“On that day I realized we had two fights,” said Ahmed, a 24-year-old sociology student and women’s rights advocate, who took part in some of the first protests in Yemen last year that helped oust President Ali Abdullah Saleh from office.

“A battle against the regime, but also another struggle — a fight within the fight — against those elements inside the revolution who oppose us and our rights as women.”

One of the poorest countries in the world and the worst for gender equality, according to a UN metric based on literacy and other factors, Yemeni women defied deep-rooted traditions by even participating in the campaign against Saleh, then became pivotal players in it.

Now with Saleh deposed and a political transition under way, female activists fear the country is moving forward without them, and that men who were keen to have  them on the streets crying freedom do not now want them in parliament, universities or the workplace.

“Society embraced us at first,” said Faizah Al-Shami, a poet and activist. “We were there to bulk up the numbers ... Now that Saleh has left they expect us to do the same: leave the streets, renounce our freedoms and return home.”

For women like Shami, 14 months of devoted dissent have proved that overthrowing an autocrat may be easier than overturning the supremacy of men in a poor and turbulent country where women are a majority at the margins.

From the earliest rumblings of discontent last January, it was clear that women would be playing a novel role in this stage of Yemen’s history. After starting the uprising on the fringes — delivering blankets, cooking food and caring for some protesters wounded by security forces — women moved to the frontline.

From the English-speaking, educated elite of doctors, lawyers and university professors to the huge numbers of unemployed female graduates and housewives, women flocked en masse to join the revolt. They led public rallies, slept in protest camps, went on hunger strikes and covered the unrest as bloggers and journalists. They were also among the hundreds of protesters killed last year during the government’s bloody crackdown.

Faizah Sulaimani, an accounting-graduate-turned-protest-leader, recounted lying to her family about taking part in protests before they spotted her on TV.

“My mother stopped talking to me, my father yelled at me. At that moment I decided to go public, to break all the limits, just to send a message that we are here as Yemeni women.

“For me it was the first time to think and act as an individual, as a woman. We had ideas, thoughts we had to share, a vision for a new Yemen that we had to express,” she said.

That vision even had a face: Tawakkul Karman, the head-scarved mother of three who became a figure of symbolic importance and who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Arab woman to be accorded such an honor.

Her arrest at one of the first pro-democracy protests in January last year sparked outrage and helped link scattered demonstrations outside a Sanaa University campus into full-fledged revolt.

“Women are no longer victims, they have become leaders, they are at the forefront of the demonstrations,” Karman said in November shortly after she won her Nobel, shared with two Liberians to highlight the importance of women’s rights toward securing peace.

She urged women in Arab countries to “win their rights in a society dominated by the supremacy of men.”

But there have been few signs of political gains. Though three of the 35 ministers selected for the national unity government established in the wake of Saleh’s resignation in December are female, that is up from two in the previous government, and the parties that make it up remain male-dominated cliques.

Aiming to break up those networks before multi-party elections due in 2014, some women activists in Yemen are pushing for a law that would guarantee them 30 percent of all elected offices and political appointments.