International Women's Day in Cairo
Ursula LindseyI have an account of what happened with the women's protest in Tahrir today up at The Daily Beast.
Protesters were attacked and driven out of the square, accused of being “foreigners” (quite a few foreign women and journalists were present), and had their flyers and posters torn up.
There was tension from the beginning, with throngs of male hecklers outnumbering the hundreds of female protesters.
“A man tried to rule us and failed—will we let a woman?” an middle-aged man yelled at the crowd of Egyptian women holding banners in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The men around him burst out laughing.
Egyptian women had called for a demonstration demanding that their demands and rights be taken into greater consideration by the military currently running the country.
People's impressions of the protest varied a lot, in terms of atmosphere. I left right before things turned ugly, and didn't sense they would. There were lots of obnoxious hecklers, but I actually witnessed quite a few substantive and civil arguments (no one was aggressive to me). I actually thought that depressing as many of the men's point of view was, it was at least a good thing that people were arguing these issues openly. I was very troubled to hear about the violence. I would say -- and this is purely a strategic observation, not meant in any way to blame -- that the organizers might have been better served by biding their time and getting a much larger coalition of supporters involved (where were the opposition parties? why wasn't this publicized by the Kullena Khaled Said group?) so that the protest might have been larger and not mainly made up of women's rights activists. I hope this doesn't discourage them from organizing something else in the future.
Reader Comments (6)
Hey, did I tell you that Surfing the Middle East is finally out!? I think I forgot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytacfoUCQrk
http://www.independent.com/news/2011/mar/03/waves-and-rockets/
When's the Gay Pride parade scheduled for in Tahrir Square?
As an organizer of the event, I knew we could have organized it better, but we contact Wael Ghonim as an admin for Kulena Khaled Said and he did not respond to the call to support us.
It seems that the battle is harder than we thought. However, we're only beginning.
This is outrageous! Why? Women are everywhere in academic life in Eygpt. Why when it comes to public office do men think that women cannot to a better job than men - just because they are not used to seeing them in those roles. Where were the youth the younger men to support them. A message to all in the ME if you are going to fight for democracy and all that entitles you to open public institutions, these have to be inclusive of women. As you are engineering a type of democracy that is possible in the near future - you make a huge mistake if you push aside half of your population. So its okay for women to march and die beside the men but its not okay that they gain the full rights for which they aspired to just as the men did. Its shameful that Eygptian men are not pushing women forward - they will regret it!
The eygptian women are only treated as well as the male dictator in the home allows .It is disgusting to see the big strong men man handle the women They dont deserve freedom until they can grasp humanity
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