With the participation of delegations from 26 countries, the Women’s Conference concluded with the answer of the question How Can Women Play a more  Significant Role in Yemen? [Archives:1999/38/Reportage]

By: Mohammed Hatem Al-Qadhi
Managing Editor, Yemen Times
The International Conference on Challenges of Women’s Studies in the 12st century held during the period 12-14 September in Sanaa was a stronghold lnadmark. It tried to gather people from different countries to share views and experiences in the field of women’s studies and the challenges faced by them. The conference is also good for the Yemeni women to exchange ideas with more experienced people in the field of women studies. To shed more light on the importance of this conference and how it can be helpful for the Yemeni women, Yemen Times coducted the following interviews with different participants from diffent countries.
Here is what they said.
Elmazabinader, a professor, writer and performer from California, United States, said: “This conference has two points of importance for me; one of them is that I am very interested in the development of women studies in the Arab countries because they need so much work to evolve so that they can help women throughout the region. Secondly, the importance for me personally as having connection with the people of Yemen through a topic which is important to us.
I am basically presenting and talking about the way women tell stories to tell the history of the family and the country and I do that by presenting my home stories of my family and by talking how women can present stories about their families and countries in their culture.
I think we will be helpful by showing women if they have enough shared experiences with one another. Not only in the same culture and country but across countries and across the world. That even if there are different problems in terms of economic or political power. These are similar concerns about the family and how to make advancement in education.
I think the Yemeni women are very ambitious women who want to see themselves developed. One of the ways that they do is that by sharing and exchanging views with women from the rest of the world and by making connections with other women. The thing that impressed me most here is the involving of men in this conference. In the USA if you had a similar conference, there will be very few men. The support of men to women is very important because it helps them feel strength in their concerns.
The position of women varies in Arabian areas from that in villages. There are some women who have economic power and education, consequently they are in better conditions than women who do not have education and economic power. I believe that women are not in a tradition of speaking up or taking a voice especially here in Yemen. However, because of their ambition and desire they will do something.
In order to develop the Yemeni women, I think first of all women have to be healthy and they need to be safe. That is because the issues of health and safety have to be addressed first. Then women have to be educated and given some kind of economic stability. In that way, they can speak themselves up, have their own literacy, express themselves and take care of themselves when the situation becomes difficult for their families to survive.
Finally, I love being here. This is my second trip to Yemen. It is still my favorite country in the world and I am so excited to see the Yemeni people have great energy to see themselves grow and develop.”
Dr. Annalies Moores, social and specialist from Tilpury University, Netherlands, said the following: “I am here to participate in assertion about law and that is because I will do a paper to show the impact of women studies on the way how in the west studies are done about family law. So I will make a comparison between how before women’s studies came to being people wrote about family law and how it changed after that. What I mean is that the old oreintalists used to emphasize very much the classical family law. There was a great emphasis on the negative situation of women, now new studies influenced by women’s studies and theories put more emphasis on the way they look on what women themselves are able to do with respect to family law. So it is not simply a question of being negative but also looking at the opportunities and possibilities if they are available to women, like for instance the possibilities they have for getting their own property by means of dowery or that of inheritance right, etc. So the elements that are positive are much more highlighted nowadays. That is a strong difference from women studies because in women studies you do not only look at women as how they are victims but you look at how they are active. Another difference is that in the old oriental studies women are seen as one group, however, in the new studies they are recognized that there are many differences between women according to classes.
I think this conference is very important to Yemeni women not simply to talk about the problems Yemeni women are facing, which are very real, but also to focus on the activities women employ both in organizations and in the individual level as well. For example, how a woman tries to negotiate her relations with her husband based on the fact that she has access to her dowry. Also, to look at points of strengths from the Yemeni culture. There are positive points, such as, the strong segregation in Yemen between women and men, which can give women certain strength that they can use. So it is not that women are excluded from the public world. But you can also see in which ways women managed to be active in the public world. Secondly, what source of strengths these strong women’s ties proved.”
Tineke M. Willemsen, a professor of Women studies, said “the focus of my paper is a study over many countries in Europe on the divisions of work and that of house tasks between men and women. More women are going to participate in the labor force working, but at the same time they have to do the tasks at home. However, there are differences in this situation among countries. So we try to find out using theoretical model what exactly influences and “who does what?”.
To put it simply, I can say that in order to understand how men and women live we have to look at the cultural level as a whole in a certain country. Moreover, to look at individuals to see what opinions, attitudes, feelings are about women and men should do. Because it is not only, for example, an economic decision to go to work for a woman, for it has also to do with whether a marriageable woman should do this or not. We are trying in our project to combine both levels of research on the level of culture, nation as a whole and on the level of the individual, and to combine this into a model to explain why the division does not work. In the end of my paper, I propagate that it would be good if we could do such kind of researches in Yemen and in the Middle East as whole to compare the different countries in this respect, to see the differences though there are a lot of similarities in terms of culture, religion and language. On the other hand, there is a very big difference between the situation of women in Yemen and women in Saudi Arabia, Gulf countries in general. It would be interesting to find out what the cultural factors are and what the opinions of men and women are that make the situation different.
There are many experts from different countries who show that women can do researches, studies and be successful. There are also a number of scholars about development projects, how you can support women in their struggle. If this got published and spread then I think it will be very good. The Yemeni women could use such a gathering to get the best of it.”
Dr. Reina lewis, from the University of East London, in the United Kingdom, said the following: “I am here to give a paper at the conference. I have been working on Turkish women writers from the early of the twentieth century. They are writing in English for the European and North American English. They are writing about the Middle East and female life. What they are doing specifically is challenging westerns about the life of women studies.
The challenges of women in the Middle East based upon many things; on work, education and the ability to take advantage of educational opportunities that may be available chosen. We need to assist their right within the family to have access to the health care quality for themselves and their families, and to be able to frame the aspirations for themselves as individuals and members of the communities. They need to be supported by the national and international structures and local organizations.
I think this conference is very important as regional and international. There are scholars and activists who are working in related field to get together to learn each other’s experiences and get work from each other. I really impressed by the work they do and the existing links they have with other centers of women studies in the Arab as well as the international World. I also admire very much their ability to formalize these links. I also believe that the academic work of people’s concern for women studies and the issues of development are always political and personal, so I do not see these two things as separate. For example, my work in London University, concerned with literary studies, is not specifically in politics or health studies or women studies. Looking to the voices of the autumn in the Middle East is a very important way of attending to the voices who are suppressed or silent. I think that it is very important for students of all religious denomination to understand that women have voices to speak about themselves, to find a critical framework and to make studies and to think of them as created people.”
Eqball Barakah, Editor-in-Chief of “Hawa” Magazine in Egypt said the following: “I graduated from the Department of English in Alexandria University and from the Arabic Department in Cairo University. The focus of my paper is women. I am very much interested in women’s status and problems. I have written short stories, novels, scripts for movie and TV. All I can do is that I am trying to express my own views through these forms of writings.
I do not have any paper because I am only going to talk about the image of women in the Arabic women’s magazines.
I think that the most dangerous challenges is illiteracy because we are reading and we are not sure that 80% of women are receiving what we are writing because they can not read. This is a real problem. Usually, we are writing to each other, to the highly educated who do not need to be informed. So, I think it is the role of the media , TV and the radio to help in this problem.
This conference is very important because studies are a major item now. We have to think very deeply about them, they are dangerous at the same time because in some cases we have foreigners who are coming to our countries under the label of making studies and you do not know what they are doing in such conferences. So, we have to be very careful about this because some times they go back with wrong ideas and images. They assert themselves that women in these countries are treated very harshly in the Arab Society. The sexuality of women is a very important thing, and all are usually interested on. When it comes to our universities in most cases studies can not be read by normal people who are graduated from schools because they are not ready or are not used to reading highly academic studies. So, what I am doing in “Hawa” is something like a study in a very simple language to be read by middle class women and families. For example, in the last few weeks I wrote about sexual Arabic writers made by jurists. I have been reading different books and simplified them. I did that to criticize and analyze the image of women in these books, such as “Tohfat Alaroos wa Motat Alnufoos”, which is a very old book. The image of woman in that book is completely sexual, nothing but sex. They do not think of her as a human being. Furthermore, they do not care about her own feelings. It was written as I said by a man to men, and it has nothing to do with women. They look at here as a doll and as some goods. They are only concerned about how to buy the best one in order to enjoy themselves be happy .
I have written fifteen books through which I made all my ideas clear. The last one is a political criticism which used to be published in weekly articles in “Roz Elyosef” Magazine, in which I was criticizing the officials in the government. It was funny. I collected all these articles in a book titled “Fadfadahand” which I am really very proud of.”
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