-box [...]
This week, another Bangladeshi woman has come forward to allege rape by managers at Classic Fashion, a garment factory in Jordan that supplies U.S.-based corporations such as Wal-Mart, Target and Macy’s. In June, human rights NGO the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights (IGLHR) released an 82-page report with worker testimonials that describe repeated [...]
Yesterday, 14 U.S. Senators–all of them women–sent a joint letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asking him to end the ban on women driving in the kingdom. Arguing that the ban “stands in stark contrast with the commitments your government has made to promote the rights of Saudi women,” the letter reads: In June [...]
When a wave of protesters took to the streets in the Yemeni city of Taiz this week, a mass of black-clad women once again stood out in the crowd. To Westerners, their conservative dress might seem incongruous in a pro-democracy uprising, but these women represent the backbone of Yemen’s revolution: ordinary people galvanized by unbearable [...]
Millions of eyes were trained on Saudi Arabia this Friday, June 17. Would Saudi women be able to fulfill their online pledge to drive cars, in defiance of the kingdom’s demobilizing ban? As participant Solafa Kurdi told Ms.: It’s my right. There’s nothing mentioned in my religion that I’m not supposed to be able to [...]
In Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on Friday, four women participating in a pro-democracy demonstration were molested and beaten by government-sponsored protesters who swarmed the square. Those assaulted were a part of a 25-woman delegation from the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, the country’s leading women’s rights group, there to create a visible women’s presence in the [...]
Since 1979, women have not been allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. Manal Al-Sharif–who learned to drive in the U.S.–is fed up with the rule. So she posted a video on YouTube explaining why protesting women will start driving in Saudi Arabia beginning on June 17, and who the organizers of the “I Will Drive [...]
In October of last year, more than 4,000 women in black abayas topped with pink ponchos gathered together in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to form a giant ribbon in support of breast cancer research–the largest human awareness ribbon to date. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the country–nearly one-quarter of all cancers–so the campaign [...]
