I am confused about gaddafi's attitude towards women. Judging from his green book women should only be wifes and mothers and stay at home but during his rule women were encouraged to go out , take jobs, even in the military. What is your opinion about this ?
Thanks for this question!
I think you might have read the Greenbook too fast if that's your takeaway from it. Because it's a little more nuanced.
He never said women should only be wives and mothers. It was his opinion that the average mother with young kids would prefer to stay home with her children if money were no object, instead of putting them in daycare, and that pretty much any baby would rather stay home with its own mom instead of going to daycare - his complaint was that the unpaid labor women do in the home raising kids doesn't get the same respect as paid work outside the home does, and he thought that was really unfair. (at the time I first read the Green Book, I was a stay at home mom with three kids under 5 and getting treated like dirt by my husband and society for not having "a real job" so that really resonated with me)
And he said that expecting a woman to both work outside the home in a paid job AND be responsible for all the unpaid household labor on top of it was "tyranny."
Now I'll admit some of the things he thinks about women are a little old-fashioned and sexist, and he did say that biology gave men and women their own separate roles that complement each other and bla bla bla. For instance he thinks women aren't suited for manual labor because they're delicate little flowers whose beauty would get ruined if they worked too hard.
But he never said women shouldn't have jobs at all. He understood that most women want or need to work outside the home.
One of the very first laws he passed was equal pay for equal work, another was raise the minimum for marriage to either 16 or 20 (I'm not sure which is accurate) gave women equal right to divorce, equal rights for girls to go to school (I've seen statistics and graphs about all this, the jump in enrollment for females is drastic and took effect almost overnight after he came into power) own property, drive cars and so much more. He was light years ahead of most of his Arab neighbors and most western countries as well in the early 70s.
2020s America has yet to catch up to 1970s Libya on many women's rights issues.
