Zaafaran Zaid says Yemen’s 1962 revolution opened education and public office to women
Yemen Herald News 
ADEN, Yemen — The head of a Yemeni women’s foundation said the September 26 revolution opened education, work and public office to women, the state news agency Saba reported.
Zaafaran Zaid, who heads the Yemeni Women’s Empowerment Foundation, made the remarks marking the 64th anniversary of the 1962 revolution. Saba published them on 27 September.
Zaid said women went on to serve as lawmakers, judges, lawyers, journalists, engineers and ministers, and in military and security posts. She said they also took leading roles in business and in development work.
Zaid said years of war and Houthi practices had undermined those gains.
Women and girls face poverty, displacement and detention, she said, along with restrictions on movement, work and education, and exposure to violence. She said they also face risks from landmines and other dangers tied to the fighting.
Zaid said Yemeni women deserve to regain their full rights and freedoms, and to remain partners in building the state and society, free of discrimination, exclusion, violence and guardianship.
The account of the interview rests on Saba, the state news agency of the internationally recognised government. Yemen Herald found no independent confirmation that the remarks were made, and no second origin for Zaid’s description of conditions for women in areas the Houthis control.
The Houthi authorities in Sanaa have not commented on the remarks.
Saba did not say when Zaid’s foundation was established, how large it is, or where it works.
Records kept by the Inter-Parliamentary Union date women’s formal political rights in Yemen to unification rather than to the revolution. The IPU says Yemeni women gained the right to vote and to stand for election in 1990, and that the first woman entered the House of Representatives that year.
No woman has served as speaker of the chamber, according to the IPU.
The House has had no women members since 2003, the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies said in a policy paper. That was the last year parliamentary elections were held in Yemen.
The National Dialogue Conference of 2013 and 2014 recommended a 30 percent quota for women in state institutions, according to the same paper.
Organised women’s activism in Yemen is older than unification. The Yemeni Women’s Association was founded in the north in 1965, three years after the republic was declared, although women’s groups had operated informally under the imamate.
In the south, the General Union of Yemeni Women was established in 1968.
The two merged in 1990 to form the Yemeni Women’s Union. Amat al-Alim Alsoswa led the northern body from 1989 and stayed on into the merged union’s first year.
The union says it runs more than a tenth of all literacy classes in Yemen. Its then chairperson publicly challenged a religious ruling issued in 2008 against women standing for office.
Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited their non-violent struggle for women’s security and the right to full participation in peace-building work. Karman was 32 when the prize was announced on 7 October 2011.
She founded the group Women Journalists Without Chains and led democracy and women’s rights protests in Yemen during the Arab Spring.
The anniversary Zaid marked dates to a coup led by Colonel Abdullah al-Sallal, which replaced the Mutawakkilite Kingdom with the Yemen Arab Republic.
The fighting that followed lasted until a ceasefire took effect on 1 December 1970. Egypt sent troops in support of the republicans and the Soviet Union supplied aircraft.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel gave military aid to the royalists, and Britain gave covert support, according to accounts of the war.
The south was a separate state at the time. Britain withdrew from the Federation of South Arabia in 1967, and the two Yemens united in 1990.
Humanitarian conditions frame the present picture for women. The United Nations humanitarian plan for Yemen, issued in March 2026, records more than 22 million people in need of assistance.
Aid agencies appealed for 2.16 billion dollars for the 2026 response, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The plan records 5.2 million people displaced inside the country and 18.3 million as acutely food insecure. More than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished, of whom 516,157 are severely malnourished.
Figures published when the plan was launched in December 2025 differed, putting the number in need at 23.1 million against a requirement of 2.5 billion dollars.
Detention of people taking part in the anniversary has been documented before. The rights group Mwatana for Human Rights recorded the detention of 21 participants in 2023 after field visits to government offices and detention centres in Sanaa, Ibb, Hodeidah, Taiz and Hajjah.
Human Rights Watch said in October 2025 that Houthi authorities had arrested people over commemorations of the anniversary in Sanaa, Amran, Hajjah, Dhamar, al-Bayda, Ibb and Taiz.
Landmines and unexploded ordnance remain a hazard along former front lines. Zaid cited them among the risks to women and girls, without giving figures.
September 26 is a public holiday in areas held by the internationally recognised government. Yemen Monitor reported commemorations in Taiz this year.
Saba filed the remarks from Aden, where the government is seated.
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