Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land, and Community in Iraq

4. Gendered Challenges: Women Navigating Patriliny

102 4 Gendered Challenges Women Navigating Patriliny [W]e can say that a woman has the right to be proud of her social status and prestige in Kurdish society. She is equal with men in most rights, and in fact, there are certain rights granted exclusively to women. These rights are entitled to the woman as long as she maintains her virginity and chastity. —Government of Iraq (1973) publication, Dohuk after March 11, 15 Historic shifts have taken place in the gender system of Iraqi Kurdistan. While the Iraqi government during much of the twentieth century promoted girls’ education and encouraged women to come into the public sphere (Al-Ali 2007), those efforts had little impact on Iraqi Kurdistan. Since 1991, however, education rates for both males and females in Kurdistan have increased significantly. In the past, a son was much more likely to attend school long enough to achieve literacy than a daughter. By the turn of the twenty-first century, in most families both sons and daughters were attending school long enough to become literate, and longer. Illiteracy rates were estimated at 18.4 percent in 2011 (Kurdistan Regional Government Ministry of Planning 2011:132). Female education rates (along with education rates overall) have steadily increased in Kurdistan (Kurdistan Regional Government Ministry of Planning 2011). This has created stark intergenerational contrasts. I have observed that both nonliterate older women and highly educated younger women are now found within many families. Many women are called upon to maintain a difficult balance in a Kurdistan that is connecting to the world. I argue that the logic of patriliny impels women to cloister themselves and their male kin to enforce their GENDERED CHALLENGES: WOMEN NAVIGATING PATRILINY 103 cloistering. At the same time, women’s observations and experiences as a part of the new and globalized world invites them to exercise their “freedom” as “modern” women.1 In recent years, significant numbers of women in the Kurdistan Region have begun to drive. Before the turn of the millennium, the only female drivers in the small cities, towns, and villages of Kurdistan were employees of NGOs and UN agencies, and most of them were not from the local area. Women drivers were very rare in Kurdistan’s two major cities, Hewler and Silemani; in fact, I do not recall seeing any local female drivers in either of those cities before 2000, although people have told me that there were a few. Now, in the second decade of the century, the streets are still overwhelmingly male-dominated, but a few women drivers can be seen here and there, and this is new. When a woman drives, especially when she drives by herself, she has much more personal freedom than when she is reliant on others to drive her. The standard mobility options for Kurdistani women include walking, being driven by a male relative or household employee, or taking a taxi or bus. (They do not include the bicycle, about which I will have more to say later.) Especially for girls and women of child-bearing age, the various PHOTO 4.1 Girls studying to become teachers of English, Zakho, 1998. (Photo by the author.) transportation options usually involve a tight schedule or supervision, so that her family knows where she was (in the taxi or bus, which took her to an agreed-upon destination) and what she was doing (riding) during a given block of time. A woman who drives a car can drive somewhere to have an illicit sexual relationship. This was a point made to me several times in the 1990s when I probed people as to why women should be prevented from driving, as they apparently were then. People would not say so openly, but they hinted at it, until, in several cases, I asked: “Do you mean that if a woman were able to drive a car, then people would wonder if she was driving it somewhere to have sex with someone who was not her husband?” I said this only to a few people I was close to, who I thought would be tolerant of the directness of my question. “Yes, that’s it!” was always the answer of my embarrassed interlocutor. Many added that a girl or woman who drove would surely feel şerim, an emotion prompted by the scornful gaze of others in the community, or at least the perception that a gaze was...