Rahila Gupta is an anti-racist feminist activist and the co-author, with Beatrix Campbell, of Planet Patriarchy
In 2025, the world that had been opened up by women has often seemed to be closing in. The forces behind the rollback of abortion rights in Donald Trump’s US are attempting to do the same in the UK. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has doubled down on its attacks on women and girls. Sexual violence is commonplace in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Mexico, even the president is not safe from sexual assault. A perverse rewilding appears to be taking place.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that around the world, women’s rights are being concreted over. But in researching our book, Planet Patriarchy, Beatrix Campbell and I found women’s resistance erupting like green shoots through the cracks. In El Salvador, women can receive sentences of 30-50 years for miscarriages construed to be abortions. Yet feminists have managed to free all 72 women who had been imprisoned for this, using innovative penal and legal strategies. In Russia, feminists have taken to wearing blue and yellow ribbons, the colours of the Ukrainian flag, to signal their anti-war solidarity.
The story that has emerged from Iceland is more hopeful still, as it overturned our assumptions about the conditions in which feminism thrives. The country’s much-vaunted place at the top of the World Economic Forum’s league for gender equality was achieved under mainly conservative governments in the past 50 years, while social democratic governments held power for only five years. The presence of women in unions has been partly responsible for these achievements – more than 90% of the workforce is unionised, approximately half of the members are women and there is a growing number of women in leadership roles.
The 1975 Icelandic women’s strike, in which 90% of its women participated, shut the country down for a whole day, inspiring women around the world to follow suit, demonstrating the indispensability of women’s paid and unpaid labour. The following year, Iceland passed a law guaranteeing sex equality. This year, an estimated 50,000 people took part in the 50th anniversary commemorations of the strike because Iceland, too, has felt the global waters of misogyny lapping at its shores.
There is much to learn and implement from Iceland’s policies on parental leave and equal pay. Employers are required to prove that they operate an equal pay for work of equal value policy. While much has been achieved, much remains to be done: the hourly rates of pay are close to equal, but incomes over a lifetime reveal wage inequality caused by the penalty of motherhood and the unequal division of labour, time and power. The rates of sexual violence against women also remain high.
The most inspirational advance in women’s rights – a women’s revolution, in fact – has been taking place in the unlikeliest of places. Buffeted by war with authoritarian Islamist forces since 2012, the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (popularly known as Rojava) now occupies nearly a third of Syria. So many of my preconceptions were punctured when I visited Rojava: war is the classic moment in which all rights get suspended or eroded. Who thinks about the importance of gender equality, or racial inclusivity, or direct democracy during war? Hadn’t the Arab spring been a failure? But were it not for the Arab spring, there would not have been a power vacuum in the north-east, which allowed the Kurds to engineer a bloodless revolution against President Bashar al-Assad, who was preoccupied with crushing the rebellion in southern Syria. The blood would come later in 2014 when Islamic State attacked, partly as a land grab and partly to shore up its own experiment with a medieval form of patriarchy that was a black-mirror reflection of the freedoms of women in Rojava.
Rojava is an experiment in direct grassroots democracy. Neighbourhood communes of up to 300 people elect a man and a woman under the co-presidentship rule to represent them at the town council, which in turn elects members to the city level, and so on until they are represented at the overarching quasi-national people’s council. The commune elects members of specialist committees such as health, education, services or conflict resolution, with equal membership of men and women led by co-presidents. Parallel to this structure, I found a women-only structure with its own committees, and the power of veto against any policies impacting women’s rights.
The women of Rojava have pinned their colours to secularism in recognition of the pernicious impact of religion on women’s freedoms. They have disbanded sharia councils (unlike the UK), banned child marriage, polygamy and dowry, criminalised “honour” killings, introduced civil marriages and given women equal rights to inheritance and custody of their children, whatever their marital status.
That other world that we hanker for is here. But it is being bombed by Turkey – to which the UK sells arms – which is threatened by a truly democratic society on its doorstep. Rojava is also at risk from the centralising impulse of the new leader of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose sharia-based government will mark the death knell for equality. Rojava’s survival, even as an idea, depends on women around the world setting up women’s assemblies in whatever civic space is available to them, to build their democratic muscle and become a force for change. We need to do all we can to steady this flickering flame, which could light up the path to our future.
