Reply #158: Thank you for your reporting.

[BlueMTexpat]

I wonder though just how long you were in-country, in what capacity and for what purpose?

I can tell you from my own experience of living and working in North Africa for eight years that it is not at all uncommon to see men and women working side by side in professional capacities there. In fact, I first lived and worked in NA in the early 1960s and found that women civil servants, e.g., teachers, medical personnel (and there were large numbers of women in both of those professions), there enjoyed more workplace protections than did women in the US, i.e., a full two months paid leave for pregnancy and a guarantee of one's position upon return to the workplace. And I repeat, that was in the 1960s!

It is not as if Gaddafi was the only one to institute reforms - and in fact, he did not institute them, merely continued what was already in place as regards the situation of women in Libya. If anything though, in later years especially, their working conditions became more difficult under his regime.

While it is true that Americans generally are woefully ignorant about the Arabic-speaking Muslim world, the fact that you were even surprised to find such things happening in Libya in 2006, which has always had close ties to Europe, in part due to its proximity and the different colonial experiences of North Africa generally, shows that your pre-visit orientation to Libya was somewhat deficient.