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SAIS Review 20.2 (2000) 167-181


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Review Essay

Eritrean Women: Defending National Borders and Challenging Gender Boundaries

Asgedet Stefanos

Figures

(Re)Defining Roles

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Photo essay on the lives of Eritrean women by documentary photographer Cheryl Hatch, conducted under the auspices of a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism from September to December 1999.

As the most recent peace effort reached an impasse and finally broke down in May, Eritrea and Ethiopia have resumed their ferocious war. With mounting casualties and hundreds of thousands of Eritreans having already been displaced, Eritrea seeks to end a war that has dampened a heartening period of national reconstruction begun in 1993, after securing its hard-fought independence from Ethiopia. 1 Renewed hostilities are depleting national resources and have required mobilizing every able-bodied person into the army, 40 percent of whom are women. 2 It is within this struggle to establish and maintain nationhood that a profound shift occurred that expanded Eritrean women's role in politics, the economy, the family, and education. These gains were extraordinary [End Page 167] and required overcoming significant resistance by some men and conservative cultural forces. They were shaped by a progressive and imaginative male national liberation leadership that generated effective policies against traditional patriarchy, and by a large number of women who seized opportunities to expand their rights and to enter previously forbidden realms of social activity. These breakthroughs in enhancing female equality gained momentum and legitimacy because Eritrean women have so clearly contributed to the successful liberation liberation struggle and current battle to sustain national integrity.

Cheryl Hatch, whose photos I review in this essay, is an independent documentary photographer. Her project in Eritrea is a component of a larger body of work that documents the consequences of war in Africa and the Middle East. In November and December 1999, Hatch met and photographed women in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, a number of other towns and villages, as well as at the frontlines. Her photographs disclose the everyday life of these women as the ferocious war between Eritrea and Ethiopia ebbs and flows. While she was in Eritrea, she and I met and discussed her work at the twentieth anniversary of the National Union of Eritrean Women's Conference in Asmara in November 1999. My background as an Eritrean woman and an academic enables me to appreciate and identify the social context out of which these portraits emerge. To fully understand these portraits and the contemporary status of Eritrean women, one must appreciate the thirty-year liberation struggle against Ethiopia that resulted in Eritrea's independence.

Eritrean Women and the National Liberation Struggle

Haile Selassie's unilateral incorporation of Eritrea in 1961 3 prompted the organized struggle led by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), which was sustained until independence was achieved in 1993. 4 The EPLF focused on changing an anachronistic repressive social order while waging the independence war. Initially, women were involved in limited realms of the nationalist effort as members of secret cells behind enemy lines, and as providers of safe houses for combatants in the countryside and cities. By the early 1970s, women's activities had already expanded to include intelligence gathering, fundraising, and transporting military equipment. In 1974, women political activists, mostly from the universities, unilaterally joined the previously all-male EPLF organization. Soon after, the EPLF [End Page 168] formalized women's right to membership and female political activists quickly demonstrated a willingness to serve as combatants at the frontlines. By the time the conflict ended in 1991, women represented about 30 percent of the frontline fighters and one third of the EPLF's 98,000 members.

Traditionally, all-male councils of elders had run Eritrean villages. Women had no formal role in public life--it was a male preserve. The EPLF's opening of its ranks to women, without any limitation on the kind of activities that females could undertake, was thus a momentous event. Women's involvement in the EPLF, politically and militarily, was unprecedented. They participated in local and regional political structures, both in liberated areas and...

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