Egyptian women urged to 'put on your dress'
An Egyptian activist has called for women to fight sexual harassment on Egypt's streets by ditching the hijab and dressing as they please.
CAIRO, Egypt — Dina Anwar, an Egyptian pharmacist, is leading a campaign dubbed “Put on your dress and take back your femininity” to fight sexual harassment in the Egyptian street. She created a Facebook page in August calling on Egyptian women and girls to go back to wearing dresses and showing their femininity.
The dress was ubiquitous in Egypt during late President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s era in the 1960s, before the radical Islamic expansion of the 1970s and the emergence of Gamaa Islamiya in 1979.
In a study conducted by the UN Women’s Egypt office in April 2013, 99.3% of women polled in a number of Egyptian governorates reported being subject to sexual harassment. According to the study, sexual harassment comes most commonly in the form of touching with 59.9%, and 54.5% of the women experienced verbal harassment.
The campaign came as part of a movement against sexual harassment following Jan. 25, 2011, when a large number of women took off their hijabs. Foreign Policy magazine described the change as a “silent revolution.”
