You may remember this iconic picture of a young woman standing on the roof of a car during the revolution which ousted Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir after thirty years of dictatorial rule.
The woman in the picture is Alaa Salah. Now that the revolutionary work is done, she and other women who participated in it are sidelined:
“Women led resistance committees and sit-ins, planned protest routes and disobeyed curfews, even in the midst of a declared state of emergency that left them vulnerable to security forces. Many were teargassed, threatened, assaulted and thrown in jail without any charge or due process,” Salah told a United Nations Security Council meeting on women, peace and security on Tuesday. “However, despite this visible role, despite their courage and their leadership, women have been side-lined in the formal political process in the months following the revolution.”This is, of course, not the first time that women have been expected to step back once a revolution has been victorious. Women were sidelined after the French Revolution, too, and all they ultimately got for their troubles was the Napoleonic Code which stripped them of further rights. Women were also sidelined after the Arab Spring uprisings.
Let us hope that Salah speaking out about this injustice serves to change things. I am not, alas, very hopeful.
It would be worthwhile to consider what causes this sidelining. My off-the-cuff guess would be that it has to do with the way power vacuums are filled. A vacuum is created when the old hierarchies tumble, and the time to fill that vacuum is a short one.
Power is most likely going to be grabbed by those who already possess the necessary resources (in people, funds and weapons) to wield political power, because they will act the fastest*. Women have rarely or never been in that position all by themselves. This means that the likelihood of women sharing in the fruits of the revolution is crucially dependent on their allies in the general population.
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* In the case of Arab Spring in Egypt, the conservative religious groups took power first because they had existing organizations and numerical support to do so. They had very little interest in supporting women's rights. If anything, the reverse was the case.