Written by Lizzy Hyatt

Four days ago was the birthday of Rosa Luxemburg, born 5 March 1871, leading socialist revolutionary, and woman. She said once, ‘those who do not move do not notice their chains’, and her message is in some ways almost indistinguishable from the message today of Asmaa Mahfouz, born 1^st February 1985, leading Egyptian revolutionary, and woman. Except maybe Mahfouz’ message was slightly different: whoever says he will not move because there won’t be enough people, ‘I want to tell him, you are the reason behind this’. In the same month a new UN Agency, UN Women, was officially launched. The role of women in movements today for fundamental human rights is beautiful, powerful, inspiring, and incomplete.

On January the 18th Asmaa Mahfouz, one of the founders of the Egyptian April the 6^th Youth Movement, made and published a vlog on her Facebook page and later on Youtube, calling for Egyptians – men and women alike – to go to Tahrir Square and protest. She asked people to come together under one cause: ‘We want our human rights and nothing else’.

They did just that. They came in their thousands and protested. They protested even in the face of camel charges, and rubber bullets, and they are still protesting – in Algeria, where they were forbidden from doing so; in Tunisia, where they’re watching like hawks for the return of Islamist parties previously banned; in Libya where citizens are being killed, raped and tortured.

If you look in all their eyes, I think you can see the ghost of Tom Joad looming from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Take the bravery of women in Egypt as an example. As Goya’s etching is titled, ‘What Courage’! What bravery it must have taken Asmaa Mahfouz and others like her to make those videos is unimaginable.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report, which assesses countries on how they divide resources and opportunities between men and women, in 2010 ranked Egypt 125^th out of 134 countries assessed. Particularly damning is the assessment of female political empowerment. There were only 2 women to 98 men in parliament; 9 women to 91 men in ministerial positions; and, more obviously, of the last 50 years 0 of them have seen a female head of state (in fact only 17 of the world’s 192 heads of state are women). Political participation is a key tenet expressed particularly in Articles 7 and 8 of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women adopted in 1979 by the United Nations to which Egypt is a party. And yet women played a major role in the overturning of the political system in Egypt on the frontline in organising, mobilising, and utilising social media (Apart from the use of Facebook and Twitter, look, for example at the famous and popular blog of, the anonymous female blogger, Zeinobia), in aid and in medical care. Or, as Mona Seif, a young woman at the heart of the revolution put it to one interviewer – ‘We played everything’. And this is not the end of their role – the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights has recently reported, for example, on the new constitutional amendments and their exclusion of women[7]. Women must fight for their role not only in the revolution but also in the calm after the storm.

The serious attack on the 17^th of February of Lara Logan, a CBS reporter, brought home the reality that many Egyptian women, with too many others in the world, daily face violence on the streets and in the home. The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights reports that, ‘women in Egypt are often subject to violence not only from family members and community members, but also by agents of the state, including the police supposedly tasked with the protection of all citizens. In addition, women are constantly subjected to violence in the form of sexual harassment and abuse on the street, and approximately ninety-seven percent of Egyptian women are the victims of female genital mutilation’. At the same time, in 2008, the UN resistance to it was enshrined in Resolution 63/155 on the intensification of efforts to eliminate all forms of violence against women along with the existence of a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. In Egypt, many women have blogged or have written of how violence disappeared in Tahrir before the fall of Mubarak but have warned how women cannot be complacent and assume that it will disappear. There not only needs to be removal of discrimination in the laws but there also needs to be a change in social attitude which does not necessarily come with the fall of a dictator.

This is just a snapshot of the issues and the roles and bravery of women in the movement for human rights in the world. The issues that Egyptian women face and are standing up to are universal. Women are discriminated against in politics and women are disproportionately subject to violence. But universally also, on this day, women are united and can celebrate in this. Human rights plays no small part in this celebration, because through this discourse women of the world know what they deserve as human beings ‘born free and equal in dignity and rights’.

‘This allows us to keep moving despite all the negatives. And when you look around the world even the most sceptical people are in the human rights system. They forge their own struggles using universal human rights standards.’

So, ‘If you have honour and dignity…– come!’ (Mahfouz). And if you’re one of those who feels like you won’t move, just, please, in celebration of International Women’s Day 2011 and for many years to come, take a moment to look at this Facebook album of the faces of the women of the Egyptian Revolution. Do any of them look a little bit like you?

Lizzy Hyatt is a student at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, reading for an MA in Understanding and Securing Human Rights at the School of Advanced Study. She previously graduated from Jesus College, Oxford with a BA in PPE.

Degree in hand, she took her campaigns for women’s rights to Warsaw, where within the space of a year she took part in and helped to organise a march for International Women’s Day, amongst other things.

A Mancunian at heart, she is now trying to find her way through The Big Smoke. Taking her bike instead of the tube, the only underground she wants to hear is through campaigning for human rights and the environment, seeing interesting and inspiring talks and exhibitions and whispering to others to do the same.