It's No Life Now, Baghdad Women Say

By Stephen Kinzer, New York Times, [circa 28 December 1998]

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A decade ago, Iman Mohammed was a new schoolteacher who earned the equivalent of $400 a month and spent a fair amount of it keeping herself smartly dressed and pretty in the hope of attracting the best possible husband.

Today Ms. Mohammed still teaches fifth-graders, but inflation has reduced the value of her monthly salary to just $2. She lives at home with her widowed mother and five brothers and sisters, and has all but given up hope of starting a family of her own.

My two brothers support the family, but they have no money to get married, she said during a break between classes on Thursday. Other young men are in the same situation. I am ready to marry anyone who asks, but who can do it in these conditions?

Depressed, unable to contribute substantially to her family and facing the prospect of living her life without a husband, Ms. Mohammed, 36, is typical of her generation of Iraqi women. Although eight years of economic sanctions on Iraq have devastated the entire society, women have suffered most acutely.

The sanctions have changed many things for women, Ms. Mohammed said. There is no work, so men do not get married. Women can barely afford food or medicine, and the idea of having anything nice is just a dream. When I was young, I was middle class and happy. Now my adulthood is being denied to me.

Boys and men can adjust more easily to this situation. They can go everywhere they like. They can have jobs, even if they are bad ones. We are much more limited. We can't even go out for a picnic. It causes us great psychological problems.

Millions of Iraqi women like Ms. Mohammed work in public jobs, and nearly all earn about what she earns. They avoid starvation largely because of monthly food rations supplied by the United Nations and paid for with money the government is allowed to earn by selling oil. The sanctions, imposed by the United Nations in an effort to persuade President Saddam Hussein to curb his weapons program and ease his harsh regime, forbid almost all foreign trade and have reduced the Iraqi economy to ruins.

Women like Ms. Mohammed do not work mainly for income, like people in the rest of the world. Without jobs they would have no alternative but to sit at home, so they work to occupy their minds and maintain contact with the outside world.

There are no reliable statistics about marriage rates here, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they have plummeted. One Iraqi newspaper recently estimated that 70 percent of Iraqis between the ages of 18 and 40 are unmarried. In interviews this week, women of all social classes said they knew of almost no young people who have married in the last eight years or are preparing to marry. It is a phenomenon that could have widespread social effects.

In this country, marriage takes a woman out of her home and gives her independence, said a 24-year-old graduate student who asked to be identified only by her first name, Nebras. Single women must follow very strict rules. It is impossible to have a boyfriend. Living alone is out of the question. The only way to have a real life and become a real person is to marry. Nowadays we can't do that, because sanctions have made it impossible for men to earn enough to support a family. It is a very difficult situation for us.

Nebras is highly intelligent and vivacious and comes from a well-to-do background. Women with fewer assets face different and perhaps even more daunting challenges.

Before the sanctions were imposed eight years ago, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Widad Abdul-Latif was busy from morning to night caring for her two sons and seven daughters. Her husband earned a good living as a tailor, and her sons ran a grocery store.

Soon after the sanctions took effect, her husband's business collapsed along with that of virtually every other tailor in the country, since people found themselves without money for new clothes. Later the grocery store failed for similar reasons. Ms. Abdul-Latif, now 58, began putting in 11-hour days selling falafel sandwiches on a street corner.

It is shameful for women to do work like this, but I have no choice, she said. My sons do construction work when they can find it, but without the few pennies I bring home, we could not survive. My daughters stay at home all day. They will never marry, not as long as the embargo continues. Men cannot afford to marry. As for women, what can we say? Nothing. We can only keep silent.