MAPPING JORDANIAN WOMEN’S ACTIVISM

Although there is a long history of women’s activism in Jordan, scholarship on the topic often takes the year 1989 as a starting point for the emergence

of civil society organizations and political movements in the kingdom. This period is discussed in relation to democratizing and liberalizing trends initi-ated under the auspices of King Hussein that continued with the succession to power in 1999 of his son, King Abdullah II. This ten- year period is marked by the suspension of martial law, the drafting and issuance of the National Charter in 1991, the legalization of political parties, and the resumption of three rounds of parliamentary elections in 1989, 1993, and 1997 (Lucas 2008).

Together, these initiatives, which are also characterized by a period of intense regional and global change, helped project Jordan as a state committed to a form of controlled democratization or restricted liberalization (Brand 1999;

Nanes 2003; Robinson 1998). In this environment, civil society actors, includ-ing women’s groups and organizations, often organized within the shadow of the state. They thus emerged, lobbied, and functioned in relation to the state’s regulatory liberalizing aims and efforts and worked in tandem with its policed democratizing projects.

Significantly, calls for social and legal reforms were carefully calibrated in relation to the ability of the state to realize them while satisfying the desires of its various tribal and religious constituencies and guaranteeing the regime’s own survival (Wiktorowicz 2000). Civil society groups therefore worked within an environment that ceded some ground to their demands while restricting their power to engage issues of a political nature through impos-ing restrictions on the press and civil liberties (Nanes 2003). As Peter Fergu-son notes, “Civil society evolved in direct response to institutionalized state practices that granted calculated political freedoms, rather than emerging as a distinct and opposing actor” (2017, 60). These organizations continued to urge for reforms that the state actively or tacitly either encouraged, mitigated, or condemned.

Highly attuned to the political reality of limited reform that structures political and social change in Jordan, the women’s movement has undergone significant developments in the past few decades. Writing on this history, Ibtesam Al- Atiyat (2012), a member of the National Committee for Jordanian Women’s Affairs, divides women’s activism in the kingdom into three over-lapping historical and political phases: “the emergence phase” (1944–48), “the equality phase” (1954–70s), and the “‘renaissance phase’” (1970s onwards). In her account, Al- Atiyat argues that the first phase of women’s activism in Jor-dan was led by elite and upper- class women. In its early state- building phase, university- educated women from the middle and upper classes, who enjoyed important positions in the kingdom through their kin and marital relation-ships, advanced a “charity- oriented” approach to women’s rights (135). This included the promotion of women’s right to literacy and education, a goal that was achieved through providing literacy training to women from poorer

socioeconomic backgrounds. As Nicola Pratt (2015), in her account of Jorda-nian women’s activism, notes, “Women’s involvement in charitable and welfare activities has been a socially- acceptable way for women to enter the public sphere, which historically has been reserved for men only.”

Women’s slow but steady entry into the public sphere and its inscription as a space that included women in sometimes reluctant and nominal ways ushered in the second phase of women’s activism. In describing the tension between nominal inclusion and full participation and equal rights, Joseph Massad describes this history thus:

On the one hand, political ideology seems to have led to and informed the codification of women’s status as inferior in the private sphere with mini-mal state intervention, and a steady expansion of women’s presence in the public sphere as nominally equal citizen- nationals with state protection. On the other hand, juridical rights (foremost among which are constitutional rights and personal status laws) inform an ideology of legal equality and expansion of rights, which many feminists and their state backers adhere to, and an ideology of traditionalization calling for circumscribing women’s rights and their presence in the public sphere and keeping the state out of the home, which secular and Islamist antifeminists and their state backers adhere to. (2001, 98)

Jordanian women activists therefore situated their efforts to attain equal rights within a national framework that was, at times, attuned to the Palestinian liberation struggle and the spirit of Arab nationalism. While they were some-times constrained by this nationalist agenda, women still lobbied for the right to vote and to run for public office. And although some of these demands were fulfilled in limited ways, such as the preliminary granting of the right to vote only to literate and educated women, activist campaigns sought to extend equal citizenship rights and privileges to both men and women regardless of education level in 1955 (Al- Atiyat 2012).

Building on two these preliminary stages that were marked also by vari-ous internal and external difficulties, Al- Atiyat shows how the third phase of women’s activism in Jordan “witnessed a ‘renaissance phase’” that was charac-terized by a significant growth in women’s activism in more visible, sustained, and encompassing ways (2012, 138). In 1974 women officially gained the right to vote, a right they would not be able to practice until 1989 with the end of martial law and the resumption of parliamentary elections (Massad 2001; Pratt 2015). The founding of the Arab Women’s Union (AWU) in 1954 was also an important milestone in this period of women’s activism, with the union

bring-ing together women from all over the kbring-ingdom to collectively call for their rights. Women’s groups sought funding and recognition from the state while also forming connections with the global community through attendance at international conferences. In an attempt to limit the influence and reach of the women’s union, the state set up the General Federation of Jordanian Women in 1981 to both coordinate and set the women’s agenda during this period in ways that cast the kingdom in a positive and modern light. The regime thus aimed to monopolize women’s issues and discussions surrounding them. The success of this effort was limited because of the structure of the organization and its inability to attract membership, as Al- Atiyat demonstrates. However, this move shows the desire of the state to “channel women’s activism” away from civil society organizations and its grasp of the significance of women’s rights issues for its own survival (Brand 2003, 165).

An important feature that also characterized this period (and that contin-ues to shape women’s politics in Jordan today) is the royal family’s support of particular women’s issues. This includes leading women’s organizations, as in the case of Princess Basma Bint Talal (the late King Hussein’s sister), who has served with a number of women’s organizations in Jordan, including as chairperson of the Jordanian National Commission for Women (JNCW), as president of the Jordanian National Forum for Women (JNFW), and as honorary president of the General Federation of Jordanian Women (GFJW).⁸ Similarly, Queen Rania plays a visible role in a select set of women’s issues, including a focus on education for girls and teacher training. In an effort to promote women’s right to work, the queen has set up organizations that train professional women as teachers and as craft makers. She has also focused on issues of family health, domestic violence, and children.⁹ The queen’s agenda often oscillates between a neoliberal and developmental focus on women’s empowerment and discourses of political and economic inclusion and spo-radic efforts to create change in areas that provoke debate and contestation in the country, such as reforms to the Personal Status Law and the National-ity Law.¹⁰ The involvement of royal family members in the women’s move-ment in Jordan can be understood as a form of “embryonic Hashemite state feminism” and as an extension of the regime’s efforts to take a leading part in simultaneously defining, setting, and limiting the agenda for women’s activ-ism in the country (Brand 2003, 165). They are also, often, staged spectacles that demand recognition of Jordan’s efforts to comply with international law and displays of Jordan’s commitment to modern and yet traditional values that align with Islamic teachings. Importantly, women’s organizations have sometimes actively sought royal support in order to guarantee the state’s back-ing of their agendas and to minimize its intervention in their affairs. In a

state like Jordan, where the dividing line between the regime and the crown is thin, royal support ensures a form of legitimation for women’s issues that are deemed divisive or sensitive.

Despite the difficult political terrain around women’s rights, royal fam-ily members have made public stances against gender violence and crimes that are known as honor crimes. In 2000 Prince Ali (the half- brother of King Abdullah) and Prince Ghazi (the king’s cousin) led 5,000 demonstrators in a protest against honor killing laws. Prior to this protest, Rana Husseini reports that the late King Hussein and his wife Queen Noor had voiced their opposi-tion to this crime, arguing that it is “foreign to Islam” (2000, 20). Queen Rania and King Abdullah have also spoken against the honor crime publicly. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, where she was explicitly asked about her position, the queen stated, “Honour killings are a terrible and totally unac-ceptable and unjustifiable practice. We still see cases every year in Jordan, and it is an issue we take extremely seriously” (qtd in James 2016). The queen’s stated opposition against the honor crime in international media comes at a time when international attention has uncritically attributed this form of vio-lence to the “traditional” or “Bedouin” character of Jordanian society. While internationally the queen has used her fame and power to articulate her clear opposition to the crime, she and the royal family at large have carefully nego-tiated their positions at home for fear of angering conservative members of Jordanian society who reject such state- led interventions, including tribal and religious sectors of society that the monarchy has relied on for support. Writ-ing on the women’s movement in Jordan and Palestine, Frances Hasso notes that “the regime also legally and discursively reinforced a form of patriarchal social organization that subordinated men to women in their socioeconomic and religious groups because its stability partly relied on alliance with conser-vative tribal and religious forces” (2005, 18).

This truncated account of women’s activism in Jordan demonstrates that, from its inception, the women’s movement sought to define an agenda that advocated for social change by securing citizenship rights for Jordanian women and men. Women who organized in Jordan came from different class backgrounds, but the movement has also been dominated by women from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds who have pushed for social changes that have sometimes alienated segments of the Jordanian population.¹¹ Never completely homogenous, the women’s movement sought to alter the status of women by working in collaborative and creative ways with the state. It thus set its agendas around certain legal, social, and political benchmarks that it sought to reach incrementally. Caught between attaining state- backed reforms and the risk of alienating conservative elements within Jordanian society,

women’s activism in Jordan has operated in an environment where negotia-tions with the state are a constant part of everyday politics and where state feminist projects are the norm and not the exception.¹²

Historical records of women’s activism explore these imbrications, show-ing how women’s organizations have worked together with the state to gain particular rights and privileges that include, for example, the establishment of a parliamentary woman quota, the gaining of the right to divorce (or khulu’), and the right to be informed of a husband’s decision to remarry or to take a second wife.¹³ In addition to these gains, in 2003 the state raised the marriage age from fifteen for girls and sixteen for boys to eighteen for both sexes, a deci-sion it would reverse in 2017 at the same time that article 308 was repealed.¹⁴ Through long- term investments in the education sector, the state was able to halve illiteracy rates of girls and women throughout the kingdom, an achieve-ment that is often assumed to indicate Jordanian women’s true integration into the labor force and achievement of economic access and equality (Adely 2009). Occurring in a short two- decade period, these local reforms were also backed at the international level in Jordan’s signing of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1992. Like many other Arab states, however, Jordan placed a number of res-ervations on some articles of the convention, including ones pertaining to equal rights on nationality, movement, and marriage decisions (El Muhtaseb, Brown, and Kayyali 2016). The state’s delayed publication of the convention in the Official Gazette until 2007 gestured toward the complex terrain that the issue of women’s rights occupies in Jordan and the government’s desire to bal-ance competing local claims of authenticity and tradition with global calls for human rights and women’s equality.

As state- backed reforms, these changes were (and continue to be) of immense importance to Jordanian society, having contributed to the reshap-ing of the state’s policies and practices and the day- to- day lives of its citizenry.

Undoubtedly, many of the achievements of the women’s movements such as the right to work and the right to vote impacted both Jordanian men and women and the workings of the Jordanian state, and yet their adoption did not automatically translate into calculable or immediate gains for Jordanian women from all socioeconomic backgrounds. While the women’s movement in Jordan has succeeded at fulfilling aspects of its agenda that align well with the Jordanian state’s national efforts, these changes have not cured the vari-ous social, cultural, and legal problems that Jordanian women—and Jordanian society at large—continue to face. My aim in listing these reforms is not to romanticize their occurrence or to overstate their significance in reconstitut-ing or transformreconstitut-ing the position of Jordanian women as subjects of the

Jorda-nian state. Rather, I wish to show how legal reforms and celebratory accounts of rights- based and juridical gains underpin the structuring logics of women’s activism in Jordan. They are the benchmarks against which women’s activism in Jordan measures both its successes and failures and through which it both defines and calibrates its relationship with the state.

THE TRANSNATIONAL TERRAIN OF RIGHTS