Women and the Political System before 1958
From the inception of the Iraqi state, women's rights activists struggled to gain political rights for women. According to the 1925 Constitution, Iraq was to function as a constitutional monarchy, with a king, cabinet, two legislative chambers and democratic rights for the populace.
In practice, for decades, the constitutional system allowed Britain, the British-installed royal family and Sunni former Ottoman officers to effectively control formal politics. The parliamentary system intended to tie urban intellectuals to the new state. But in order to ensure that the power of the Hashemite government would not be undermined, the Constitution and election law facilitated the exclusion of all but an elite few from the seats of power. Considerable obstacles hindered many men from entering Parliament and totally blocked women from participating in formal politics.[983] Indeed, the struggle for women’s political rights repeatedly stumbled over the obstacle of the Iraqi Constitution, on which the election laws that prescribed women's disenfranchisement were based. Although the Constitution stated, in Articles 6 and 18, that all Iraqis were equal as pertaining to their rights and obligations, two other articles in the document restricted this provision to men only. Article 36 required that the Chamber of Deputies be composed on the basis of one deputy for every 20,000 male inhabitants, while Article 42 stipulated that any Iraqi male who had reached the age of 30 and who was not disqualified by certain provisions stated in the Constitution could be elected as a deputy.[984] Based on these articles, election laws restricted the right to vote and to be elected to men.[985]Throughout the Hashemite period (1921-58), women protested against their exclusion from formal politics. As early as 1924, when the Constituent Assembly was convened to discuss Iraq’s Constitution, Paulina Hassun, publisher of the first women’s magazine to appear in Iraq, appealed to the Assembly not to ignore women’s rights.
Participation in democratic life, she wrote, is not the right of men alone.[986] However, it was not until the 1950s that the government allowed women activists to conduct an organised campaign for political rights. Earlier requests to establish organisations for this purpose were rejected by the Ministry of Interior.[987] In the 1950s, organised efforts of middle-class activists for political rights intensified. But only one women’s organisation, the Iraqi Women’s Union (al-Ittihad al-Nisa’i al-‘Iraqi, established in 1945), many of whose members were wives and relatives of the ruling elite,[988] was authorised to act for women’s rights. The leftleaning League for the Defence of Women’s Rights (Rabitat al-Difa‘ ‘an Huquq al-Mar’a, founded in 1952) was unauthorised and had to conduct its activities underground.The union stepped up its efforts in the early 1950s by a variety of means. Members sent missives to successive prime ministers, heads of Parliament and party leaders. They met with senior state figures and initiated special activities and events devoted to women’s enfranchisement. In 1953, during the premiership of Muhammad Fadil al-Jamali, for example, the union succeeded in organising a special week in support of women’s political rights. The events during that week included lectures, a symposium, radio programmes and a meeting with the Prime Minister, all dedicated to women’s suffrage. Union members mobilised the press by giving interviews, providing information to the media and making sure that daily newspapers regularly covered union actions.[989] But their demands were often rejected outright as unconstitutional, and even when prime ministers expressed support, the complicated process of amending the Constitution was never begun.[990]
The Hashemite government, as I elaborated elsewhere, utilised the notion of ‘gradual modernisation' to constantly postpone activists' demands for suffrage during the 1950s.
The notion that reforms were best introduced gradually, taking into consideration the country's ‘reality and its possibilities’, [991] enabled the government to set goals before reforms could be introduced. Education was set as prerequisite for women's suffrage. But while the government demanded that women, unlike men, exhibit such ‘progress' as a prerequisite for gaining rights, it was far from doing its utmost to enable women this kind of progress. Indeed, the government's lack of effort was clearly reflected in the 1957 census, which indicated that under the monarchy, the literacy rate even among the urban, more privileged women did not exceed 10 per cent.[992] However, in the context of this chapter, it is important to note how the Constitution was used to postpone enfranchisement. It was, in fact, the mechanism of introducing amendments to the Constitution itself which served to slow down and even stave off this reform. Indeed, Article 119 of the Constitution required that any amendment of its provisions be approved by a two-thirds majority, both by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. After approval, the Chamber of Deputies had to be dissolved and a new Chamber elected. The amendment then had to be resubmitted. Again, after approval by a two-thirds majority of both houses, the amendment had to be submitted to the king for assent and publication.Amendment to the 1925 Constitution became inevitable in early 1958. The formation of the United Arab Republic prompted Hashemite Iraq to establish the Arab Union with Hashemite Jordan, which required amendments to be made to the Constitution. Now that the complicated process of changing the Constitution had to be set in motion, women activists seized the moment and mobilised with greater vigour to fight for women's political rights. In March 1958, it seemed that their efforts would finally bear fruit. On 26 and 27 March, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate voted unanimously in favour of an amendment stating that ‘the Iraqi Constitution may be amended within a year from the enforcement of this law, and this shall include the granting of political rights to educated women’.
It added that ‘if the [future] two chambers approve this [second] amendment, it shall be forwarded for Royal assent without dissolving the Chamber of Deputies [in contrast to the usual procedure]’.[993]While the Women’s Union, as well as some observers at the time, presented this as a reform,[994] the government, in utilising Article 119, actually deferred women’s citizenship rights to some later point in time. For the educated, this future seemed near; for the illiterate masses, it was more distant. The former had to wait a year before gaining their rights, but the latter would have to attain an education or wage a new campaign to amend the Constitution yet again. However, a closer look at the wording of the amendment reveals that even the educated were not given any solid assurances that they would enjoy full rights within a specified period of time. Rather than guaranteeing a future change in the Constitution, the amendment stated only that the Constitution ‘may be changed’. It did not clearly state that women would receive both the right to vote and the right to be elected, nor did it specify the level of education required for gaining rights. It ensured a swift passage of any future amendment if a future Parliament approved it. Thus, only a future Parliament could decide whether educated women should receive political rights, the minimum level of education required for political participation and the nature of the rights that women would be granted. In other words, had the ousting of the Hashemite monarchy in July 1958 not occurred, this amendment would have been just another ploy in deferring the granting of political rights to women.
It is important to emphasise that the planned amendment also ensured that, even if it were implemented, only a negligible number of women would enjoy political rights. The census conducted in Iraq in 1957 showed that the number of women aged 20 (the legal voting age) and older who had at least an elementary school education was less than 20,000. At the time, the total number of women aged 20 and older in Iraq was one and a half million. Even a broader definition of ‘educated’, one that included women who, according to the census data, could ‘read and write’ or ‘read only’, would thus have resulted in political rights for only five per cent of all women of voting age.[995]
IV.