According to the daily AL-WATAN, the new grouping was announced at the Kuwait Lawyers Society on Thursday. Currently, in Kuwait there is only one female minister and no female representatives in parliament. However, there are some women active in local governments. This is why the new group’s immediate aims are “to prepare women to occupy leading positions among decision makers.”
Interestingly, the women of Kuwait had been very active and open in promoting resistance and political rights during the Iraqi invasion in 1990-1991—as many of their husbands had fled the country or went underground. However, with subsequent strong pressure from the Islamic bloc in Kuwaiti parliament in the 1990s, women had bowed out of politics for nearly a decade, although the Emir of Kuwait had tried to gain the right of franchise to females in Kuwait in the same era.
Now, as the women actually have now gained the right of vote and the right for participation in national politics, women leaders throughout Kuwait today are reviewing their previous positions in the political arena and are seeking to be engaged more and more. One area in which women and the youth of Kuwait have been most active is in the press. One other arena, the women and youth coalitions have been seeking to reverse the Islamic bloc’s passage of segregation laws in Kuwaiti schools 8 years ago. They have also been vocal in the area of Bedouin rights.
In 2000, schools in Kuwait were officially segregated by gender as the Islamic bloc in the Kuwaiti parliament pushed through legislation turning-back-the-clock on improving education in Kuwait for all. In the intervening years, though, most schools in Kuwait have been showing a variety of forms of civil disobedience and civil resistance in this arena of segregation--with many private schools and all universities, for example, ignoring and circumventing this segregationist legislation time-and-again.
SAD TREND IN USA IN 2008?
This anti-segregationist trend in Kuwait is an important shift in focus in this land at a time when segregation in U.S. schools is actually increasing for boys and girls.
In an ARAB TIMES article entitled “Georgia County Eyes Single-Sex Schools” dated 27 of Februaray, 2008, one AP writer notes, “Nearly four decades after a rural Georgia county stopped segregating its schools by race, it wants to divide students again—this time by sex.”
It is also noted, “Districts across the US have been switching to single-sex education since federal officials issued rules to ease the process in 2006. Nationally, at least 366 public schools are either entirely single-sex or have single-sex classrooms”.
In short, as this particular AP article had been published in Kuwait in the run-up to recent protests against segregation of sexes in Kuwait schools, I would say that what happens in the U.S. in coming months and years in the area of the re-segregation of schools by gender will probably have an affect both on developments in female education in Kuwait and throughout the states of federal Afghanistan—i.e. places which are trying to recover from the years of Taliban dominance.
NOTES
Abduldayem, Mervat “ Kuwait Witnesses First-ever Female Bloc”, AL-WATAN, 7 March 2008, p.1.
“Georgia County Eyes Single-Sex Schools”, ARAB TIMES, p.13.
Irvine, Welsh, “Journalism”, http://www.irvinewelsh.net/journalism.aspx?jid=24
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
