© The Associated Press/Hani MohammedYemeni activist Tawakkul Karman laughs as she speaks on the telephone after the announcement of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize in Sanaa, Yemen, Friday, Oct. 7, 2011. The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen for their work on women's rights.
As demonstrations first swelled in Yemen, regime supporters distributed a photo showing Tawakkul Karman at a protest with a male colleague - cutting out others around them - to taint her for being alone with a man.
Karman's Nobel Peace Prize draws attention to the role of women in the Arab Spring uprisings; they have rebelled not only against dictators but against a traditional, conservative mindset that fears women as agents of change.
Women have participated in all the protests sweeping the Arab world, working both online to mobilize and on the ground to march, chant and even throw themselves into stone-throwing clashes with security forces - side by side with men.
The response from authorities has been quick and dirty, exploiting widespread cultural attitudes - present even in more liberal countries - that condemn such close contact between women and men as shameful.
In Egypt, women protesters detained by military troops were subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" that authorities claimed were to protect soldiers from rape allegations. To the activists, they were a clear warning: women should not take part in demonstrations. It raised such an uproar that the military promised not to conduct such tests again.
When scores of women in Saudi Arabia drove their cars in defiance of the male-only driving rule in the kingdom, ultraconservative forces lashed back, ordering one woman to be whipped before the king overturned the sentence. Conservatives depicted the driving campaign as a foreign, "corrupting" revolution, with Internet drawings showing hands with red-polished fingernails tearing the Saudi flag.
