Baghdad, Iraq ? Most of the theatrical gowns designed by Feryal Kilidar over 32 years have gone up in smoke — burned by looters.

Her studio had been located in the government-owned House of Fashion, but that has become the headquarters of an upstart political party called the Higher Council to Liberate Iraq. The party platform is a work in progress, but on this the members are clear: Under the Baath Party government, the House of Fashion was a warren of corrupt and un-Islamic activities.

One party activist suggested that Kilidar, who is from a prominent and wealthy family of Shiite clerics, is not really a Muslim because she does not wear a head scarf. “What are we going to do with them?” Kilidar said with a laugh when told what party members had said about her.

Her career a shambles and hostile newcomers squatting in her office, Kilidar has not been back to see the charred gowns with their Sumerian motifs or the damaged paintings on which the new occupants tried to write the name of their party. Like most Iraqi women, she has not left her house since the government of Saddam Hussein collapsed April 9, unleashing a crime wave that residents say is unlike anything they have ever seen.

“We never used to stay at home,” said Kilidar, who lives in a spacious, art-filled house in a field of date palms along the Tigris River. “But I don’t want to see Baghdad in this state. And we hear about men with guns stopping cars. I’m too afraid to go out.”

Chaos spurs fears

Kilidar was a privileged citizen under the former government, although she said she joined the Baath Party only three years ago. But while she enjoyed more advantages than most, the collapse of her career, her self-imposed confinement and the fog over her future mirror the uneasy situations facing many Iraqi women. A chaotic city filled with soldiers, thieves and carjackers, Baghdad often appears to be inhabited only by men. Alarmed by the lawlessness and now without jobs, most Iraqi women refuse to step outside their homes.

The absence of women in public view is striking in a country where women have for decades had professional jobs and lived with a measure of independence unusual in Arab countries, fostered by the Baath Party philosophy.

Since the war, women have been missing from the markets, where men now shop for food. Nor can women be seen in the long lines that begin forming overnight at gas stations. Most significantly, an interim government and scores of political parties are being formed with little to no input from women.

No networks

Without television news or readily available newspapers, women have no way of knowing which parties are addressing their concerns. The only permitted women’s organization was an arm of the defunct Baath Party, so women have no natural networks to turn to outside of friends, family and co-workers.

“I’m a bit surprised myself that Iraqi women are not on the stage,” said Tamara Daghistani, one of a handful of women working with the Iraqi National Congress, an exile organization seeking a political role in postwar Iraq. “Iraqi women are famous for being tough and decisive. But they went through three long and terrible wars. Women lost children, they lost husbands, they lost their sense of self-dependence. It takes time for them to readjust. As soon as the country gets running and the electricity comes back, things will fall into place, and women will start shopping around for a niche.”

No role in new government

Even among themselves, Iraqi women are not discussing power-sharing or the potential for an Islamic government that could dictate their movements and their dress. They say their immediate concern is not with getting a seat in parliament, but with getting a reliable supply of electricity to their homes and a police car patrolling their neighborhoods.

“The coming of an Islamic government is possible,” said Azhar Shehily, a political scientist and constitutional law professor at Baghdad University. “We would harshly refuse anyone telling us what we have to wear. If that happened, I’d be very afraid. But I think the coming government will not be 100 percent Islamic. And frankly, we have more important concerns now — like security, and having social services, first of all electricity.”