The Woman Question

Hannah Allam

When I speak before Western audiences about my years covering the war in Iraq as a journalist for McClatchy Newspapers, someone inevitably asks, "What was it like to be a woman over there?"

"Well, I've never been there as a man, so I'm not sure I can compare," is the clever way some of my friends reply to the same question.

I remind myself to borrow the line, but I can never quite remember to use it because when I hear the question, I see faces. Ban. Shatha. Sahar. Faten. Huda. Alaa. Jinan. Raghad. I think of the slivers of Iraq that they and many other women showed me, spaces that were off-limits to my male colleagues. Kitchens where meals were prepared without electricity. A bedroom with a mortar crater in the ceiling. A beauty salon that banned political talk so customers could get their hair done in peace. "Ladies' hours" at the Babylon Hotel swimming pool, where sunshine hit bare skin and the war lurked just over a tall concrete barrier.

Reporting on Iraq through the eyes of its women was illuminating, but, perhaps more important, it was more representative of the population as a whole. Years of bloodshed had left Iraq with a population that was more than half women, many of them heads of households because their men were dead or missing or exiled. When the "woman question" comes up at public talks, I explain the importance of covering women's stories by evoking the grisly math of car bombings.

At the height of the sectarian war, in 2006, car bombings were so commonplace that we stopped reporting on them unless twenty or more people were killed. For a year I didn't bother to set my alarm before going to sleep because I knew I'd be awakened every morning by a thunderous boom. It wasn't unusual to record daily car bomb death tolls of eighty or more. Because the most frequent targets were government and police buildings, the vast majority of the casualties were men.

Consider those numbers for a moment: eighty dead men meant eighty new widows and dozens of newly fatherless children. Every day. That meant that each week, more than five hundred Iraqi women suddenly became the sole providers for their families, setting their own devastation aside to keep their children fed and housed. They sold their wedding gold to buy bread. They felt like burdens on the extended families who took them in.

At their most desperate, some women entered into so-called temporary marriages that weren't intended to last long. Essentially, these marriages were prostitution with a thin religious veneer: men with money to spare would pay the women in exchange for sex, but because the couple was technically "married," however briefly, the arrangement was deemed legitimate according to some Shi'a Islamic rulings.

A widow named Nisreen told me her hands shook and her face reddened with shame when she signed a temporary marriage contract in exchange for fifteen dollars a month plus groceries and clothes for her five children.

"My son calls me a bad woman, a prostitute. My children have no idea I did this for their sake," Nisreen said.

Before I first traveled to Iraq in the summer of 2003, I read an article in Rolling Stone in which a U.S. military officer marveled at the toughness of Iraqi women and mused that the advance might not have been so easy had U.S. forces faced the country's women. It was a comment meant to emasculate the men as much as it praised the women, and I would hear many versions of it when I was around U.S. troops.

Even in the Middle East, where there is no shortage of heartache, Iraqi women are known to be particularly tough. The guttural Iraqi accent only underlines that...