Orthodox Jewish feminists may seem to outsiders to be a contradiction in terms. But as Cassandra Balchin discovers while talking with Israeli Orthodox Jewish feminist, Dr. Debbie Weissman, Jewish politics in Israel is anything but straightforward.
"The essential problem in relation to our predicament as women, but also with our world, is the architecture of human relations - a system of social organization that is based on hierarchy. This architecture is all pervasive from the family to the state and it holds across the world. We decided th
The murder of two men by a CIA agent in Pakistan raised issues of masculinist national sovereignty and honour, and exposed the uncomfortable privilege that religious laws based on power, rather than religion, extend to men, says Afiya Shehrbano Zia
"Egyptian women are lucky in one way. They have witnessed the predicament of Iranian women and seen how the Islamic state has hijacked the Iranian revolution, changed the laws and reversed women’s gains. My advice to Egyptian women is “do not give way to a government that would force you to choose
The debates triggered by a 14-fold increase in violent crimes against women in Turkey in the last seven years have pitted Islamic male scholars and journalists against Islamic women writers, reports Sertaç Sehlikoğlu
Despite the vibrancy of mobilization in Egypt after Mubarak, Hania Sholkamy’s account of the 8th of March demonstration in Tahrir square to mark International Women's day bears witness to the persistent resistance to women’s political participation
In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement had a badge that proclaimed: women who seek equality with men lack ambition. We don’t want to participate as equals in the violence, oppression and greed of patriarchal power, says Rebecca Johnson.
Women were visible and effective in the popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. Will this moment of opening yield empowering outcomes? Deniz Kandiyoti argues that the greatest peril lies in truncated or aborted transitions where women’s rights are offered up as an item of populist compromise
Secularism, as a concept, appears to be in danger from both the left and the right. Among feminists, it tends to be only some minority women scrambling for the soul of secularism. It is time for all feminists to muck in, says Rahila Gupta
"The goddess Sekhmet has risen once and will rise again so Hathour can flourish in peace and justice" - Zainab Magdy reports from Cairo as women gather for the Million Women March in Tahrir Square today
Global funding for HIV/Aids now goes to large international organisations. They need the grassroots organisations to tick their boxes of “community involvement”, but they are corporate entities, and the money for the daily advocacy work of positive women has all but dried up, says Alice Welbourn
The women party activists who applied for nominations to stand in next week's local elections in Sri Lanka found themselves blocked by a system of entrenched patron-client relationships. As one of them said, " for how long will the men decide where the wells should be, even though it is the women
