Women’s Movement Faces Setbacks

In 1952, Dulaimi founded the Iraqi League for the Defense of Women’s Rights (later known as the Iraqi Women’s League) and served as its first president.

Since its founding, the Iraqi women's renaissance has been concerned with calling for a personal status law to replace the discriminatory laws that remained from the Ottoman era.

After years of struggle, their efforts finally succeeded, when Iraq issued a civil personal status law in 1959. This law tried to comply with international conventions concerning women's equality, without compromising the prevailing religious beliefs in society.

Despite the succession of dictatorships in Iraq, the secular system employed by those regimes protected the women's movements and did not suppress them. However, when the regime of late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched its famous "faith campaign" in 1991, things changed completely.

The political regime sought to regain legitimacy after the defeat of the Kuwait War via a union with tribal forces and fundamentalist religious groups. This resulted in a decline in social enlightenment movements, first and foremost feminist activism demanding equality for women. This activism contradicted the nature of patriarchal authority in the tribal structure and the religious beliefs of fundamentalist groups.

After 2003, the women's current did not have the opportunity to thrive, in light of emergence of Islamic parties whose fundamentalist principles did not believe in the equality of women and men. These parties considered feminist movements a type of Masonic activity that was imported from the corrupt West.

It is very clear that the beliefs of decision-makers have an obvious impact on the path of society. When the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Iraq was taken charge of by Ibtehal Qasid al-Zaidi in 2011 — a woman with a religious background who opposed the freedom of women — and when she stated that she was against equality between men and women and believed in the necessity of the guardianship and power of men over women, then what chance did women's rights institutes in the country have for growth and prosperity?