Gallantry in Struggle, Achievement in Peace: The Case of Eritrean Women

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Introduction

No nation develops by advancing only half its people. When women are confined, a society’s potential is confined with them. When women rise, nations rise. The emancipation of women is not a secondary social project; it is the foundation of durable development, economic vitality, and political stability. This truth is particularly evident in countries forged through struggle, countries like Eritrea, where women were not spectators to history but authors of it.

The story of Eritrean women is not a decorative chapter appended to independence; it is one of the structural pillars of Eritrea’s modern identity. Their emancipation was not granted as a post-war reform. It was tested in the crucible of a thirty-year liberation struggle that demanded total mobilization and moral clarity. Women fought, organized, commanded, and endured alongside men. And when the guns fell silent, their task did not end. It changed terrain. Nation-building replaced trench warfare, but the same courage was required.

Yet emancipation is never self-sustaining. Gains won in revolution can erode in peace. Eritrean women’s progress has been real and measurable, but it remains contested terrain, challenged by economic pressures, by inherited patriarchal reflexes, and by the difficult realities of post-war state construction. Their story, therefore, is not simply one of victory. It is one of vigilance.

International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day (March 8) emerged from early 20th-century labor and suffrage movements, was formalized after the 1910 Copenhagen conference, and later recognized by the United Nations in 1975. Over time, it has grown into a global day honoring women’s rights, achievements, and the ongoing struggle for equality.

Today, March 8 is marked across the globe through rallies, conferences, public campaigns, and national commemorations. In many countries, however, it is more than symbolic—it is an official public holiday, recognized in over 25 nations, particularly in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and parts of Africa and Asia. Eritrea stands among the small number of African countries that formally observe International Women’s Day as a national holiday, granting it full state recognition and public observance. This designation reflects Eritrea’s historic acknowledgment of women’s central role in the liberation struggle and national development, and affirms the institutional importance accorded to women’s rights and contributions to society.

The map below illustrates the global status of March 8 observance: countries shown in red recognize International Women’s Day as an official public holiday; those in orange observe it as a women-only holiday; countries marked in yellow treat it as a non-official observance; and those in grey do not formally recognize March 8 as a holiday.

EPLF’s Progressive Vision and Women’s Mass Participation

Eritrean society, like many others, carried long-standing conservative norms about women’s public roles, norms that confined women to domestic labor and treated leadership, armed defense, and public authority as male domains. The EPLF did not simply “include” women within that culture; it confronted it. Equality was not framed as charity, nor as an afterthought to be negotiated later, but as part of the liberation project itself: the nation could not be free if half the population remained socially subordinate.

That ideological stance mattered because it changed the moral permissions of society. It did not merely ask whether women could participate; it insisted they must, as equal agents, not helpers. And once women were expected, to fight, lead, organize, and govern in wartime conditions, old stereotypes could no longer survive untouched.

Between 1961 and 1991, Eritreans fought a 30-year war against an Ethiopian army far larger and better equipped, an army bolstered at different times by external powers and treated as one of the strongest on the continent. Under such conditions, Eritrea’s survival depended on mobilizing every capable resource. Women were not placed at the margins of that effort; they were placed at its center.

The Eritrean struggle for independence rested on the shoulders of both men and women alike. In the cities and semi-liberated areas, clandestine networks were sustained by women as much as by men, organizing cells, carrying messages, moving supplies, and maintaining the underground lifelines of the revolution. Repression did not discriminate. The enemy arrested, imprisoned, and tortured men and women with equal severity, recognizing that both were indispensable to the resistance.

By the late years of the struggle, women comprised roughly one-third of the liberation forces. They fought on the frontlines, served in direct combat operations, held strategic and leading positions, and carried responsibilities indistinguishable from men’s. They were commanders. They operated heavy equipment. They moved behind enemy lines. They trained, marched, endured hunger, faced bombardment, and died in the same trenches. By 1989, women were deeply integrated across the institutional and economic structures of the EPLF. They comprised 23% of the army, 29.5% of industrial workers, and 25.5% of those working in the transport department. In health services, women formed a majority at 55.2%, while they accounted for 19.6% in construction and 19.8% in agriculture. Their presence extended into technical and administrative fields as well: 25% in electronics, 33.1% in communications, 9.5% in finance, and 1.7% in national guidance. That is why Eritrean women’s wartime legacy is often described as distinguished not only in scale but in quality, gallantry that was organized, sustained, and structurally embedded in the liberation movement itself.

This experience also transformed daily life inside the revolutionary field. Shared hardship eroded social ranking and gender hierarchy alike. The front did not recognize “women’s work” and “men’s work” as separate moral universes; it recognized competence, discipline, courage, and sacrifice. In the process, women did not just win battles, they helped shift what Eritrean society could imagine a woman to be.

Eritrea remains one of the few nations where women have fought side by side with men not as auxiliaries, but as full combatants. That legacy continues in the structure of national service, where both men and women undergo military training, including months of instruction in weapons handling, tactics, and survival skills. Living and training together in military camps, they learn discipline, endurance, and national defense as a shared civic responsibility, an enduring reflection of a liberation struggle built on collective sacrifice rather than gendered roles.

The NUEW: Vision, Mission, and Historical Role

The National Union of Eritrean Women (NUEW) was established in 1979, with the backing of the EPLF, precisely to ensure that women’s emancipation was not a slogan but a practiced reality. During the liberation struggle, NUEW’s role was twofold.

First, it organized and mobilized women as a core component of the liberation effort, politically, socially, and militarily, so that women’s participation would be systematic rather than occasional. Second, it worked to sensitize society itself, challenging discriminatory attitudes and promoting gender equality as a national imperative, even in the midst of war.

After independence, NUEW reconstituted itself as an organization dedicated to improving the status of women and girls and ensuring that women participate equally in political, economic, social, and cultural life, and share fully in the benefits. Its stated mission, in essence, is to build women’s confidence, protect and expand their rights, and ensure equal opportunity and equal participation across every sphere of life. In practical terms, NUEW has positioned itself as an advocate, educator, and mobilizer: pressing for legal literacy, fighting harmful traditional practices, strengthening women’s access to education and employment, improving maternal and reproductive health awareness, supporting women’s economic empowerment through skills training and credit, and defending women’s rights within family and civil law.

NUEW also played a national role in civic formation, including organizing workshops and sensitization efforts during the constitutional process and advocating for policies through a gender lens. It is structured nationally, with offices across the six zones, and its membership and diaspora branches function as a bridge between local community work and broader national goals, linking the liberation-era spirit of collective organization to peacetime development needs.

Achievements After Independence: From the Unthinkable to the Visible

One of the clearest indicators of Eritrean women’s advancement is their presence today in professions and leadership roles that were once inconceivable within the country’s traditional social framework. Women now serve as teachers, doctors, nurses, professors, engineers, mechanics, pilots, navy captains, regional and subregional administrators, mayors, judges, army officers, and cabinet ministers, including portfolios such as justice, education, health, and labor and human welfare, as well as director generals and ambassadors.

This development represents more than individual achievement; it reflects a profound social transformation. It marks a shift from a past in which women’s authority was largely confined to the domestic sphere to a present in which competence and leadership are increasingly acknowledged as gender-neutral in principle—even if practice has yet to fully realize that ideal.

Alongside professional advancement, post-independence initiatives tied to literacy, skills training, micro-credit, and community development have expanded women’s participation in the formal labor force, small business licensing, and local administration. Women have benefited significantly from national development programs in education, health access, water and sanitation, and savings and micro-credit schemes. Progress has also been pursued against harmful practices through legal prohibition and public campaigns, including efforts to reduce female genital mutilation and underage marriage, areas where NUEW has consistently been a key actor in awareness, community mobilization, and coordination.

Just as importantly, women’s national defense participation has continued. Eritrea remains one of the few countries where women train and serve alongside men as part of national service and military structures. Whatever debates exist about the broader system, the fact remains: Eritrean women’s identity as national defenders did not end with independence. Their courage did not retire. It was redirected.

Challenges: The Afterlife of Equality

The greatest test of liberation-era gender equality is not whether women fought bravely, history answers that. The test is whether a society forged in revolution can prevent old patriarchal reflexes from reasserting themselves once the emergency of war fades.

Former fighters and younger women alike still confront cultural expectations about domesticity, marriage, childcare, and “proper” feminine presentation, pressures that can quietly punish independence and ambition. Economic constraints complicate the transition from wartime clarity to peacetime competition: child bearing and rearing consumes time; childcare requires infrastructure; professional mobility demands networks and resources that many women did not have. Thus we need to avoid the risk that women’s sacrifices become celebrated rhetorically while their material advancement stalls in practice.

That is why the work of institutions like NUEW remains central. Its mission is not only to commemorate women’s contributions, but to defend those contributions from being relegated to nostalgia, by pushing legal awareness, expanding skills and opportunity, and keeping gender equality on the national agenda even when society drifts toward traditional defaults.

Eritrean women proved gallantry in the hardest arena, war, at a scale and depth that reshaped the liberation struggle itself. They then carried that discipline into reconstruction, education, health, administration, and national service. Their achievements since independence are real and visible: women now occupy professional and command roles that the pre-EPLF social order barely permitted to exist.

But gallantry is not only the courage to fight; it is the courage to persist, against poverty, against cultural rollback, against the quiet return of old hierarchies. Eritrean women have already rewritten what is “normal” in Eritrean public life. The unfinished task is to ensure that what was won through sacrifice becomes permanent through policy, institutions, and sustained cultural change.

In that sense, NUEW’s founding logic remains as urgent today as it was in 1979: liberation is incomplete if equality is temporary.

Conclusion

The emancipation of women is not an abstract moral aspiration; it is a developmental necessity. Societies that fail to unlock the capacities of women limit their own growth. Societies that invest in women multiply their future. Eritrea’s experience demonstrates this vividly. Women were indispensable to liberation; they remain indispensable to nation-building. Their participation in defense, education, medicine, engineering, administration, and governance is not symbolic; it is structural.

The measure of a nation’s maturity is not whether it praises women’s past sacrifices, but whether it protects and expands their present opportunities. Gallantry in war proved that Eritrean women could carry the weight of national survival. Achievement in peace proved they can carry the weight of national progress.

The unfinished task is clear. Equality must not remain a revolutionary memory; it must become a permanent civic norm. Institutions must safeguard what trenches made possible. Culture must align with law. Opportunity must match rhetoric.

Eritrean women have already demonstrated that they can transform a battlefield and a society. The question for the nation is whether it will continue to transform itself in return.