BAGHDAD -- Three school years' worth of unbaked clay pieces have piled up in Hanna Milla's darkened office at Iraq's National Museum of Modern Art: rounded vases, stern masks, a lumpy hawk on its post, all shaped by the hands of young students and smoothed by Milla's coral-tipped fingers. And all waiting to be fired in kilns that have sat without reliable electricity for two years.
Teachers in the museum's warren of classrooms and halls last ran the kilns in January 2003, as students and instructors prepared for what would be their last exhibition as war closed in.
At the exhibition that night, the instructors -- almost all female -- mingled with students and artists, sipped drinks and eyed the displays. For the women, it would be the last late evening for years.
"We stayed . . . until 1 or 2 in the morning," Milla recalled, sounding the nostalgic note heard often now in Iraq.
The art, and the women, have receded to the dark corners. As with women in all wars, those in Iraq have been forced to yield the center to men waving guns. Saturday's vote on a constitution will not improve their lives, Milla and her colleagues say; at this point, they cannot imagine anything that would. They just hope it won't make their existences any worse.
As the constitution was being drafted by rival factions battling for control of Iraq and its future, women, who make up more than 50 percent of the population, were never treated as more than a side issue. None was involved in the backroom dealing. They had to rely on male leaders with other issues on their minds to plead their case.
President Bush has said women's rights is one of the reasons Americans are fighting in Iraq. A Western official in Baghdad said Friday that the proposed constitution was "a good constitution for women, and very frankly that's something we were very insistent upon."
The draft going before voters Saturday specifies equality regardless of a person's sex and aspires to reserve 25 percent of the seats in the National Assembly for women.
But it also gives each Iraqi household the option of using religious law to decide matters of inheritance, divorce, alimony and other family issues. Rights advocates have said they fear women will be coerced by male relatives into accepting the least favorable interpretations of religious law -- forbidding divorce without a husband's permission, for example, or cutting a daughter's inheritance compared with a son's.
The constitution also sets aside seats for Muslim clerics on the Supreme Court, which will weigh the constitutionality of all laws. In a country where an Iranian-influenced Shiite religious party holds the balance of power, that alarms proponents of women's rights.
"They call this constitution a tent, but they pulled Iraqi women out of this tent," said Zakiya Khalifa Zaidi, 73, a well-known actress who is now an activist.
"The constitution was written in a very tense atmosphere," Zaidi said. "That's why we lost many of our rights amid the chaos."
