Equal Rights for Jordanian Women

For some time now, the subject of Jordanian women and their rights in the country has been brought up for discussion in order to solve the ancient problem that we shouldn’t even be discussing in these times.

Luckily this February, the senate of Jordania approved the changes in article 6, now addressing that: “Jordanian men and women shall be equal before the law. There shall be no discrimination between them as regards to their rights and duties on grounds of race, language or religion".

The actual disturbance regarding this article in the law was nonspecification of the genders who should have the right to be equal, in the old article, the men and women were replaced by simply just “Jordanians”.

We should give credit to Queen Rania Al-Abdullah who is a fighter for her gender and who had an admirable contribution to making the changes in the government's law. Queen Rania was also one of the most prominent figures who supported the amendment of the kingdom's constitution in favor of female Jordanians.

Jordanian women got the right to vote in 1974 which sounds absolutely insane and also the first time a woman of this nationality entered the parliament was 1993, which wasn’t that long ago, but only 29 years apart from today. Why do we need to live in a world where these timetables are real? Why does it need to be that only 48 years ago a woman had her right to choose for her country for the first time? It sounds incredibly stupid and wrong. And to think that still today some laws and rights based on women’s needs may not stay so still and could easily only lie just to fool their eyes.

The Jordanian women activists still fear and believe that the amendment regarding article 6 is more something for publicity to fool the public eye and not something tangible, written on official papers.

There are a lot of rights based on equality that Jordanian women don’t seem to possess at this very moment, but some maybe even worse than others. For example, as of right now, a Jordanian woman doesn’t have the right to pass on her nationality to her children, but a man does; and the sad thing is that over more than 110,000 Jordanian women are not married to a man with the same nationality as them, so their children will not have the mother’s nationality regarding only the laws up until this point. Also, they are not even entirely sure if their law may contain some rights that prevent them from physical assault and violence, but also some that incorporate the need for education, which is extremely out of this world.

It seems unlikely for these severe and cruel moralities to change anytime soon, but the more realistic expectations regarding law changes are seen in the fields of gender pay gaps or women’s workforce participation which is a very beneficial action, but at the same time not enough.

Because city life and rural life have big differences in Jordan's territories, people living in the countryside portion do not have the same mentalities as the ones living in the more civilized and evolved part from the urban side, that affects the statistics of Jordan and also being another reason for the government to believe that women do not need any changes regarding their rights when in reality it is a must.

Women’s rights have always been a very controversial and often discussed topic, but it is such a normal thing to discuss because equality should be an understandable thing from the beginning, but the truth is that most people are not as evolved mentally to recognize that equality in everything would make the world smarter and wealthier.