Reflecting on what women’s movements looked like this year, Tess Lowery from Global Citizen shares what she has learned from the 13 feminist protests that took place in 2022, from India to El Salvador.
Tess Lowery / Global Citizen
“We have to march.”
On Nov. 9, 2016, the day after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a retired lawyer from Maui, Hawaii called Teresa Shook, wrote a Facebook post and hit send.
Less than three months later, that Facebook post had helped to ignite a smoldering discontent that culminated in the largest single-day protest possibly in US history: the Women’s March of 2017. Since then, we’ve made great strides from the legalization of abortion in Ireland to Saudi Arabia lifting its ban on female drivers.
Despite this progress, we’re actually further away from gender equality now than we were in 2017. According to a report published by UN Women in Sept. 2022, it could take close to 300 years to achieve full gender equality at the current rate of progress (read: too slow).
Why? A global pandemic, conflict, climate change, and harsh backlash against progress for women’s rights. We gain an inch, then we’re pushed back a mile.
But women and girls are fighting back, their anger and resilience exploding like lava in the sky across continents. This year alone, the Carnegie Endowment (a global protest tracker) notes 13 major protests around the world relating to women’s issues. Compare that to 2019 when they recorded just one.
However, it’s important to note that this is not a woman’s fight. It’s on all of us, however we may feel about the F-word, to use our voices, positions of privilege, or proximity to power to change the world and achieve gender equality for all people, everywhere. Nothing less will do.
Having reflected on what women’s movements looked like this year, here’s what I learned from the 13 feminist protests that took place in 2022, from India to El Salvador.
1- Liberation isn’t about how much or how little skin you show; it’s the freedom to choose.
In January 2022, college student Muskan Khan was attempting to hand in an assignment when she was accosted by a group of Hindu men wearing saffron scarves — the color of India’s ruling pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The men heckled her as she made her way across the school grounds, demanding she take off her face covering. Instead of complying, Khan shouts back “Allahu Akbar” as she punches her fist in the air.
Khan became the poster girl for the movement against the religious divide in Karnataka, a southwestern Indian state, after a group of girls began protesting outside their government-run school when they were denied entry to the classroom for wearing Muslim religious attire.
The protests then spread to other cities including in Delhi where scores of students took to the capital’s streets holding placards and shouting slogans to express their anger at the ban.
Just under nine months later, on Sept. 16, 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, was arrested by the so-called morality police in Tehran, Iran, for “incorrectly” wearing her hijab and allegedly beaten to death.
Protests erupted around the country with women taking to the streets to dance, cut off their hair and burn their hijabs. The unrest has continued to swell into an uprising that has become the most significant in Iran since the 1979 revolution.
Whether it’s the right to wear the hijab or the right not to wear it, the right to wear trousers or the right to sport a bikini, the fight is the same. It’s the fight against patriarchal oppression. Liberation isn’t tied to a particular garment, or how much or how little skin women show; it’s the freedom to make choices about our own bodies and what we clothe them in — and it’s a fight that is still raging around the world.
2- The path to gender equality isn’t linear.
While some us might have assumed that the painful, inching progress of feminist victories was a one-directional line on the graph toward gender equality, 2022 revealed how rapidly those victories, and the rights they represented, could be reversed.
In countries as diverse as Afghanistan and the US, women and girls now have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers did.
On March 24, 2022 ― the date the education ministry had set for classes to resume — thousands of jubilant girls across Afghanistan had flocked to their learning institutions. But just hours into the first day, the Taliban announced a shock policy reversal that ordered girls’ secondary schools to close, undermining two decades of educational and economic progress.
Despite the great risk of protest in Afghanistan, people gathered in the capital city, Kabul, the following Saturday with chants to “Open the schools! Justice, justice!”
In the year since the Taliban returned to power, they have also issued various orders restricting the freedom of women — barring them from most government jobs, secondary education, and from traveling more than 70 km without a male guardian.
Then, on Friday, June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark ruling that had safeguarded the right to abortion across the US. Since then, at least 13 states have banned abortion meaning that Americans in these states now have fewer human rights protections than authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia.
From beneath the Statue of Liberty to Croatia, the shockwaves of this decision were felt around the world — not least because of the potential implications for abortion rights around the globe. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to make their voices heard with a mixture of rage, grief, and desperation.
I knew that the fight for gender equality was an uphill battle, but 2022 showed me that it’s not just continuously uphill; it’s hilly. Despite vertiginous mountainous peaks such as the election of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to sit on the US Supreme Court and an increasing number of nations adopting feminist foreign policies, this is a fight that also comes with its abject troughs.
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