Women Fear Their Rights Will End With Hussein Era
BAGHDAD — Haida Azzawi doesn't wear a scarf to hide her long, flowing hair. She dresses in striped cotton trousers and a colorful T-shirt. She comes and goes from her house as she pleases, unescorted by male relatives.
And she wants to keep it that way.
Like many Iraqi women, the lively 24-year-old, who has a degree in math and statistics from a private college in Baghdad, is happy about the end of Saddam Hussein's rule, but she worries that the change in government could lead to a dramatic erosion of women's freedoms.
"I have never worn hijab, and I don't want to," said Azzawi, referring to the head covering worn by observant Muslim women. "But now I wonder if that is what's in store for the future. That and more things like it."
For decades, Iraqi women -- at least those living in Baghdad and some other big cities -- have enjoyed a degree of personal liberty undreamed of by women in neighboring nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates.
They can drive. They can attend coeducational college classes. They can work outside the home in offices where men work as well. They can inherit property equally with their brothers.
Women make up a large proportion of Iraq's professional class -- doctors, lawyers, engineers, college professors, bank directors, faculty deans. Many are free to choose whom, or even whether, to marry.
But there is a growing sense here that the power vacuum left by Hussein's fall will probably be filled, in large measure, by Shiite Muslim political figures who may seek to impose the conservative social mores that are typical in Iraq's Shiite-dominated south.
Like their society as a whole, Iraqi women are wrestling with a complex and subtle calculus of gains that is yet to be realized, coupled with potentially irredeemable losses, as a result of Hussein's fall.
The Iraqi leader presided over one of the world's most repressive police states, but at the same time his secular, socialist-minded Baath Party provided many women with professional and educational opportunities unparalleled in the region.
"It's all mixed in my mind," said May George, a 41-year-old professor of engineering at Baghdad Technical College. "I am so glad he is gone, yes, but look at this."
She was standing in her shattered office in the college's department of metallurgy and industrial engineering, where looters had smashed windows, scattered documents, set fires that left a still-acrid pall of soot and smoke, and tossed computer terminals out third-story windows.
