Women of Kuwait Win Again

In Momentum, I wrote about the women of Kuwait using their blackberries and cell phones to email the Kuwaiti legislation in favor of full women’s suffrage.  Much to the surprise of the men of Kuwait, laws allowing women the right to vote and the right to run for office were passed in the spring of 2005. This past weekend, four women were elected to the Kuwaiti legislature!

My friend Rochelle Lefkowitz describes this historic event this way on Huffington Post:

This past weekend, Kuwait’s civic glass ceiling got a seismic crack when four women won seats in that small Gulf state’s parliamentary elections. News reports said their victory marked the first time that women won parliamentary seats since given the right to vote and run for office in 2005.

Amidst the bigger, scarier goings on in the Gulf, this transformation barely registered. Unfortunately, the seemingly objective phrase “given the right to vote” is one of many examples of “credit theft” that silently seeps from headlines into textbooks, fueling the fearful helplessness, in realms from work to governance, that living Code Orange inflames.

It’s fine by me if it barely registered in the Gulf. Let the men take their naps and assume that the status quo continues, even though it never does. And please don’t tell them, but soon they’re going to wake up and find ten women in their midst, and then twenty-five, and then a women foreign minister and a woman prime minister. Whether the men of Kuwait (or India or Iran or Japan or the United States) like it or not, whether they’re ready or not, the women of Kuwait have their blackberies and they know how to use them!