Iraqi women before 1990

Iraqi women have a long history of participation in public life, including education, labour force participation, and political mobilization. Throughout the 1950s, Iraqi women were marching side by side with Iraqi men to protest against social injustice and exploitation under the monarchy, as well as to oppose British military and political colonialisation. After the 1958 Revolution, which marked the end of the monarchy, a large secular and leftist women's organization, the Iraqi Women's League (IWL), was formed which had an estimated 40,000 members. The IWL was instrumental in shaping the relatively progressive Personal Status Law enshrined in the 1959 constitution. This law granted more equal inheritance and divorce rights, and restricted polygamy.

Although independent women's activism was impossible during the period of Ba'th dictatorship (1968-2003), an amendment to the constitution in 1978 included greater rights of women in the context of marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. The General Federation of Iraqi Women, the female arm of the Ba'th party, was the regime's vehicle to implement its developmental policies with respect to literacy programmes, wider education and income generating projects.

It was during the first decades of the Ba'th regime (1968-2003) that women's education and labour force participation expanded from a small elite sector of the population to all social classes. Aside from ideology, economic needs prompted the Iraqi government to encourage women to be educated and to work. Severe labour shortages were initially a result of a rapidly expanding economy in the context of the nationalization of the oil economy and a rise in oil prices in the 1970s. Later on, as hundred of thousands of Iraqi men were drafted into the army and thousands were killed during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), women had to replace their men folk in virtually all professions. However, during the eight year long war with Iran, Saddam Hussein's rhetoric about women shifted from the emphasis on 'the modern educated working woman' to 'the childbearing mother of future soldiers'.

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