Are women enemies of themselves?

by Ayman Okail

On the sidelines of the Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva, a fellow participant asked me when we were in a meeting with an expert in the Working Group on Violence against Women and Girls, which is one of the thematic mandates of the United Nations Special Procedures. Do you really think that women are the enemies of themselves? In fact, I quickly answered, “No.”

I was not interested in searching for the origin of the statement or the extent of its credibility, but I recently remembered this conversation when my eyes fell on a recent book published in February 2024 entitled If Love Could Kill: The Myths and Truths of Women Who Commit Violence, in which Anna Motz, the author of the book, an American psychiatrist, documents some cases of violence committed by some women against other women. I was curious to look for other incidents in which some women refuse to grant other women like them some rights.

For example, in the Philippines, some women refused to nominate other women for senior positions, claiming that they were unable to lead and run institutions. In the United States, opinion polls showed that women aged 18 to 29 preferred Bernie Sanders over Clinton at the Democratic Party internal elections in 2016. This prompted the late US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the time, who was supporting Hillary Clinton, to say, “There is a place in… Hell for women who don’t support other women.” In addition to some women themselves repeating that there are some professions and jobs in which men are smarter than women.

Because I am a women’s rights defender and a believer in women’s empowerment, their right, and their ability to lead and work, I ignored all the previous facts to search for the origin of this (Saying), “Women are the enemies of themselves”. After researching, I found that its reason is in contrast to what is being circulated. In the last century, when women were allowed to have limited quotas in the labor force and to participate in public life, this led to intense competition among women in the hope of obtaining these jobs. This competition among women appeared as if they were in a state of hostility between each other, and from here this saying or phrase was promoted. “Women are the enemies of themselves.” But in fact, the origin of the phrase is not about women’s self-hatting or their hostility towards other women, but about free and fair competition among women. In the end, we must investigate the accuracy of the common phrases that are circulated without knowing their origin and understand the context in which these phrases were said…“Women are not the enemies of themselves.”