HAS ANY WORLD LEADER EVER DONE MORE TO HELP WOMEN?:

Bush's Feminist War: Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Elinor Burkett, author of So Many Enemies, So Little Time. An American Woman in All the Wrong Places. (Jamie Glazov, July 1, 2004, FrontPageMagazine.com)

FP: As someone who was once on the Left, tell us how your travels through the Muslim world challenged some of your ideological beliefs.

Burkett: Let me start out with some background. As you clearly know, I spent most of my adult life (I'm 57) thinking of myself as on the Left. Not a liberal Democrat. In my generation of '60s activists, liberal was a dirty word. We thought of them as those establishment types who thought that America's problems could be fixed with a band-aid. We were trying to ask harder questions about the system, about the balance of power among the nation's various constituencies. And in some sense, I think I'm still asking those questions.

If you think of the women who reinvigorated public discussion and political activity around women's issues in the late 1960s and early 1970s as Second Wave feminists, that was me. I helped establish two Women's Studies Programs. I taught Women's History. I was on the front lines of a dozen battles to defend women's rights.

Then, in August 2001, I took a Fulbright Professorship to teach journalism in Kyrgyzstan. I wasn't looking for news. I was taking a break from reality and had seized on Kyrgyzstan as the most remote possible country - one where the word chad had never been uttered, one which never would appear on any CNN map.

Two weeks after my arrival, the Embassy called late one evening and advised me to turn on the TV and STAY HOME. About 10 days later, they called for a voluntary evacuation of Americans since the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, has been very active in Kyrgyzstan.

At that point, reality had come to me, so I couldn't go home. Rather, I plunged into the new reality at the intersection where Reagan's Evil Empire met Bush's Axis of Evil. In late October 2001, I flew into Kabul. Over my Christmas break, my husband and I went to Iran. The day after our return, Bush declared the Axis of Evil. Since I'd already been to one of the three, I decided to try for the other two. I never made it to N. Korea, but that May I spent three weeks in Iraq. Over the intervening months, I traveled and lectured in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

No matter where I went, it was impossible for me to escape the reality that ALL of my experiences were being shaped more thoroughly by my gender than by my nationality. Sure, people reacted to me as an American - mostly to ask if I could help them get visas or to ask if some silly nonsense they'd read in the press (U.S. troops being required to pray daily to a pamphlet filled with photos of Bush and his Cabinet, or the U.S. plotting to deprive the Russians of gold medals at the Winter Olympics.) But I was suddenly operating in a part of the world in which my gender was foremost in almost every encounter.

In Afghanistan, I found it difficult to walk down the street because I didn't understand that women always scurried around in their burqas because they were always expected to get out of the way of any man on the sidewalk. I met a woman who'd been crippled by a beating from the Vice and Virtue Police because - unaccustomed to seeing out of a burqa - she's tripped on the street and exposed a little ankle. I interviewed extraordinary women who'd been active professionals before the rise of the Taliban who'd endured their confinement by addicting themselves to sedatives or by abusing their husbands and kids.

In Iran, I got on a bus one afternoon and was directed to the back of the bus, which is where women are expected to ride. In Turkmenistan, I heard about arranged marriages to uncles, about women who refused to agree to such marriages being driven out by their families. In Kyrgyzstan, I learned about hymen replacement surgery - surely an amazing symbol of the plight of young women caught between modernization and tradition. If these women couldn't produce bloody sheets on the night of their weddings, they would, as a minimum, be shunned, at a maximu, be killed. In Iraq, urban women had watched as Saddam became more religious, and as short-sleeve dresses disappeared from the stores and women were pushed out of public life.

So when I came home, I fully expected the feminist movement to be up in arms, demanding that the U.S. government do more to defend these women, marching on the United Nations in defense of their sisters.

Instead, I found NOW working on its annual Love Your Body Day. And if I didn't hit a wall earlier, I hit it several weeks ago during the March for Women's Lives. Whoopi Goldberg declared that "there's a war going on, a war against women."

This ties in to two of the essays from yesterday: WHEN THEO MET NEO and AS PETER BERKOWITZ WAS SAYING. Except for rhetorically, the Left seems to have completely abandoned the struggle for human rights abroad.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 1, 2004 9:37 PM