Women Empowerment Quotes
This statement is referring to the custom of women covering their eyes whenever a man who they did not know passed them. Turks did not ever use Burkas the way some other Muslim countries do, but they wore headscarves and covered their eyes when a strange man appeared. This was a shocking statement in a sexist Islamic culture. Although the process of modernization and reform in Turkey was relatively bloodless, Ataturk was prepared to and did use force to defend it. This and many others made the role of women not only uniquely equal in the Islamic world, but women were suddenly elevated to the level of most Western nations and in voting rights were ahead of most. He used his own family to set an example. See {584503}.
Jinnah was a modern Islamist who saw the role of females in a modern context. He, like the Indian Hindu leaders were in a sense products of the West and Western government and education. He would be very surprised that in his Pakistan men can murder their female relatives who they believe have dishonored the family, or that women would not be educated in the Madrassas, or that authorities could sentence a female relative of a man deemed guilty of seduction to be gang raped, but that is what happens in modern Pakistan. Jinnah and many of the early leaders believed that their new government could modernize Islam but the control and influence went the other way. Pakistan became a religiously dominated autocracy rather than the democracy that Jinnah foresaw.
Most modern feminists would not agree with this quotation by one of the great early femonists.
It would be over 30 years more before American women could vote for President. Lockwood never could.
This relatively radical viewpoint regarding equal rights for women was expressed by Roosevelt as his Senior thesis at Harvard in 1880. In those days, the kind of scrutiny of everything a candidate ever wrote or said that is characteristic of modern politics, did not exist. It is very doubtful that if the Republican Party officials had ever known that he had espoused these views—even as a young student, that he ever would have risen so high in the party, much less get nominated at the Vice Presidential candidate which was his entree to the Presidency. When in office however, there is no record of him reviving his youthful proposal that women who marry retain their maiden names.
