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The State of the Women’s Movement in Eritrea Sondra Hale Introduction In the pantheon of women's successful participation in liberation movements, Eritreans would rank near the top. Many of us who research women and social movements have been watching Eritrean women very closely. In the Eritrean case, where women participated in one of the most protracted conflicts in the twentieth century and in an even deadlier second war spilling over into the twenty-first century, we have another opportunity theoretically to note the differences between egalitarian gender relations during a conflict and the conditions for women in civilian life; for example, women's transition from the status of "fighter" to civilian (or demobilized fighter).1 Here I present a series of six generalizations about the situation for women in Eritrea and about their participation in the national struggle (1961–1991) that is intended to serve as background to the discussion to follow: 1. Eritrean society—half Christian, half Muslim—is highly conservative with regard to the cultural positioning of women. 2. In contrast, however, during the first liberation war (30 years), the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) developed one of the most enlightened views of women that we have seen anywhere in the world. [End Page 155] 3. EPLF was a syncretistic, independent Marxist-oriented guerrilla movement—a secular, multi-ethnic vanguard party. 4. Women participated fully—not as substitutes but as full-fledged citizens of revolutionary Eritrea—eventually comprising more than 30 percent of the fighting force and serving in all capacities; this is not the usual history of militaries, where women have more commonly been used selectively and mostly in jobs seen as extensions of their domestic labor. 5. The National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW, or HAMADE) was a highly developed women's organization that was instrumental in crafting a women's agenda during the military struggle and was poised to play a leading role upon liberation. 6. Women experienced a high degree of emancipation while "in the field"—obtaining an education—including political education—learning new skills, coming into a new sociopolitical identity. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the highly positive portrait above is holding in the aftermath of the war(s) or falling apart. Is women's organizing on behalf of women effective, especially NUEW, first during the military struggle and now in the postwar struggle? As material and military conditions changed, varied human resources had to be marshaled. Did the change to civilian life change women's place in the national allegory? I have argued elsewhere that such a transition has seen changes in the ways in which women's bodies have been configured and reconfigured for the purposes of mobilization and demobilization to serve the state. I argue that EPLF, the ruling party, had to make a rapid switch in the way women were represented. What had to change was the icon of the brave woman fighter—the image of the independent woman wearing an Afro hairstyle, khaki pants or shorts, a leather jacket, and plastic sandals manufactured behind the lines ("in the field")—that is, the icon of the liberated woman, the warrior comrade.2 The period since the first war ended has been a time of state-building and constitution-creating, with the one-party government simultaneously attempting to maintain control and build democracy. The end of [End Page 156] the second war saw the rise of an opposition movement against the government and the state's unabashed attempts to quell that dissidence by curtailing civil liberties. Postwar periods in any society figure not to be propitious times for women to make demands, to separate themselves from the "common good" ("national" concerns), or to build an independent movement. Gender and Liberation Movements If my proposition holds that men in most liberation movements in the last half of the twentieth century have positioned women within the culture to serve "their" movement,3 then it remains for theorists of such movements to ascertain the degree of women's agency in these processes, the nature of that "culture" vis-à-vis gender arrangements, the negotiations that both men and women engage in, and the potential for women to...
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