Abstract
literature on citizenship and gender in the Arab world highlights the importance of women's relationship to the state by focusing on the way state policies, laws, and institutions have produced gender inequalities that reinforce the patriarchal character of society, i.e., its privileging of men over women (Joseph 2000:3-30; UNDP 2002). Paradoxically, this literature silent on the discussion of the role that Arab women have or have not played in the debates of these rights and the difference that their mobilization and organization (or its lack thereof) made to their content. In this article, I argue that the power of the state in Arab societies, coupled with the absence or weakness of independent women's organizations, explains the slow progress made toward deepening women's citizenship rights. In the attempt to develop this particular argument, I will offer a historical overview of the roles that the state and/or women have played in pushing women's developmental citizenship rights over the last sixty years. These rights, associated with the economic and political development of a society, include women's access to education, health care, employment, and political participation. They lay at the heart of what the UN has identified since 1991 as the central basis of human development, whose goal is to enlarge the range of people's choices and to make development more democratic and participatory (UNDP 1991:1). The first section of the article will show that following decoloniza-
Published Version
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