The status of women in Iraq has been affected by wars, Islamic law , the Constitution of Iraq , cultural traditions, and secularism. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women are war widows, and Women's rights organizations struggle against harassment and intimidation while they work to promote improvements to women's status in the law, in education, the workplace, and many other spheres of Iraqi life.
Abusive practices such as honor killings and forced marriages persist. As a part of their conquest, the Iamas successfully defeated the Persians during the seventh century. Doreen Ingrams, the author of The Awakened: Women in Iraq , stated it was a time when women's help was needed.
In particular, a woman called Amina bint Qais "at the age of seventeen was the youngest woman to lead a medical team in one of these early battles. In , Baghdad was attacked and captured by the Mongols. In , Iraq was declared independent and in was a founding member of the United Nations. In Ba'athist Iraq , the Secular Socialist Baath Party women were officially stated to be equal to men, and urban women were normally unveiled. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in , there was a surge in threats and harassment of unveiled women, and the use of hijab became common in Iraq.
Iraq established an education system in and by the s education became public and free at all levels. During the s and s, despite Saddam Hussein attempting to use higher education as a form of propaganda , the overall illiteracy rate dropped until the Iran-Iraq War.
Throughout these wars, there have been several authoritarian leaders whose government policies negatively affected those in higher education. One those changes in regards to government policy is the severe lack of government funding to those in universities following the costly Iran-Iraq War. Women's overall literacy rate continued to decline well after the Iran-Iraq War, moreover this decline was more pronounced in the Southern rural provinces where obtaining an education was already difficult to begin with.
