Women in Iraq
One of the mysteries of our modern world is that women seem to do better overall under communist and certain other forms of dictatorial rule. They have more rights and more opportunities, and more equality with men than they do under democratically-elected governments, or, in the case of Iraq, under a sort-of half-assed democratic government that provides a thin veneer of "freedom" over religious and tribal anarchy. The Guardian in the U.K. has a disturbing story about the precipitous decline in women's rights and freedom in Iraq since the U.S. invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
This anomaly doesn't exist in all dictatorships, only the ones in which the government is hostile to organized religion to one degree or another. So you didn't see it in Augusto Pinochet's Chile and especially not in Francisco Franco's Spain, which glorified the Catholic Church. But you did, for example, in Communist East Germany and in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As the Guardian article notes or implies, women in Saddam's Iraq were among the more educated, free and equal in the Middle East (while still far short of their Western sisters), because the government decreed that should be the case and was in a position to suppress religious hostility to women.
And that's really what it comes down to: Christianity and Islam in their most conservative forms are profoundly hostile to women, although sometimes the cultural beliefs of the tribe are mistaken for those of the deity. Not all Christian denominations are hostile to women, far from it, but there is constant tension between conservative and moderate-to-liberal Christians over the proper role of women. The current troubles in the Episcopal Church, where I belong, are nearly as much about conservative hostility to ordaining women as ministers as they are to ordaining gays and lesbians.
America, with its constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state, splits the difference. It doesn't allow Southern Baptist clergy like Mike Huckabee to enforce their belief that the Bible dictates the only proper role of a women to be submissive wives and stay-at-home mothers, nor does it pass an Equal Rights Amendment or give women the sort of serious support for working outside the home that East Germany did. American women are somewhere in the middle of those extremes.
No one wants the ugly aspects of the East German or Saddam regimes to return, but it would behoove us to find ways to better support the equality of women, just as those improbable champions did.