Who’s afraid of women power?

History and a review of its recorded autocratic leaders reveal them to be sexists. Napoléon Bonaparte is said to have decriminalized the murder of unfaithful wives.  Benito Mussolini is known to have said that women “never created anything.”

Thankfully, the 20th century has eclipsed such remarks with the vast improvements in women’s equality in most parts of the world. Women’s movements have triumphed by winning the women’s right to vote, expanded access to reproductive health care, education and economic opportunity. However, in recent times, authoritarian leaders have been eroding these successes, threatening the decades of progress in the women’s movement.

That “misogyny and authoritarianism are not just common comorbidities but mutually reinforcing evils” is the recurring theme of the Foreign Affairs essay in its March/April 2022 issue entitled “Revenge of the Patriarchs: Why Autocrats Fear Women.” It is bylined by Erica Chenoweth, professor at Harvard University, and Zoe Marks, lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Today’s examples of authoritarian leaders who have contributed to the “patriarchal backlash” in the world today include China’s Xi Jinping, who has silenced women accusers of sexual assault by powerful men. He has also excluded women from the Politburo’s powerful Standing Committee.  Russia’s Vladimir Putin is said to be rolling back women’s reproductive rights and limiting women’s participation in public life, instead promoting women’s traditional roles.

North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has led women to flee the country and seek refuge overseas at roughly three times the rate of men. Egypt’s Abdel Fatah el-Sisi has introduced a bill reasserting men’s paternity rights, their right to the practice of polygamy and their right to influence whom their female relatives would marry. In Saudi Arabia, a man’s approval is still needed for a woman’s marriage or for her to access health rights. In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s victory “has erased 20 years of progress” on women’s access to education and representation in public office and the workforce.

The situation is no less bleak in the rest of the world with the rise of more authoritarian-type leaders. Georgetown University’s Women, Peace and Security Index notes that the implementation of gender equality laws has slowed down, as well as “gains in women’s educational attainment and representation in national parliaments.”

It also reports that intimate partner or domestic violence has increased, with significant increases in feminicide – a first time for me to hear this word – in Honduras, Mexico, Turkey.

The COVID-19 pandemic has aggravated these trends worldwide, leaving women no choice but to leave the workforce to take on additional unpaid care, restricting their already limited access to health care and education. And sadly, “limiting their options for escaping abuse.”

This assault on women’s rights coincides with a broader assault on democracy. The essay reveals that a study by Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy Project at the University of Gottenburg reports that the last 15 years have seen an authoritarian resurgence. It reported that relatively new democracies such as Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey have slid into autocracy or in that direction. Countries considered partially authoritarian a decade ago, like Russia, have completely become total autocracies.

What does it look like in some of the world’s oldest known democracies, like France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States? It has not been spared, as antidemocratic sentiment is present and growing in established political parties.

It is thus a pattern that the rollback of women’s equality is happening at the same time as the rise of authoritarianism. While political scientists have established the relationship between women’s civil rights and democracy, they are only belatedly recognizing that women’s rights is a “precondition for the latter,” democracy.

We thus see that aspiring autocrats and authoritarian rulers have every good reason to fear women’s political participation.

Studies reveal that when women participate in mass movements, these are more likely to succeed and significantly, more likely to lead to a more egalitarian democracy. Thus, “fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders – and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist.”

It is not such a simple matter of linking women’s rights to democracy, of course. But understanding the “relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding” is crucial if one is to fight against both.

Scholars of democracy have made a case for the empowerment of women as an outcome of democratization or “even a function of modernization and economic development.”

It has to be remembered that women fought for their own representation and interests through numerous suffrage movements and women’s rights campaigns which ultimately redounded to the strength of democracy in general.

The women’s struggle is far from over and though historic gains have been made over the last century, these have not been shared equally among all women. As feminists themselves have acknowledged, the biggest gains have benefitted elite women, “often white and Western ones.”

It is noted that in the past seven decades, women’s demands for inclusion have bolstered democratic transitions, especially when women were on the frontlines of mass movements.  Historical records show that democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, Latin America and, closer to home, Southeast Asia during the 1980s and 1990s were made possible by popular mass movements in which women played significant key roles.

Seen in that light, the role of today’s women in effecting reforms and preserving democracy becomes crucial.

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Write Things’ September Offerings via Zoom:

Sept. 17: “Writing in Challenging Times” for adults with award-winning novelist Glenn Diaz, 2-3:30 pm. His first novel “The Quiet Ones” (Ateneo University Press) won the Palanca Grand Prize and the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle. His forthcoming second novel “Yñiga” was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize. Sept. 24: Young Writers’ Hangout with facilitator Sofi Bernedo, 2-3 pm.

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