Sadia Khatri is determined to change the lives of women and girls in Pakistan—one tea-sipping, snacking, strolling, bicycle-riding excursion at a time.  The story of Sadia, a native of Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, and her activism began with her decision to go to college in America. Sadia landed at Mount Holyoke, a prestigious, all-women’s college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Sadia’s American experience changed her life. It seems possible that the sense of empowerment brought back to Pakistan by this one young woman might end up changing the lives of thousands of women and girls in cities across Pakistan.

Sadia’s epiphany came to her after she returned to Karachi and realized that the lifestyle she’d enjoyed as a woman in America, particularly the freedom to go out alone with no purpose other than to enjoy being out in a public space, shed a harsh light on the constrained lives of women and girls in her hometown. As Sadia explains, male-dominated traditions, misperceptions about safety for women, and both subtle and overt social mores dictated that females have a male companion or chaperone accompany them in public spaces—whether that be a male friend, a father, or a brother. As a budding feminist and a young woman who had experienced the unfettered freedom of women in America, Sadia was seized with a passion for change.

Fueled by a new sense of self-confidence and a belief in the collective organizing they’d discovered in America, in 2015 Sadia and Atiya Abbas, a friend who had also observed on her own travels the contrast between the freedoms of women living abroad and the cramped lives of women in Pakistan, founded the feminist collective Girls at Dhabas.

The framework for their public protest is simple but brilliant and effective. Dhabas, which are popular, casual roadside cafes for locals and truckers, are places where men traditionally gather to drink tea, snack, and socialize. These are public spaces where the lone woman or girl traditionally was not welcomed. Girls at Dhabas encourages women to venture out alone to interact with public spaces, like the dhabas, in order to erase the fear of being out alone and to build a level of comfort with utilizing the public spaces in their cities.

Relying on personal narratives, storytelling, and social media, the Girls at Dhabas movement has created connections and strengthened the resolve of women to reclaim their right to public spaces in cities across Pakistan. The collective has either inspired or helped young women in other cities reclaim public spaces by staging their own actions, like organizing all-women cricket matches and collective bicycle rides.

Humay Waseem, a bicyclist participating in a group inspired by Girls at Dhabas called Islamabad Girls on Bikes, explained her new-found feelings of freedom to a Western news service: “I drive on these roads all the time but this was maybe the first time I got to experience them while biking … I loved the feeling of freedom with the breeze in my hair.”

As Sadia explains in the video below, the transformation of the perception of public space and who has permission to be there is freeing not just for women but for men as well. As she says, “the more we step out and the more we start getting comfortable in these spaces—not just for us does it get normalizing but also for the men.”

American influence

In this upside-down era of Trumpism where intolerance has been elevated to the highest levels of government, it’s easy to forget about the value of encouraging artists, academics, scientists, and students, like Sadia, to come to the U.S. and soak up the influence of America’s cultural and intellectual diversity. Think about how just one young woman’s experience of being in America has inspired thousands of women to find the courage to embrace a new definition of their rights as women in a place more than eight thousand miles away. Sadia’s experience and the fervor she developed for women’s rights is a shining example of the best of America and what the projection of American values and influence used to look like on the international stage.

What America is losing

How many more smart, motivated men and women, like Sadia, are out there? Given the opportunity, how many more will carry back to their countries the values of democracy, free speech, equal rights, and an open and diverse society that represent the best of the American experiment?  Sadly, we may never find out. The current harsh rhetoric and restrictive policies and intentional delays on immigration and visa allocation have cast a shadow over the numbers of individuals seeking to attend, do research, or teach at American institutions of higher learning.

The facts are telling an irrefutable story of America’s loss. Following years of significant growth, the number of international students attending colleges and universities in the U.S. has declined precipitously. According to data from the U.S. State Department, the total number of F-1 visas—the visas that enable international students to attend school full time anywhere in the U.S.—declined from approximately 644,000 in 2015 to 394,000 in 2017.

The economic loss is significant as well. During the 2017-2018 academic year, international students attending American institutions of higher learning in states across the country contributed approximately $39 billion to the economy as a whole, helped to support the challenged budgets of colleges and universities from coast to coast, and contributed to supporting more than 455,000 jobs.

Loss of influence. Loss of dollars and jobs. Loss of access to the international brain bank. Loss of opportunity to influence the next generation of organizers and leaders like Sadia. This is not what winning looks like.

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Every year, just as the summer is nearing its end, the world remembers. We remember the unconscionable use of the world’s deadliest weapons—nuclear weapons—seventy-three years ago, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This year, unlike in the years past, we no longer should be comforted solely by “never-agains” in speeches and statements of government officials marking the event. This year, for the first time in world’s history, there exists a credible and widely supported framework to deliver on the promise of the nuclear-weapons free world. A group of bold women played an essential role in its delivery.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the Ban Treaty) came into existence in July 2017. This ambitious document spelled out a commitment to a world without nuclear weapons. It banned the making, testing, possession, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons.

More than 120 countries participated in its drafting, most of them from the global south – including the small island states whose populations are still reeling from the consequences of nuclear testing. Absent were, unsurprisingly, nine possessors of nuclear weapons (U.S., U.K., France, China, Russia, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel) and their respective allies (including almost all NATO members).

As of now, more than sixty states have signed onto the Treaty and fourteen have ratified it, slowly inching closer towards the goal of 50, when the treaty would become operational.

The road to the Treaty’s existence was a culmination of political courage and skillful diplomacy. But it is also the result of the decades of tireless advocacy by civil society movements, like the International Coalition to Ban Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize last year for its work.

ICAN follows the long line of anti-nuclear efforts which span as far back as the invention of the atomic bomb itself. They feature a diverse cast of characters, movements and well-meaning individuals from the U.S. and abroad. They have included environmentalists, hippies, young people, lawyers, physicians, scientists, and even committed nuns – Sister Megan Rice who broke into the high-security nuclear facility in Tennessee as an act of protest being among the most well-known.

Women have played an integral part in anti-nuclear activities in the U.S. and across the world. They organized and attended protests, produced scholarship and were instrumental in pushing for past diplomatic breakthroughs on nuclear testing ban treaties. They were also key to bringing about the Nuclear Ban Treaty.

Many of the civil society activists who took part in negotiations were women. ICAN’s leadership is made up of passionate and committed women and led by Beatrice Fihn, a proud mother of two. Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the nuclear blast in Hiroshima, also played an outsized role in speaking against nuclear weapons. She was a constant presence in the halls of the UN headquarters for the past several years, sharing her story of survival and lobbying diplomats to support the Ban.

Women were well represented in many country delegations negotiating the Treaty. The diplomats from Ireland stood out in this regard, for their team was composed solely of female Ambassador, experts and policy advisers. Despite this, women remain grossly underrepresented in disarmament diplomacy

Women who have delivered the Ban Treaty and are now working to mount a large coalition to ensure the Treaty ratified by as many countries as possible.  Their work should be supported, the role they played in bringing about the Treaty should be celebrated more widely known.

At a time when the number of social justice causes calling for our attention is ever-increasing, we must prioritize the call of the anti-nuclear weapons activists. Responding to their calls will  provide for safety and  security of our planet for many years to come.

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I distinctly remember as a child once telling my mother I was divided into “half Muslim and half American,” as if there was no overlap. My mother, understandably, was horrified, but I couldn’t understand why. It made sense to me. I couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7 years old, so it must have been around 2003. The pain of 9/11 was still a raw, open wound in the American psyche, and it colored my perception of society, even though I wasn’t even school-aged when those hijacked planes brought down generations’ of hopes and dreams alongside the towers. Because of it, I internalized the message I was hearing from the world that in order to be a real American, I had to be White and Christian; being neither of those things, I felt I had to compartmentalize my supposedly mutually exclusive identities. And so I spent years trying to make myself palatable by erasing my Muslimness and shunning my Pakistani heritage in the hopes of becoming worthy of belonging. Foolish. As if I don’t forever wear those pieces of me in my very skin.

Today several years wiser, I have come to embrace my hyphenated identity as Muslim-American, even when the reservations on my complete Americanness rub me raw. And I have realized I am worthy as I am— whole and unapologetically me. They are both irrevocably components of my identity and, rather than foregoing either, I’ve dedicated myself to carving a niche in my community for the burden of that hyphen. To some extent, I didn’t have much of a choice. Hating a part of yourself you can’t change because of what other people say isn’t exactly good for your self image. Besides, somewhere along the way I decided to become a hijabi and, if there’s anything that can break a desire to be more palatable, it’s choosing to go out every day in a scarf that literally makes some people want to kill me.

But old habits die hard, and I can’t entirely shake the idea I wasn’t necessarily wrong to think like that when, to this day, that’s how the world sees me. I’m too Muslim/Brown/Pakistani to be American, and too American to be Muslim/Brown/Pakistani. Can I belong?

And the one idea that underscores the cause of all of this— the reason this is something I have to struggle with in the first place— is a lack of representation. The idea I am some mystical creature playing a tug-of-war with parts of my identity for the right to exist comes from the fact that everywhere I look, Muslims are portrayed one way and Americans are portrayed another, and there is a vast, seemingly insurmountable chasm in between those two representations.

When we think of Americans they are White, Christians (and usually men). But the only time I see someone who looks like me on screen, they are either (a) terrorists, (b) apologists, or (c) casualties. The bomber whose face everyone has been texted to be on the lookout for could be my brother; the man on screen reminding the world that the terrorist does not represent Islam and apologizing on behalf of the Muslim community could be my father; the children ravaged by war in Syria or savaged by a drone strike in Afghanistan could be my sister or cousin. But never a positive representation in America. No, people who look like me only show up in the context of a crime. No wonder I grew up thinking there wasn’t space for me.

Even though I know better, the challenges of internalized underrepresentation and misrepresentation still plague me. I’m currently applying to law schools, but a year ago I had ruled it out from my possible postgraduate future. Noting that poverty exacerbates most other social justice concerns, the idea of working on civil rights issues pro bono had called to me. But a nagging concern stopped me short. What if, because of the way I look— because I am a hijabi— a jury would deny justice to my client? What if the judge took an immediate dislike to whomever I was representing because they couldn’t overcome the way I looked? What if someone else suffered despite the purity of my motivations merely because my appearance was an obstacle to their chance at justice?

In other words, the idea of identity-imposed restrictions held me back— the idea that because of the way I look, there are certain things to which I can never aspire. No one ever said it to my face, but I inferred it from my society. You can’t be what you can’t see. I’ve never seen a hijabi attorney in the United States before— in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, certainly, but never the United States. Perhaps this was why. So for a long while I abandoned the idea and resigned myself to a future working with an NGO or nonprofit where, so long as I was behind the scenes, my appearance could cause no one harm.

Recently, though I’ve decided I was being dumb. Those restrictions didn’t really come from the nature of my identity, but from me. I can’t subvert myself out of fear or cynicism or what-ifs; I’m just going to have to hold a little tighter to my faith in humanity. And in no small part, my about-face is because I want to change the system. I didn’t have role models to convince me I’m not crazy to aspire to this, but perhaps my story can convince someone else their dreams aren’t unattainable. That their hopes are valid. If I surrender to “this is just the way things are,” then who brings about “the way things should be”? Someone’s got to do it. And I’m too stubborn to give up.

On the flip side of the same coin, representation is also the catalyst for profound microcosmic change. Representation inherently carries the potential to empower. A few weeks ago, I bought Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age on a whim, being an avid fan of muslimgirl.com. And although Amani Al-Khatahtbeh is a Jordanian-Palestinian-American Jersey girl, and I’m a Pakistani-American Midwesterner a few years younger, I was astonished to see pieces of my story in the pages of her’s. As a child, I craved books with protagonists that looked like me, and I remember reading even the most bland and uninspiring things simply because one character had a vaguely “ethnic” name. And now there’s an entire book— a gorgeously written, candid memoir— that reflects pieces of me?!? I sent a series of incredulous messages to a friend, “I have never ever felt like my thoughts were written by somebody else’s hand. (She even likes lists!) Wow, the power of representation. Is this how most people feel when they just read most books?”

Immediately after I finished it the first time, I picked it right back up and began again. I was just so amazed to see experiences that so closely mirrored mine validated in black and white right there in front of me. She talked about respectability politics and the burden of representation as the Token Muslim Girl; I have struggled with that.

She talked about the challenges of first-generation Americans to straddle the lines of a hyphenated identity the world tells you is mutually exclusive and her perpetual frustration with the pathetic “where are you from” question; I have written these words.

She talked about when in elementary school the insults lobbed at her distinctly shifted to be racial slurs about “her people” and how she got the student suspended when she told the teacher; I was in the fifth grade the first time I had a student suspended for his racism.

She talked about the feelings of inherent inferiority that plagued her childhood as a girl of color and how difficult it was because of it to convince herself she was allowed to take up space; I intimately know that self-doubt.

She talked about those who try to challenge her feminist identity by claiming her status as a hijabi invalidates her quest for women’s empowerment; I fight that battle.

She talked about the constant vigilance as a visibly-Muslim hijabi that keeps her from saying certain phrases too loudly in public or standing too close to the train tracks; I self-monitor like that, too.

She talked about her infuriated exhaustion at having to asserting her humanity time and time again after each terrorist attack simply because she is Muslim; I know that anger.

She talked about how she was labelled “abrasive” when she, as a woman of color, spoke up too loudly for what she believed in; I wear that label.

She talked about the challenge of forcing White America to confront the pervasiveness of racism— even when people of color have never been able to turn away from that depravity— in the context of Brexit and Trump’s GOP nomination; I wrote that in the context of Trump’s election.

I still can’t get over the power of that book to validate what I feel, even though I spend hours telling other people time and time again what they experience is valid. I know it, but seeing it written in my hands helped me internalize it.

And there are thousands of stories other than these about the power of representation. Representation is the story of the Mexican-American father who was irrepressibly happy because in Rogue One, Diego Luna’s character unabashedly has a heavy accent like his and was still portrayed as an average person, not a caricature. Representation is the story of an excited young Whoopi Goldberg who saw a Black woman on Star Trek who wasn’t a maid and said “I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be.” Representation is the story of the beaming little girl who saw the protagonist in Home had dark skin and hair like hers and the adoring girl empowered by the all-female cast of Ghostbusters. Representation is the story of the now-iconic image of the little boy astonished to find the president’s hair felt just like his. Representation is the story of how a mere visit from Michelle Obama to a girl’s school seems to have boosted their tested scores as they realized “She made it. And so can we.”

I can’t help but think representation is one of those foundational issues that, once resolved, can affect change in so many areas. Imagine it. If when we looked around— at the media, at politics, at our neighborhoods— and saw people who looked like us looking back, stigmas could slowly disappear in the face of diverse narratives that portrayed people as humans, not labels. Without those stigmas, prejudice would lighten. With diverse narratives readily available, the burden of representation would ease. Having role models would help to ensure no child’s dreams were stunted by hopelessness or cynicism. Representation matters.

As I scrawled inside my copy of Muslim Girl, representation “is the difference between knowing at a rational level that I’m not crazy for what I think and how I feel, and KNOWING deep inside me that I’m not crazy in the least. I’m not alone. And representation is the light at the end of the tunnel that, if she could do it, maybe I’ll survive all this and succeed after all. This is the power of representation to inspire hope.”

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Whether you’re pro or anti Hillary Clinton, you have to admit that a woman running for President of the United States is a good thing. We live in a county where 50.8% of the population is female and yet historically all 44 presidents have been men. The U.S. is a bit behind when it comes to diversity in political leadership. Other countries have elected female heads of state (Israel, Germany, the United Kingdom, Portugal, India, Norway, Pakistan, and quite a few others) and about 18 nations are currently run by a woman. Despite this, women have been running for president for a very long time. This inforgraphic gives a quick rundown of other times when a woman has run for office. It’s interesting to note that some of them were running before women even had the right to vote.

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Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial before a throng of civil-rights activists in August of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech, one of the most powerful and enduring calls for equality and tolerance ever uttered on a public stage.

Dr. King proclaimed, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” With those words, Dr. King captured the most fundamental hope of every parent: that their children be allowed to follow their dreams without limit, free from presumptions about who they are or what they may achieve simply because of the color of their skin, their gender, their ethnic heritage, their religious affiliation, or their sexual preference.

For the sake of the children, Dr. King pleaded that day, America must live up to the most fundamental of its democratic ideals.

The questions raised by Dr. King’s speech fifty-three years ago are still as powerful and relevant today as they were then. They are questions worth considering on this holiday that honors the man and the legacy. Here are a few: Will we follow the path Dr. King and others forged and celebrate rather than denigrate the rich tapestry of our diversity? Or will we allow our differences to be cynically exploited to divide us? Can we overcome our fears and open ourselves up to the underlying content of a person’s character, no matter how different or foreign they seem to us? Or will we continue to believe falsely that the entirety of individuals can be summed up by the hoodies they wear on the street, or by the scarves wrapped around their heads, or by the manner in which they celebrate the dictates of their beliefs?

Below is a video of Muslim women from around the world speaking out about why they choose to wear hijab, what their choice does or does not say about them, and the challenges they face living as Muslims in Western societies.

I imagine Dr. King would have seen in these brave women echoes of the struggle he dedicated his life to. He certainly would have invited them to stand shoulder to shoulder with him on that stage because he would have understood that they too “have a dream.”

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If you live in or near St. Louis, you may have walked or driven on a street named in her honor, but you might not know who she was.  Leonor K. Sullivan was the first woman from Missouri elected to Congress.  The street named in her honor runs at the foot of the Gateway Arch, along the Mississippi River. Once known as Wharf Street, and occasionally underwater,  it has been called Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard for years.

We recently wrote of Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the first woman to officially have her name placed in nomination for president.  She first served in the House of Representatives; then the Senate.  As was the case with so many of the first women in Congress, she was elected to her late husband’s seat following his death.  The situation was similar for Leonor Sullivan.  Her husband, John–a Democrat, like Leonor–had  an odd tenure representing Missouri’s Third district. The trajectory of his elections had a pogo-stick quality.  He was elected in 1940, defeated in 1942, elected again 1944, defeated again in 1946, made another comeback in 1948 and finally won a consecutive term in 1950, only to die in January of the following year.

Leonor had served as his administrative aide during his off-and-on tenures in Congress.  She was clearly familiar with the territory.  After Congressman Sullivan died, the governor appointed another gentleman to complete the term.  Mrs. Sullivan ran for the seat in 1952. She won and served through 1977, choosing not to run for re-election in 1978.

Her obituary, reported in the September 2, 1988 New York Times described her accomplishments:

In her years in Congress, Mrs. Sullivan became a prominent environmentalist and consumer advocate. She pressed for preservation of environmental resources and improved employment conditions, as well as consumer protection laws for foods, drugs and cosmetics. In 1954, she was an author of legislation creating the food-stamp program.

While progressive in the areas cited by the Times, her record is marred by her having been the only woman in Congress during the early 1970s to vote against the Equal Rights Amendment.

The Third district has remained interesting. Leonor Sullivan was succeeded by a St. Louis alderman who was a member of the “young Turk” faction advocating reform.  He was the son of a milkman. You know the rest: His name was Dick Gephardt.  He served as both the Majority and Minority Leader of the House, but not as Speaker of the House.  After a failed presidential bid in 2004, he retired to seek a non-political fortune, but theThird district remained interesting, as Russ Carnahan, whose father had been Missouri governor, and whose mother, Jean, had been a senator from Missouri, won a primary with eleven contestants, one of whom was Jeff Smith (Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?).

Leonor Sullivan was successful enough to overcome the unpredictability of election results experienced by her husband.  Since she was first elected in 1952, Democrats have won every November election for the seat.  That’s thirty consecutive races.

Despite her hard-to-fathom opposition to the E.R.A., she distinguished herself in Congress.  Her name is now back in play as the City to River movement in St. Louis is capturing the city’s imagination to link downtown with the riverfront, and Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard.

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