Cynthia Nixon is speaking out against provisions in the House and Senate health care bills that limit coverage for abortions.

Breeanna Hare
CNN

It's been a little more than a week since Cynthia Nixon flew back from filming "Sex and the City 2" in Morocco, and she's already diving headfirst into the debate surrounding abortion and health care reform.

Nixon, a longtime abortion rights activist, says she can't keep quiet about the recent health care bill amendments that would limit insurance coverage for abortions.

"It's a very basic female right that we need to protect," Nixon said. "What's so frightening about this Stupak ban is that he's found a backdoor way to basically not cover abortion for the vast majority of American women."

The Stupak-Pitts amendment, written by Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan and Republican Rep. Joseph R. Pitts of Pennsylvania, is a point of contention in the House health care bill. The amendment would limit funds in the health care bill, preventing subsidies from directly paying for abortions and also from paying for any insurance plan that covers abortions.

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An abortion demonstrator protests a clinic in Nebraska.

Orrin Hatch
Special to CNN

The Democratic health care proposal being debated in the Senate not only contains large new taxes, enormous government expansion and huge spending, but I'm convinced it also seeks to allow federal funding for abortion - something 61 percent of Americans do not support, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey.

Recently, the House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill containing language that would safeguard the rights of the unborn, and also prevent medical providers from being coerced into performing procedures that violate their conscience.

However, the health care reform bill introduced by Harry Reid, D-Nevada, in the Senate does not contain similar protections. To be clear, the language in the Reid bill on abortion is significantly weaker than that of the bill that passed in the House last month.

I have major concerns about how effective the weak language in the Reid bill will be. The one thing we know is that coverage of elective abortions in the government-operated health plan (or the public option) would be decided by the secretary of Health and Human Services. I am certain that federal subsidies would ultimately pay for insurance coverage used to cover elective abortions.

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U.S. Military

Women have served in the United States Military since 1775. They are an invaluable and essential part of the Army. Currently, women serve in 91 percent of all Army occupations and make up about 14 percent of the active Army, where they continue to play a crucial role. Go here to find an historical timeline of women in the U.S. Military.

At least 100,000 and perhaps as many as 300,000 children in America are victims of sex trafficking each year.

Bridgette Carr
Special to CNN

"We did not have a right to choose where we lived ... freedom of speech, or freedom of actions. The traffickers had keys to our apartment. They controlled all of our movement and travel. They watched us and listened when we called our parents. They didn't let us make friends or tell anyone anything about ourselves. We couldn't keep any of the money we earned. We couldn't ask anyone for help." - Lena

Lena was an athletic student from Eastern Europe yearning to visit the United States through a study-abroad program at her college. She had visions of learning English and returning home to share her experiences with her family.

But the human traffickers who ensnared her had a different vision for Lena, shipping her to America and exploiting her in the sex industry for profit. They met her at the airport with news that her study abroad placement had been changed. She was given new bus tickets and sent off to Detroit, Michigan. Once there they took her passport and her freedom.

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CNN Heroes

For the first time in history, women make up half of the U.S. workforce and are the primary or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of all American families. Forty years ago, women made up only one-third of all workers.

Joanne Lipman
New York Times

FINALLY! I hear we’re all living in a women’s world now.

For the first time, women make up half the work force. The Shriver Report, out just last week, found that mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. We have a female speaker of the House and a female secretary of state. Thirty-two women have served as governors. Thirty-eight have served as senators. Four out of eight Ivy League presidents are women.

Great news, right? Well, not exactly. In fact, it couldn’t be more spectacularly misleading.

The truth is, women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.

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Maria Shriver
The Shriver Report
The Center for American Progress

Earlier this year, the Center for American Progress decided to closely examine the consequences of what we thought was a major tipping point in our nation’s social and economic history: the emergence of working women as primary breadwinners for millions of families at the same time that their presence on America’s payrolls grew to comprise fully half the nation’s workforce. In addition, we were watching the Great Recession amplify and accelerate these trends. We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation of the way America works and lives.

But my own interest wasn’t just academic. It sprang from a very personal source: my mother. My family wasn’t much like what we were watching on TV in the 1950s. My parents had a tag-team work life—my father working in a factory during the day; my mother in a pink-collar job from 5 p.m. until midnight. Like millions of families today, they juggled, struggled, nurtured, laughed a lot, and fought a little so that their kids could lead good lives and get ahead. I don’t think my mother ever really thought of herself as a trendsetter, but she was at the leading edge of a wave that shaped America in the last half of the 20th century—a wave we call “a woman’s nation.” Though she recently passed away, she still serves as a role model for my daughters.

So I was delighted when Maria Shriver, who cleverly conceived of the phrase “a woman’s nation,” came to me with the idea of combining a project she envisioned with CAP’s work and together producing a landmark examination of thisfundamental change in American society. We realized that Maria could add invaluable depth to the efforts underway because she recognized not only the enormous impact of these changes on the workplace, but their import for every aspect of the American life and culture, as well. A partnership was born, and it produced a document that goes far beyond the typical findings of your standard economic policy report.

This report brings together the relentless intellect of a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist who pushes beyond statistics to fully reveal the complexity of women’s lives and the academic muscle of a progressive think tank that understands how to comb through data and illuminate the trends re-shaping the American landscape.

Read the full report here

Time Magazine

In the 1970s, a majority of children grew up with a stay-at-home parent; now that figure is less than a third. A large majority — 70% of men, 61% of women — believe this has had a negative effect on society. Fifty-seven percent of men and 51% of women agree that it is better for a family if the father works outside the home and the mother takes care of the children. Asked to rank what they value most for their own daughters, 63% of men and 56% of women put a happy marriage with children first; 17% of men and 23% of women said an interesting career; and 15% of men and 20% of women said financial success.

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Time Magazine

Fifty-five percent of women strongly agree that in households where both partners have jobs, women take on more responsibilities for the home and family than their male partners do; only 28% of men strongly agree. (Fifty-four percent of Latinos strongly agree, along with 52% of blacks and 38% of whites.) Sixty-nine percent of women say they are primarily responsible for taking care of their children; only 13% of men say this of themselves.

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Eighty-four percent of Americans agree (53% strongly) that businesses haven't done enough to address the needs of modern families.

Time

Eighty-four percent of Americans agree (53% strongly) that businesses haven't done enough to address the needs of modern families. Asked what would have to change to make it easier to balance work and marriage and children, 54% of women and 49% of men said more-flexible work hours or schedules; 15% of women and 17% of men said more paid time off; and 13% of women and 12% of men said better or more day-care options.

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Nancy Gibbs
Time Magazine

If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money.

It's funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they've changed completely. It's expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women — largely because the downturn has hit men so hard. This is an extraordinary change in a single generation, and it is gathering speed: the growth prospects, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are in typically female jobs like nursing, retail and customer service. More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household (almost 40%) or are providing essential income for the family's bottom line. Their buying power has never been greater — and their choices have seldom been harder.

It is in this context that the Rockefeller Foundation, in collaboration with TIME, conducted a landmark survey of gender issues to assess how individual Americans are reacting. Is the battle of the sexes really over, and if so, did anyone win? How do men now view female power? How much resentment or confusion or gratitude is there for the forces that have rearranged family life, rewired the economy and reinvented gender roles? And what, if anything, does everyone agree needs to happen to make all this work? The study found that men and women were in broad agreement about what matters most to them; gone is the notion that women's rise comes at men's expense. As the Old Economy dissolves and pressures on working parents grow, they share their fears about what this means for their children and their frustration with institutions that refuse to admit how much has changed. In the new age, the battles we fight together are the ones that define us.

A Quiet Revolution

In the spring of 1972, TIME devoted a special issue of the magazine to assessing the status of women in the throes of "women's lib." At a time when American society was racing through change like a reckless teenager, feminism had sputtered and stalled. Women's average wages had actually fallen relative to men's; there were fewer women in the top ranks of civil service (under 2%) than there were four years before. No woman had served in the Cabinet since the Eisenhower Administration; there were no female FBI agents or network-news anchors or Supreme Court Justices. The nation's campuses were busy hosting a social revolt, yet Harvard's tenured faculty of 421 included only six women. Of the Museum of Modern Art's 1,000 one-man shows over the previous 40 years, five were by women. Headhunters lamented that it was easier to put a man on the moon than a woman in a corner office. "There is no movement," complained an activist who resigned her leadership position in the National Organization for Women two years after it was founded. "Movement means 'going someplace,' and the movement is not going anywhere. It hasn't accomplished anything."

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Cairo University students wearing niqab stand outside a university dormitory on Oct. 7

Octavia Nasr | BIO
AC360° Contributor
CNN Senior Editor, Mideast Affairs

The Arab Middle East teaches minorities some tough life lessons and shapes them in ways that might surprise you. While the effect of a conservative patriarchal society is expected to keep people under the thumb of tradition, culture and tribal and religious beliefs - sometimes too much oppression and control yields opposite results.

Having lived in several parts of the Middle East as a child, I learned that a woman doesn’t exist except as someone’s daughter, sister, wife or mother. Her opinion is not required, her emotions don’t count and she has no rights whatsoever – except those granted to her by a male.

With a few recent exceptions, an Arab woman’s testimony is not accepted in court. Most Arab women can’t travel outside their countries without permission from a male guardian, and most Arab women still can’t give nationality to their children. In Saudi Arabia women are not even allowed to drive cars. A popular Arabic saying describes it best: a good woman “has a mouth that eats but not one that speaks.”

The Arab Middle East taught me that sexual expression is exclusive to men. Men can have pre-marital sex, and when they’re married, their extra-marital affairs are ignored, justified or blamed on the wives. Their bodies are their own to do with them what they want. A woman’s body, however, represents her family’s honor. So, girls and women are expected to cover their bodies and repress their sexual feelings to protect the honor of the family.

This is such a deeply-rooted belief that, to this day, girls and women are killed by fathers, brothers or cousins at the suspicion of sexual activity. Even if a girl or woman is the victim of rape or assault, she can be killed under the pretext of “cleansing the family’s honor.” The practice known as “Honor Killing” is still common among all religions in the Middle East; it is even justified under the law and carries no penalty.

As someone who grew up and spent my early adulthood in the Middle East, I also learned that men run the show and they run it for life. Imagine that with the exception of a few, all Arab leaders haven’t changed since I was a child; and those who died were replaced by their sons. So far, the customary behavior has been such that if you wanted change, you had to ask men for their permission, their blessing, their support, their approval, their orders, and their actions to bring that change.

The women in my family were very active in the women’s rights movement of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Men listened to them, gave them a forum to express their desire to become equal through conferences, speeches and occasional articles in the media. They even gave them some rights – like the right to vote in some countries and the right to run for office in others. But, women’s rights were always controlled by men’s approval and that didn’t go far at all. As a matter of fact, a quick look at the Arab Middle East shows you that with very few exceptions it remains a region controlled by the ruling few who are unwilling to relinquish power. They resist change as if it were a contagious disease that will lead to their demise if they ever catch it.

Enter the age of the computer and the Internet, the age of blogging and connecting with the world. The only age that will allow a Saudi female cartoonist to draw pictures depicting how a woman feels when her husband takes on a second or third wife. It simply rips her heart out she draws.

A Saudi female cartoonist's rendition of how a woman feels when her husband takes on a second or third wife.

Islam accepts polygamy and blesses it with a caveat which men enthusiastic about the practice tend to ignore. You can take multiple wives, but “if you want to be fair, marry only one,” the holy Muslim book guides. While not many in Saudi Arabia might care about how Hana Hajjar feels, a whole world outside the kingdom, is paying attention, supporting and perhaps even lending a hand.

The online traffic we witnessed in the aftermath of Iran’s contested elections and the outpour of support Iranian reformists received through social media are perfect examples of the effect of international support on local activism. In the case of Iran, it energized and helped spread the message to far reaching corners of the world.

Other stories that have captured the world’s attention are bloggers jailed in Egypt and Saudi Arabia for speaking up against the Status Quo in their countries and demanding social justice and political reform. We are learning about what’s going on inside the most conservative and most police-controlled countries in the region through bloggers who are not allowing the intimidation of prison, harassment or abuse to silence them.

It is obvious now there is a growing number of Arabs, men and women, who not only want change but they are willing to get to that change on their own. They grew tired of demanding it and not receiving anything in return, so they made the decision to truly become the change and live it in practice.

Now, you have bloggers like Wael Abbas in Egypt who openly criticizes President Hosni Mubarak’s policies and screams out slurs against his country’s secret police that detains him for hours and confiscates his laptop without any explanation or apology whatsoever.

You also have the gay and lesbian Middle Eastern community publishing their online magazine which deals with issues they find important. They discuss sexual orientation out in the open and provide a voice and an outlet they wouldn’t have even dreamed of a few years ago. Their headlines read, “Who we sleep with is nobody’s business” and “Homophobia and Paranoia: Words that Ryhme.”

The Lebanese Association of Women Researchers ‘Bahithat’ just organized what is dubbed a cornerstone of Arab Feminism through a conference at the American University of Beirut. Women from all over the Middle East - including Iraq and Iran - were there promoting the idea that “change will have to be imposed not demanded anymore” says Lebanese Feminist Zeina Zaatari, one of the most vocal voices at the conference.

The Feminist Collective promoted the event online through social networking sites such as Twitter. They drew the world’s attention to hear the voices of powerful women who gave themselves the right instead of waiting for officials to give them permission to speak or express themselves. Zaatari captured the limelight as she linked a woman’s equality with a woman’s sexual freedom and sexual expression. “A woman can’t be free if she doesn’t own her body and has full control of it and if she doesn’t express her sexuality,” she told me in a phone interview from Beirut.

The December 2008 Issue of Jasad.

Another example of women taking matters into their own hands is a quarterly magazine called ‘Jasad’ which means ‘Body’ in Arabic. It’s a racy magazine that was launched by a woman in Lebanon at the end of 2008 dealing with the female body and its deepest sexual desires. ‘Jasad’ is banned and its website is blocked from many Arab countries.

“This doesn’t stop subscriptions from being delivered by courier mail,” founder and editor-in-chief Joumana Haddad told me as she was busily preparing the fifth issue. She says the magazine is doing well despite the fact that “no one dares to advertize” in it. She talks about threats she and her editors receive on a regular basis and unending harassment since they all use their real names. She says it is the support she receives from within the Middle East and outside that keeps her going and that “nothing will stop ‘Jasad’ from being published.”

Several new lines are being drawn in the Middle East’s desert sand simultaneously.... If they continue to be drawn at this rate longer and thicker, it’s hard to foresee any governments, censors or jails being able to stop them.

Peers of Roman Polanski have praised him for his talent and lamented his arrest.

Leslie Morgan Steiner
Special to CNN

Historically, women's rights and status in America have been viewed by both men and women as "soft" issues - worthy but marginal.

Real problems are the serious ones - financial crises, international confrontations, nuclear arms, trade disputes, Mafia murders, the Steelers/Ravens game (if it looks close). But ills that plague the daily lives of women like rape, incest, prostitution and domestic violence - not so much.

However, with Hillary Clinton perched atop the State Department, Michelle Obama in the White House, Oprah, Katie and Diane dominating television, and Arianna Huffington running the blogosphere, so-called "women's issues" may finally get the attention they deserve.

Which perhaps explains why a 76-year-old French man who pleaded guilty to "unlawful intercourse with a minor" 30 years ago is a front page news story and one of California's prosecutorial priorities despite the financial and international crises crippling various segments of our country and the world today.

Maybe you've not heard of Roman Polanski, the 76-year-old French-born filmmaker who directed "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown" and "The Pianist," for which he won an Oscar in 2002.

In 1943 he survived the Nazis in Krakow, Poland; in 1969 he survived the trauma left by the Charles Manson family, which murdered his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child; in 1977 he also survived the American criminal justice system when he fled the United States before being sentenced after he was accused of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

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Representatives from the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the interior ministry and the UNHCR at the workshop last month.

Charity Tooze
AC360° Contributor

Syria is making significant steps to protect the most vulnerable of Iraqi refugees – women and children who are trafficked or forced into prostitution.

Last month, Syrian government officials met with representatives from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) for a three-day workshop. The purpose of the meeting was to develop laws for the rights and duties of refugees, train local officials on refugee issues and address the growing problem of human trafficking.

An anti-trafficking bill is currently working its way through the Syrian parliament. If passed, it will be the first law of its kind in the Middle East. There are also a number of projects under way to protect women who are trafficked into the country for sex tourism or indentured servitude.

“Women at risk are a priority for the Damascus [UNHCR] office especially in view of their increasing vulnerability to exploitation under economic duress,” said Farah Dakhlallah, public information officer for the UNHCR in Syria.

The anti-trafficking law has been working its way through parliament for more than a year. It includes provisions for victim compensation, the establishment of rehabilitation centers, punishment for beneficiaries (clients), and the creation of an independent administration within the ministry of interior affairs for combating human trafficking crimes.

The Good Shepherd Convent, a Christian church in downtown Damascus run by four nuns, has several projects that support vulnerable woman and children, including a shelter with 22 beds for victims of sexual gender-based violence (SGBV). One of the new projects the government is supporting is an additional shelter specifically for trafficked women and girls. The project is being carried out by The Good Shepherd church, the International office of Immigration (IOM) and the Ministry of Interior.

Trafficking to Syria has garnered attention over the past few years because of reports that an alarming number of Iraqi women have fallen into prostitution and are being trafficked. It is impossible to track how many women are forced into prostitution but the organization Iraqi Women’s Will says approximately 50,000 women and girls have been victimized by this trade. In November, 2008 the UNHCR published a report outlining the various issues surrounding trafficking but did not quantify the issue. In June of this year they reported they’ve gained access to 70 SGBV cases in the Douma Prison in Syria and intervened with seven Iraqi girls in the Juvenile and Rehabilitation Center in Damascus.

“We have 210,000 Iraqis registered with the UNHCR but the Syrian government says there are 1.1 million Iraqis in Syria,” Dakhlallah said.

Syria doesn't require visas from Arab or African countries. " Syria is used for transport to the Gulf region. Gangs smuggle the girls across the border and through Syria," said a representative from the Good Shepherd church.

Without the law in place, if a woman is arrested in Syria for prostitution and doesn’t have a passport she will be charged with a crime and potentially deported, even if she was trafficked.

Minors are typically brought to juvenile detention centers. Local advocates and UNHCR workers have an agreement with the Syrian government to intervene in their cases. The Syrian 1956 labor law prohibits a stranger from working inside a Syrian home. Therefore, the concept of having domestic or sexual labor in the home is new to the Syrian legal system. The anti-trafficking law will change the government’s stance on both issues.

The economic situation for Iraqi refugees in Syria continues to worsen. Survival sex, prostitution and the sale of young women into Mutas or “pleasure marriages” have been on the rise.

A manager of a local NGO, who would not reveal her true identity because she fears retribution by both the traffickers and the government, said there are at least 5,000 trafficked girls in Syria. Like many of Iraq ’s neighbors, Syria has not signed the 1951 Convention on refugees. While Syria actually hosts more refugees than any other country and has opened its education and health care system to Iraqis, refugees are not legally allowed to work. This inability to find legal employment has led to the spike in the trafficking and prostitution of Iraqi women.

The manager said young women are kidnapped from Iraq or sold by family members to traffickers in Syria – who she says are mostly Iraqi. She adds that young women and girls who are virgins are sold for prices ranging from $4,000 – $10,000 U.S. dollars.

“The kids think the parents aren’t doing anything wrong. They think they are just going to go work cleaning someone’s house,” The manager said. The average age of a trafficked girl is approximately 13-years-old. Those sold into “pleasure marriages,” which can be dissolved in a matter of days, are then forced into prostitution.

The manager said the girls are kept in houses until drivers pick them up to take them to a “beneficiary” for the night.

“Usually the male member of a family, who is stronger, will prostitute female family members,” the manager said. Some women work at nightclubs dancing for money, while others are pimped and leave with men at the end of the night.

“A woman found two girls who fled Iraq to escape the violence,” a representative from The Good Shepherd Church said. She drafted fake marriage certificates and then planned to sell the girls. One of the young women overheard that she was to be sold and managed to escape. She is being protected by the Good Shepherd Church and hasn’t heard from her sister since her escape.

Syria cannot fight this issue alone. The manger of the local NGO said the government needs the support of the global community and international donors. “Because of the traumatic memories and negative stigma from being trafficked, the best option for young women is to be resettled in other countries,” she said. The UNHCR has a fast-track resettlement program for young women who have been trafficked.

“There was a young woman who was undressed and paraded in front of potential buyers,” the manager said. “She said she felt like a piece of merchandise and felt bad because they didn’t want to pay that much for her.” The psychological implications of sex and domestic slavery will be with these young women forever. To support the healing process the UNHCR along with the Syrian Red Crescent covers all psychological costs for women who’ve been trafficked or forced into prostitution.

Another positive step is a partnership that is developing between the UNHCR and the Syrian Women’s Union, which seeks to empower refugee women, especially women at risk.

Without a trafficking law, few pimps or traffickers are ever prosecuted. Many women are often prosecuted for prostitution, unless an aid organization intervenes on their behalf. If the new law is passed these women will be protected rather than prosecuted.

Editor’s Note: Charity Tooze is a freelance journalist currently working in Jordan . She was the executive producer of Rites of Passage, www.ritesofpassage.tv, a weekly television program by and for young women in the Bay Area. Last month she was in Syria , reporting on Iraqi Refugees as part of her master’s thesis.

A woman wears traditionnal Muslim dress in Venissieux, near Lyon, France.

Arsalan Iftikhar
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

First of all, I am no fan of the burqa…

Secondly, I am no fan of French President Nicholas Sarkozy…

I love France…Sarkozy, not so much…

Third (and most importantly), as an international human rights lawyer, I am no fan of any government in the world (whether it is France or Afghanistan) mandating what a person can (or cannot) wear as a free member of their society.

According to a media report in Reuters, a recent French study found that only 367 women in the entire nation of France wear Islamic veils (better known as a burqa) that completely cover their faces and bodies. This report severely undermines the position of right-wing politicians who are pushing for a ban on the garments.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has stopped short of backing a ban, but has recently said the veils were “not welcome” in France. The influential French newspaper Le Monde said that in light of the tiny number of women concerned, the idea of a ban should be dropped.

Read more…

Program note: Scott Roeder, alleged killer of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, is scheduled for a preliminary court hearing today. Gary Tuchman is in Kansas with Lindsay Roeder, Scott's ex-wife. Join us tonight at 10pm ET to hear what they have to say.

Elham Gheytanchi
Author and Professor

Ordinary women are performing extraordinary acts of bravery in Iran today.

Neda’s image and her brutal death in Tehran this past Saturday in a street protest demanding the annulment of the results of the country’s tenth presidential election has brought the role of women in this post-election crisis to light. At the forefront of these non-violent demonstrations violently suppressed by the government-backed militias (Basij) are brave Iranian women.

The story of Iranian women’s rights movements and their demands go back to the beginning of the formation of Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

Ayatollah Khomeini called on Iranian women to rid themselves of Western influences and become ‘truly’ liberated through active participation in Islamic Republic.

Iranian women’s liberation was only possible, according to Ayatollah Khomeini, if they wore the Islamic hejab, which became mandatory in 1980. As a result, the secular women were driven to the margins.

By the start of the Iran-Iraq war, it was the martyrs’ wives who were the first women demanding their rights from the Islamic state that had promised them Islamic justice. These martyrs’ wives wanted the state to grant them custody of their children and not allow their husbands’ families to raise their children. The Islamic state had to flex the sharia laws (Islamic family law) in order to meet this challenge.

By the end of the war, women who had taken part in the job market were no longer willing to go back to their homes. Women flooded the universities in unprecedented numbers, demanded more of their share in family matters and forcefully lobbied the authorities to grant them right to divorce in Islamic family courts that barred women to be judges.

Today, 62 percent of all university students are women, rates of divorce initiated by women have accelerated and women’s rights have become an issue for the leaders of the country.

Iranian women’s rights activists who have become technologically savvy launched grass-roots movements against the discriminatory laws against women in their country. The One Million Signature Campaign is one example of a social movement that started in the mayhem of the previous election.

The campaigners focused on gender inequalities in the constitution and, through face-to-face interactions, successfully raised awareness among other women.

The Campaign quickly spread to 16 provinces and even made the members of the conservative eighth parliament to react to their demands. But Ahmadinejad was determined to eradicate demands for gender equality under the banner of national security and alleged that women’s rights activists were motivated by the ‘enemies of the state.’ His government arrested more than 70 activists over the course of the past forty years.

But as the arrests continued to rise, so did the number of volunteers in the campaign and other women’s rights initiatives. More women began to lobby for rights. They formed a broad coalition one month before the presidential election to demand all four candidates to respond to women’s issues. The coalition specifically demanded two things: the Iranian state to become a signatory in CEDAW (Convention of elimination of discrimination against women) and changes to discriminatory articles in the constitution that lead to gender inequality.

The presidential candidates did respond to women’s issues. Zahra Rahnavard, Mir Hussein Mousavii’s wife, released a public statement stating that Mousavi’s cabinet will make Iran a signatory of CEDAW and will work hard to improve women’s rights. Jamileh Kadivar, the spokeswoman for Karoubi even went further to question the much taboo issue of mandatory hejab.

Whereas Ahamdinejad’s government had gone to extreme measures to suppress women’s rights activists as agents of the West, the presidential debates raised women’s expectations.

Ahmadinejad had proposed to make polygamy legal in the country where it is socially unacceptable and to lower the number of female attendees in universities through a gender quota system. The national TV which works under direct control of the supreme leader which has shown his support for Ahmadinejad before and after the disputed election, made one program after another advocating the women’s ‘proper place’ in an Islamic society.

So, it is not surprising to see waves of women in chadors or rusari (headscarf) to come to street to protest a fraudulent election, a coup indeed to re-elect Ahmadinejad. Iranian women know that there is much at stake for them. Four more years of Ahmadinejad will bring more morality police into the streets that harass women and more pressure on Iranian women’s rights activists.

Today, Iranian women are in the streets protesting and throwing themselves at the Basij to protect the lives of the youth, the students and all those who want their voices be heard through a non-violent movement. The middle-aged women remind the Basij of the Islamic Republic’s promise to women; Islamic justice that would be better than any Western ideas including feminism. The bloody face of Neda will export the revolutionary promises but in a completely opposite way than what was initially intended by the founders of the Islamic state.

UPDATE: A group of mothers gathered in a park in Tehran on Saturday (June 27th) to commemorate Neda and all those who have been martyred by the basij and security forces since June 12th in various peaceful protests in Tehran and other cities. They started pouring into Park Laleh in the center of Tehrann around 5 p.m. Their numbers grew by the minute. The security forces attacked their peaceful demonstration and brutally beat them with buttons. The security forces and the plain-clothed men believed to be Basijis detained around 20 protesters. They have been transferred to a female-only detention center on Vahdat Eslami street (literally means Islamic Union street).

Editor’s Note: Elham Gheytanchi teaches sociology at Santa Monica College. She writes about women, culture and politics in Iran.

A woman is seen throwing a rock at one recent protest in Tehran.

Feminism has a rich history in Iran. Now more than ever, says journalist Roya Hakakian, it is alive and well and at its most vibrant.

Forbes: What was your first reaction to seeing women among the protesters in the streets of Iran? Hakakian: The presence of women is not a surprise to me at all.

Iran has had a robust women's movement for several decades now. But in the late 1990s, a new generation took charge; and in the early 2000s, they managed to organize and unite in ways that women had not since the revolution in 1979. It started as petition movement to collect signatures to ban stoning women to death and has spun out to become the "One Million Signatures Campaign." So this is precisely what I expected.

What's the extent of risk these demonstrators are taking?

The risk is enormous...

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Howard LaFranchi
The Christian Science Monitor

In the battle of the burqa, the two Western presidents from two international defenders of freedom, France and America, are finding no common ground.

On Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy forcefully condemned the burqa, the traditional female dress for some segments of Islam that covers a woman from head to toe, as a form of enslavement. And he vowed to ban it from the French republic.

Mr. Sarkozy's position, offered in a speech to Parliament, followed by less than a month American President Obama's opposite take on the subject of covering by Muslim women.

In his Cairo speech to the Muslim world earlier this month, Mr. Obama called on Western countries "to avoid dictating what clothes a Muslim women should wear," saying such action constituted "hostility" towards religion clothed in "the pretense of liberalism."

To seal the Franco-American fashion debate, the issue subsequently divided the two leaders – both male, it should be noted – when they met in Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day on June 6.

Having suffered the lightning wrath of some French women's groups for his Cairo comments, Obama reiterated: "Our basic attitude [in America] is that we're not going to tell people what to wear."

Sarkozy's response was also based on a defense of freedom, though from a different perspective. "A young woman can wear a head scarf," he said, "provided that's a decision she made freely and had not been forced on her by her family or entourage."

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