“ALL of us were there, throwing stones, moving dead bodies. We did everything. There was no difference between men and women.” So says Asmaa Mahfouz, an Egyptian activist, remembering the protests that felled Hosni Mubarak at the beginning of the year. Though some men told her to get out of the way, others held up umbrellas to protect her.

In Tunisia Lina Ben Mhenni, an activist, travelled round the country documenting protests on her blog, “A Tunisian Girl”. Besides photographing the dead and wounded, she included pictures of herself with male protesters at sit-ins in the Kasbah in Tunis. Tawakul Karman, awarded the Nobel peace prize at the beginning of October, has been a leading figure in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Yemen, camping out for months in front of Sana’a University, calling for Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president, to step down. Defying their stereotype as victims of oppressive patriarchies, Arab women have made their presence a defining feature of the Arab spring.

The position of women in the Arab world has long been difficult. In 2002 the first Arab Human Development Report cited the lack of women’s rights as one of three factors, along with lack of political freedoms and poor education, that most hampered the region’s progress. Amid the loud calls for democracy in the early days of the uprisings, little was said specifically about women’s rights. But now that constitutions are being rewritten, many women in Egypt and Tunisia, whose revolutions are most advanced, hope to push their own liberation.
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CAIRO — Beginning two decades ago, the United States government bankrolled an Egyptian think tank dedicated to economic reform. A different outcome is only now becoming visible in the fallout from Egypt’s Arab Spring.

Formed with a $10 million endowment from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies gathered captains of industry in a small circle — with the president’s son Gamal Mubarak at the center. Over time, members of the group would assume top roles in Egypt’s ruling party and government.

Today, Gamal Mubarak and four of those think tank members are in jail, charged with squandering public funds in the sale of public resources, lands and government-run companies as part of a dramatic restructuring. Some have fled the country, pilloried amid the public outrage over insider deals and corruption that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.
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