WUNRN
TUNISIA - WOMEN'S RIGHTS IN THE NEW DEMOCRACY
Women's rights have long been considered a development keystone. Tunisian women--in the vanguard of the Arab world--will put that theory to a crucial test as the country's new democracy takes shape following last week's elections.
(WOMENSENEWS)--With its recent elections,
While the world will watch closely as a constitution is created and a government formed, there is one important gender-specific bellwether that bears special attention: The ability of educated women to help forge a stable, advanced democracy that preserves and promotes their civil rights.
In
Here is a real-time chance to observe whether educated women with small families, employable skills and time for careers can contribute significantly to a stable, largely secular political order able to restrain a potential conservative backlash against them.
Around the Arab world, women worry about where the revolutions are leading society, perhaps most publicly in Egypt, where many gains for women made under Hosni Mubarak and his wife, Suzanne, are now threatened because of their origins in that hated regime.
But
On Wednesday, about 200 Tunisian women demonstrated in downtown
Better Quality of Life
In 2008 (the latest available U.N. figures) the maternal mortality rate in Tunisia -- the deaths of adolescent girls and adult women in any stage of pregnancy and immediately after giving birth -- was 60 in 100,000 live births. In Arab nations generally, the rate was 247 in 100,000. Ninety-five percent of Tunisian births are attended by skilled health personnel. The Arab world's average is 72 percent.
Virtually all Tunisian girls go to primary school; 76 percent are enrolled
in secondary education. Female teens and young women in the 15-to-24 age range
enjoy literacy rates that are roughly on a par with their male counterparts.
Ninety-eight percent of men can read and write, and 96 percent of women can as
well, roughly 10 percentage points ahead of women in a region that stretches
across North Africa and the
By some measures,
Modern Amenities, Longer
Life
A majority of Tunisian women are urbanites, living in homes with modern sanitation and household conveniences. In old age, a Tunisian woman can expect, statistically, to live to 77, five years longer than the world average and 21 years longer than her counterpart in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Only 3 percent of Tunisians are thought to be living on less than $1.25 a day, compared with 53 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Why do all these measures of a woman's life matter? For decades people looking for clues to why some countries develop faster than others have pointed to the status of women and their involvement in national life, including in economic development and politics.
Educated women, it has been said again and again, will have fewer children to strain family resources and more time, energy and training to play productive roles.
The belief that women are key to development, and the demand that their
rights be foremost in matters of reproductive health, were the main messages of
the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. That watershed
meeting was held in
Mahnaz Afkhami, founder and president of the Women's Learning Partnership in
Afkhami, a minister of women's affairs before the Islamic revolution in
"
That election resulted in a majority vote for Ennahda, which has been described as a moderate Islamic party that has pledged to uphold women's rights, Afkhami said. But, she added, "Women's rights and democracy activists are seriously concerned that the party will act differently once in power."
In
But she was also cautious about a threat of reversals for women in the tumultuous revolution around her. "We aren't there yet," she said.