Mada Masr-<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been working on bodily rights since the revolution. Before 2011, I was a really ordinary woman. I wondered when I\u2019d get married, when I\u2019d have kids, that kind of thing. But since I was young, I always had questions, things I wanted to know and understand and most of these were to do with being a gendered subject.<\/p>\n
I was brought up in a lower-middle class family in Mahalla, and there was no one in my\u00a0family who engaged in\u00a0political activities, or even charitable ones. We had no connection to the public sphere, a family unto itself.<\/p>\n
After the revolution, I felt like\u00a0I wanted to take part in the things happening around me and I thought, why not? I started noticing things that needed to be fixed. And what was happening shed light on the things that I felt were\u00a0wrong, and I said\u00a0no. A no that wasn\u2019t frightened about what would be said about it, not frightened\u00a0of family punishment. A clear no, because things could not\u00a0carry on like this.<\/p>\n
I started to take part in demonstrations and other political activities, and I began to notice that my presence on\u00a0the streets was\u00a0like my presence at home. At home, I was\u00a0told not to go out at night, not to come back late, to dress a certain way, and if someone harassed me, it must have been\u00a0because of something I did. At\u00a0demonstrations, people\u00a0pointed me toward cordons for women so I\u00a0wouldn\u2019t get harassed, telling me I\u00a0couldn\u2019t dress a certain way because of the revolution\u2019s reputation. There was something similar in the private space I was coming out of and the public space I was coming into, and they were linked to my being a woman.<\/p>\n
At the\u00a0time, I heard a lot of people talk about politics, but not about women. I didn\u2019t even know there was\u00a0a women\u2019s movement in Egypt. I decided to found something called Girls\u2019 Revolution, a feminist platform on Facebook where women could share their experiences.<\/p>\n
They talked about\u00a0many things, including physical and sexual violence they faced at home. And one point, they were very focused on the issue of the veil, which was also important to me personally \u2013 I was veiled at the time, but not out of choice. I took it off \u00a0in May 2012. Part of being able to find the strength to make that\u00a0decision was largely because of Girls\u2019 Revolution. People usually understand it wrong \u2013 they think that because I am the founder, I influence the women who take part, but it\u2019s the complete opposite. Because of my role, I began\u00a0to take note\u00a0of the many\u00a0different experiences around me, and\u00a0it was these that\u00a0influenced\u00a0my own.<\/p>\n
The idea I had for\u00a0Girls\u2019 Revolution was that\u00a0it could become\u00a0a platform for\u00a0women to\u00a0have discussions about\u00a0things\u00a0on their mind in a safe space. We had\u00a0offline activities too, but we found\u00a0that online you could\u00a0bring up sensitive topics\u00a0in a way that you couldn\u2019t\u00a0in public or through activities. There are things I couldn\u2019t\u00a0say on the street, but I could\u00a0in a space that I could\u00a0moderate\u00a0to a great extent.<\/p>\n
Choice as\u00a0a woman\u2019s right is a principle we believe in in our work. So if someone chooses to be veiled, for instance, that\u2019s up to her, but she can\u2019t try to impose a choice she made for herself\u00a0on another person in different circumstances. We don\u2019t say anything about religion, just that a woman always has a choice. Regardless of the content of her decision, the important thing is that she ultimately decides for herself, or is at least aware of the conditions of her choice, even if these\u00a0conditions are coercive to\u00a0some degree.<\/p>\n
For example, regarding the question of abortion, we talk about the right of choice \u2013 my right to choose whether I will carry on with a pregnancy, my right to choose if I want to be a mother. The\u00a0discussions also shed light on the difficulties of getting an abortion and the stigma surrounding\u00a0a woman who has\u00a0one.<\/p>\n
The state says that this is a body that cannot be pregnant except in a particular framework \u2013 that of registered marriage \u2013 and if it gets pregnant it must proceed with it, unless the woman is sick. But say, I am pregnant and I\u2019m not sick, but I have four children and don\u2019t want a fifth, I won\u2019t be able to afford fifth, what do I do? The state\u2019s answer is that you have to carry the pregnancy to term. For society, someone who gets pregnant in what is\u00a0considered an illegitimate framework should not be able to abort as a kind of punishment \u2013 you had\u00a0sex outside of\u00a0marriage, so bear the consequences of your actions.<\/p>\n
In Girls\u2019 Revolution, we\u2019ve seen development in relation to abortion. When the topic was\u00a0first brought it up in 2013,\u00a0abortion was considered by most as completely unacceptable, but we\u2019ve noticed that now it\u2019s the page\u2019s users\u00a0who respond directly\u00a0to people writing judgemental things about it.<\/p>\n
Historically, the women in my family didn\u2019t have a problem with abortion: They\u2019d perform the procedure at home. It was ordinary. Of course, there are different issues concerning awareness and visibility for married and unmarried women, where the latter often had to manage in secret. But the women in my family were all nurses, so I don\u2019t know if that issue played a part in it.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t consider\u00a0abortion such a big deal until I came to Cairo, until I entered politics. It was only then that I realized that the problems women face aren\u2019t all the same, and how much class structures \u2013 among many other things \u2013 affected these issues.<\/p>\n
Ghadeer Ahmed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mada Masr- I\u2019ve been working on bodily rights since the revolution. Before 2011, I was a really ordinary woman. I wondered when I\u2019d get married, when [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[627],"tags":[81,600,92,635],"class_list":["post-11079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-egywomen","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-women","tag-women-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11081,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11079\/revisions\/11081"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwrcegypt.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}