In the early days after the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Islamist movements and parties appeared to be the winners of the political transformation. This opened new opportunities for activism and political participation for Islamist men and women. The political organizing of the Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood and Ennahda women in Tunisia before, during, and after the Arab Spring provides a significant case for addressing the gap in the literature on Islamist women's political organizing and agency. Moreover, it addresses the lack of scholarly attention to the Muslim Sisterhood and Ennahda women and the agency they manifest in their sociopolitical activism. Relying on primary and secondary interviews with these activists, this article traces the framing strategies, activism, and roles of Islamist women in Egypt and Tunisia. In both cases, we argue that government repression and backlash against Islamist movements is a shared experience and a central topic of identification for Islamist women. Islamist women in Tunisia and Egypt became more visible in the aftermath of the uprisings and reached into decision-making bodies such as a parliament when their countries were on the path toward democracy. Women from the two groups highlight democracy, freedom, human rights, and women's rights to frame their activism.
Do women candidates in the United States more openly provide the specific details of their policy preferences and make clear their political ideology? Previous research supports all manner of conflicting expectations regarding gender and campaign communication strategies. Here, with an eye toward offering evidence on the degree to which candidates make clear their issue positions, we consider how more than 1,300 candidates running in the 2016 elections from fifteen randomly chosen states answered voter guide questions. We do so both to better understand the murky theoretical relationship between gender and communication styles and to offer insight into the practical realities of how women run for office. Ultimately our findings support the notion that women run for office differently, offering less transparency of their issue positions than men. The implication, consistent with a theory of conditional political ambition, is that women weigh more seriously the decision to run for office and, thus, run more sophisticated campaigns when they do pursue office.
This chapter explores the ways in which political institutions in three countries—Egypt, Sri Lanka, and Argentina—interact with religious and cultural conceptions of motherhood to provide women with social authority, often through respectability politics. State and societal dynamics in each case forced women to bargain with patriarchy in order to secure political gains using—and therefore reproducing—respectability politics. In each of these three cases from different geographical regions of the world, the authors’ analysis has revealed how women’s “bargaining with patriarchy” by employing patriarchal discourses on respectable femininity and maternal identities enabled some women to engage, challenge, and resist the state. By using respectability politics centered around maternalism and the institution of motherhood, women have helped to advance democratization by challenging human rights abuses and/or furthered women’s participation in politics. With these three cases, the chapter demonstrates how, in certain political and cultural contexts where religion and women’s roles as the foundation of the family significantly structure the lives of women, motherhood has been utilized as a powerful tool for political mobilization and contestation.
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