THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IN IRAN

A HOPEFUL PROGNOSIS

AZAR TABARI

The situation of women in Iran has been the subject of much reporting, commentary, and analysis over the past several years.1 Understandably, most reports have concentrated on the horrendous things that have happened to Iranian women since Khomeini’s regime cam to power. However, it would be false to think of the past five years as a purely bleak page of history. Discouraging as they have been, these years have also revealed glimpses of new and hopeful developments. My purpose here is to pull out some of these silver lining from the clouds of gloom that have descended over Iran.

The most positive development has been the emergence for the first time of a women’s rights movement in the wake of the fall of the shah, on a scale unprecedented in Iranian history.  Shortly before the change of regime, on 31 January 1979, the first women’s group declared its existence. In a press statement, the Committee to Set Up the League for Women’s Awakening reported that one of the glorious characteristics of the present movement and the revolution of Iranian people is the participation of large layers of urban women, intellectuals and toilers, and even some women from the rural areas… This reflects the growth of political awareness among women, their attraction to the revolution and their concern for its victory. On the other hand, given that women in their majority are still not involved in the movement, it poses the necessity of raising political demands and slogans that would further mobilize women.

The statement reviewed the general political situation in Iran and demanded certain rights for women. It concluded that “women need their own organization that would centralize their forces.” The committee projected its own task as one of preliminary organizing and propaganda, through the publications of a journal, Women’s Awakening.

The founders of this committee were in political sympathy with the Union of Iranian Communists; like other Left groups at the time, they totally underestimated the extent of women’s aspirations for organizing and fighting for their rights. In response to their press advertisement for a preliminary meeting at Tehran University’s Faculty of Engineering, hundreds of women showed up to register as members of the league. Overwhelmed, the organizers canceled the meeting.

Similar incidents attest to the energy generated among young, secular women at the time and the inability of the Left to deal with the Socialist Workers Party of Iran, set up a committee to celebrate International Women’s Day, 8 March 1979. The students expected about fifty people at a planning meeting, but over 250 diverse women turned up. Task-oriented subcommittees were set up for International Women’s Day activities, but no long-term perspective was developed for organizing women against the new Islamic regime.

In the first decade of this century during the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911), only a few Iranian women were concerned with female emancipation. Their efforts concentrated on such issues as raising literacy levels among women by opening girls’ schools and creating facilities for improving women’s health and hygiene. I do not mean to belittle these early efforts. Without the tireless and often thankless efforts these early pioneers for women’s rights, in the face of much hostility, Iranian women would not be where they are today. But the general social and political situation of early-twentieth-century Iran – where even the thought of literacy was limited to a small handful – is in stark contrast to the Iran of 1979, where the threat of an institutionalized assault on; women’s rights brought tens of thousands of women into the streets.

Several factors have contributed to this development. Undoubtedly, the most important is the economic and social development of the country over the past seventy years. And this is not unique to Iran. Development of capitalism in what is commonly referred to as the Third World over this period, particularly over the past thirty years, has integrated ever larger numbers of women into the paid labor force and into economic and social activities that were only recently exclusively male domains, including various skilled professions as well as industrial employment. In some Latin American countries, for example, this integration has been more thorough. In many Middle Eastern and Islamic countries, however, it has come much more slowly, and women have made headway m fewer professions and occupations.4 Despite different rates of progress and varying patterns, the integration of women into economic life, in contrast to their traditional domestic domain, stands as an indisputable feature of capitalist development in the Third World. It is this integration that has opened new vistas of thought, new expectations, and new conceptions of individual right among women.

Like the women’s rights movements in America and Europe it the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growth of a feminist consciousness among Third World women has started from, and at present is limited to, women involved in professions such as teaching, nursing, engineering and other technical fields, medicine, architecture, and law. Women in agriculture traditional crafts and factory work continue to be bound by the strength or the extended family as an organization for production and/or are oppressed by poverty.5 In such circumstances, there is little room for the growth of individualism for each member of the family, but this is particularly true for women. When the very survival of the family is dependent on everyone chipping in with his or her labor or income, no one can think of himself of herself as an independent individual. A woman factory worker does not thin of her wages as “my wages” but as part of the family income. As part of a family, and often an extended one, she can at least survive. She thus has no image of herself as a separate individual it her own right.

In contrast, women in white-collar jobs and professions can begin to break with tradition. They have a choice to perceive themselves freed of material bondage, as independent human personalities. Contrary to nationalist glorifications of communal values and traditional social structures, contrary to Third World mystification about the cultural and welfare strengths of kinship networks, the break from this suffocation bondage in the direction of individualism’s is a tremendous positive and liberating experience. Only people who have not been forced into arranged marriages, who have not felt the burden of kinship pressures, could call these relations anything but deeply oppressive bondage. The problem with Third World  capitalist development is not that it has launched an assault on such bondage but that it has made the break from these ties positive for only a tiny fraction of women.

This point needs further elaboration. Certain precapitalist traditional structures  of Third World  societies are sometimes pointed to as desirable features to be persevered for the future. In the case of women, all-inclusive female networks, for instance,  have been held up as models of sisterly solidarity. A prebourgeois absence of individualism is projected as an alternative to atomized alienation, characteristic of a highly advanced capitalist society. 6 Such conflations  are a misreading of the actual state of human relations in these societies; they are factually false and are politically and socially regressive. In extreme form, such viewpoint could serve to glorify some of the most oppressive social relations.

In her attempt to counteract what she considers to be “Western ethnocentric perceptions of the harem,” Leila Ahmed draws the following alternative perception of the secluded life of Saudi Arabian women:

The reality is that Saudi society not only designates and demarcates men’s space, is also designates and demarcates women’s space, and furthermore declares it –women’s space but not men’s space –inviolable. In their space, women can me, and often are freely together, freely exchange information and ideas, including about men, without danger of being overheard by men… Here, women share living time and living space, exchange jokes, stories, or plays – the world of men. 7

Suppose one were to write of the American South in the nineteenth century in similar terms.

The reality is that southern society not only designates and demarcates the whites’ space, it also designates and demarcates the blacks’ space. Furthermore, in their space, the blacks are freely together, freely exchange information and ideas, including about the whites, without danger of being overheard because the whites do not frequent the quarters of the slaves. The strict segregation of the South has meant in fact freedoms for salves and freedoms to engage in activities that would imperil their living in a desegregated society.

Would not the author of such lines be criticized for at best being blind to the most important single feature of the white/black relation that of master to slave? Worse, such an interpretation of the quality of the segregated quarters of the black slaves  could be seen, particularly by the black slaves, as a justification for an ugly and oppressive travesty of social reality.

The element of choice here is crucial. It is the absence of choice that makes parallels drawn, by Ahmed, between the voluntary association of women and traditional segregation of women such as monstrous travesty of social reality.

Thinking back over that world and over such encounter, from Massachusetts where feminists have former communes and are rediscovering the strengths of women sharing it seems to me that to believe that segregated secluded from the company of men are women deprived, is only to allow ourselves to be servility obedient to the constructs of men, Western or Middle Eastern.”

Feminists in Massachusetts who form all-female communes do so out of free choice, with a vision that such living arrangements offer them more meaningful human relations. At any point one of them may change her mind, leave that commune and go and live differently, even with a man if she so desires. In this voluntary association women seek new sources of strength and imaginative life experiences. In contrast, the secluded all-female life of the  Saudi Arabian women is the only one available to her. It constricts the horizon of her thought, defines the limits of her intellect, and blinds the experiences of her  life under threat of the most  severe punishment should she dare to break such limits.

Indeed, Ahmed herself, when citing examples of women who have gained her admiration does not point to women who are developing their strengths and skills and analytical and imaginative recourses inside the confines of their exclusive female space. She points with pride to women who are breaking out of these confines, taking up those who are various professions: “Almost all those young women I knew whose grades were good enough intended  to enter the sciences at a university, preferably engineering, architecture, or medicine only if their grades were not good enough did they think of entering the arts.’

It should be mentioned, however, that the preference for the sciences does not stem solely, or even primarily, from the “intellectual fearlessness” of Arab women. Educational choices in Third World countries are not motivated by individual preference; they are above all subordinated to “interests of national development.” It is for this reason that sciences are given top priority. Arts and humanities are considered useless, and social sciences fall somewhere in the middle. Even within the sciences--in contrast to more advanced capitalist societies--applied sciences, such as engineering and medicine, have higher prestige than more abstract (and, by implication, less useful) fields, such as mathematics and physics.

In fact, the misreading of the apparent contrast with what Euro-American women choose to study or focus their struggles on has often led to false conclusions. Many Third World people interpret such phenomena as a sign of some superiority and seriousness of Third World women compared with the apparently frivolous interests of Western women. This is reflected at the political level as well. The fact that in most of these countries women have so far not raised their problems as women--indeed, they have often consciously subordinated such concerns to the presumably higher national interests--is seen as a source of pride and an indication of the weightiness of their political interests:

Women of the ex-colonial world have seen much of the substance of these [the Western women’s movement] struggles as irrelevant to them. Women struggling to liberate themselves from the burden of oppression by imperialism--a burden which manifests itself in extreme ways through poverty, disease, genocide--appear to find little point of comparison between their own goals and the concerns of Western women. For them, Western women represent a privileged middle class elite fighting sectarian aims, while women in national liberation struggles are fighting on behalf of their whole people.10

Mavis Nhlapo, representative of the African Congress Women’s Secretariat, put it most succinctly: “In our society women have never made a call for the recognition of their rights as women, but always put the aspirations of the whole African and other oppressed people of our country first.”11

Such differences between the concerns of women in differing

social, economic, and political contexts are not analyzed as historical differences but as an indication of the superiority of Third World women’s struggles:

The Western WM [Women’s Movement] has concentrated on extending individual sexual freedoms as part of liberal democracy rather than on fundamentally changing society. What Third World, Black and working-clan! women pose is a much more profound and total reorganization of society itself and the relations within it. The idea of individualism is alien to Third World countries where familial, caste, tribal or national interests are often dominant. And in these countries the separation of women’s freedom from other freedoms becomes impossible. Freedom from hunger, from dictatorship, from foreign domination. . .define their priorities.12

I am not disputing that struggles against poverty, hunger, and dictatorships often take precedence for Third World women over struggles for their rights as women. What is incomprehensible is why so many authors consider this a source of pride, an indicator of “something more profound.” On the contrary, I would argue that to the extent that familial, caste, tribal, and national interest: take precedence over women’s rights as individuals; to the extent that the immense pressures on society as a whole, and on women in particular, continue to force humanity to fight for such elementary concerns as food, health, democratic rights, and national self assertion; to the extent that society cannot afford and does not allow individuation among its members, we are dealing with a more backward situation, with a more difficult social setting, with a much longer and more arduous road to the emancipation of women.

It is only with the development of individual consciousness that a woman can come to the brutal recognition that general civil rights, which are supposed to encompass all citizens, are gender differentiated. This differentiation is particularly sharp in Islamic societies such as Iran, where even before the advent of Khomeini’s Islamic republic, the body of civil codes was based on Islamic Shari’a (religious law) in which man’s prerogatives over woman are immense.

In Iran the family laws on polygamy and divorce had been reformed in the 1960s, but these reforms were very limited. Despite their limits, however, that population of Iranian women awakening to their rights as women had no intention of accepting a reversal or annulment of these laws. It was at this juncture that the clear clash between feminist expectations and the actual course of developments following the shah’s overthrow took shape. Many of these women had, in fact, participated in the movement to overthrow the shah’s regime with the expectation that new arenas of women’s rights and women’s participation in social, political, and economic life would be opened. To their horror, from the outset they faced reversals, not advances.

As a concession to the religious leaders of the movement, the shah’s regime, in August 1978, had banned abortion. Shortly after the change in regime, the reformed family laws were suspended, women were barred from becoming judges, and Khomeini issued his first statement on the veil, on the eve of International Women’s Day. A whole series of measures were taken to segregate education, buses, sports, beaches, and so forth. The Iranian women’s movement burst into the political scene as a response to these attacks.

A week of demonstrations, meetings, sit-ins, and other forms of protest began on March 8. From the early hours of that morning, meetings were held in girls’ high schools and at Tehran University. Marching women converged on the University, the Office of Prime Minister Bazargan, and the Ministry of Justice. Some of the slogans of the demonstrators were: “Freedom Is Our Culture, to Stay at Home Is Our Shame”; “Women’s Day Is Neither Western Nor Eastern, It Is International.” In several incidents women demonstrators were physically attacked by Islamic thugs. Many meetings to celebrate International Women’s Day were held throughout the day, each drawing an audience of several thousands.

Further demonstrations and sit-ins against the imposition of the veil took place on March 10. The next day, approximately 20,000 women attended a rally at Tehran University, even though Bazargan, the day before, had announced that wearing a veil would not be compulsory.

Following this first wave of activities, the women’s movement went through a period of inactivity and fragmentation. There were two reasons for this. First, after the initial retreat by the government on the issue of the veil, the central focus of mobilization had been removed. Second, the situation was further aggravated by the organizational format adopted by the women’s groups. Almost all groups were set up as adjuncts of existing political formations.

Without any clear feminist perspective, these groups often simply served to recruit members for the parent organization. This fragmentation further facilitated the regime’s continued attack against women’s rights. The proposed Islamic family law in autumn 1979 provided a new national focus for action and gave rise to a short-lived centralization of women’s groups. On 25 November 1979, the first “unified congress” of women’s organizations was held to discuss joint action against the new Constitution and various laws affecting women adversely. But the general political consolidation of religious rule in Iran and the setbacks suffered by the Left and other secular forces affected the activities of women’s groups. The poor and disorganized response to the enforcement of the veil in summer 1980, in contrast to the mass demonstrations in March 1979, was an indication of these setbacks. For a while a number of women’s journals continued to be published by some groups but ceased publication in the subsequent waves of attacks against the press in general.

A second factor that prepared the ground for the emergence of a women’s movement in Iran was a political one. Again, this is not unique to Iran but common to much of the Third World. In a previous period of political and social struggles in these countries, political efforts were focused on issues related to “external” forces; struggles against colonial powers and for national independence overshadowed all politics. Even in a country like Iran, which was never colonized, an issue such as nationalization of the oil industry dominated the politics of the 1940s and 1950s. To the extent that women participated in these struggles, they were seen and saw themselves not as individuals but as “auxiliary forces” to the national collective struggling for independence. Issues of women’s rights were rarely raised but were relegated to a future that never seemed to arrive--witness the Algerian Liberation movement, various African nationalist movements, and others.

In contrast, the current struggles in most of the Third World no longer face such powerful external forces which shape all internal politics. Social movements in Third World countries are forming along internal lines of differentiation. Indeed, anti-imperialism, devoid of its previous real and progressive content, has become a political battering ram in the hands of ruling classes in the Third World to suppress internal opposition. Its most reactionary manifestations became evident in the Iranian case, where all dis­sent was banned and internal uniformity imposed under the pretext of anti-imperialism. Yet the only acts of so-called anti-imperialism were the hostage taking at the American Embassy or even more regressive measures instituted to cleanse society of the presumably cultural evidence of imperialism-unveiled women, film, music, and wine!

Unfortunately, however, most currents on the Iranian Left had remained locked into an archaic analysis. The main struggle was against imperialism--not that anyone bothered to define what that meant--and unity in this imaginary struggle took precedence over whatever else was going on in the real life of Iran. With the change of the regime, the Left was concerned over a possible attack by imperialism, a possible army coup, on the model of the 1953 coup against the nationalist premier Mosaddeq; the pages of the Left press were covered with material about the lessons of the coup in Chile, for example. In this picture, consequently, struggles of women against the imposition of the veil, against being banned from the judiciary, seemed trivial and diversionary. While all this concern with imperialism and external threats preoccupied the Left, the real threat against any hopeful development in postPahlavi Iran was not growing externally, but in Qum and Tehran, through the building of the new state‑an Islamic state. The moral campaigns of the new regime were tolerated in silence; some leftists shared the austere and puritanical image of humanity, held by Islamic currents; others considered it unimportant. In fact, it was these very “trivial” vents that cumulatively shaped the new Islamic state and its politics.

In such a context, the Iranian’s women’s movement posed one of the first challenges to the legitimacy of the new regime. It will become one of the most important ones in breaking the Islamic conformist hold over society.

A third element that has contributed to the development of a women’s movement in Iran (and again not only in Iran) is the increasing interaction of the women’s movement on an international scale. In the early twentieth century such an interaction was minimal. The handful of women in Iran who knew about Euro--suffragist movements could only look toward them with a distant envy. The feminist press in the West did report on the life of women in the colonies--for example, British women’s journals on Indian women’s lives--but only occasionally.13 In contrast, the 1970s and 1980s have witnessed a tremendous interaction between the women’s movements in advanced capitalist countries and those of the Third World. The enormous strides made by these movements in the West have exerted a powerful influence on many women of the Third World. Many ideas among Iranian (and other Third World) feminists, for instance, were shaped under the second wave of feminism in the West--ideas such as the double oppression of women, the struggle against patriarchal norms and values, and the necessity of autonomous organizations of women. In other words, socioeconomic developments in the Third World have made much of the experience of feminism relevant internationally. The gap between the two sets of circumstances and expectations has greatly lessened.

Many of the Iranian women instrumental in organizing the numerous women’s groups and activities in the spring of 1979 had been students in America and Europe in the early‑ and mid‑1970s, strongly and directly Influenced by their women’s movements. On the other side, feminists from those countries were eager to see, to report on, and to show active solidarity with the emerging Iranian women’s movement. Women from France, Italy, and the United States were alongside Iranian women in the activities of March 1979.1’ This international interaction has not been free from tensions. Many Iranian and Third World women, under nationalist prejudices, deny their intellectual debt to, and distance themselves from, “Western feminism.” Ironically, the early Iranian feminists, despite the enormous gap between their situation and that of Western feminists, looked positively toward the latter. Today, many Iranian feminists emphasize the differences in problems faced by women in different countries, viewing those faced by Third World women as more serious, more vital, than the “personal” preoccupations of women in the advanced capitalist countries.

The difference between the two contexts and two sets of problems are undeniable. What is questionable, however, is the air of superiority, of “reverse ethnocentricity” that is implicit in such attitudes. The “seriousness” of the problems of Third World women is only indicative of the more backward situation of women in these societies compared with Euro‑American women. This is nothing to be proud of and shows what a tortuous, long, and difficult road we have ahead of us to women’s liberation.

Similarly, many activists in the women’s movement in advanced capitalist countries have distanced themselves from women’s movements in the Third World. They are fearful that their feminism in ft Third World context may amount to some sort of “cultural imperialism.” All my attempts to locate a precise formulation, an extended description, or an analysis of the oft‑repeated cliché‑cultural imperialism‑have led nowhere. A charged concept that combines two loaded words‑culture and imperialism ‑ it enters with such elusive ease in so many writings, without leaving a trace. Jenny Bourne, for instance, refers to “the cultural imperialism of the [Western] Women’s movement” so comfortably, as if an obvious fact of life hardly requires elaboration.15 Judy Kimble and Elaine Unterhalter consider the following statement of Samora Machel, president of Mozambique, as “a clear rejection of Western cultural imperialism”:

There are those who see emancipation as mechanical equality between men and women. This vulgar concept is often seen among us. Here emancipation means that women and men do exactly the same tasks, mechanically dividing the household duties. ‘I! 1 wash the dishes today, you must wash them tomorrow, whether or not you are busy or have the time.’ If there are still no women truck drivers or tractor drivers in FRELIMO [Front for Liberation of Mozambique], we must have some right away regardless of the objective and subjective conditions. As we can see from the example of the capitalist countries, this mechanically conceived emancipation leads to complaints and attitudes which utterly distort the meaning of women’s emancipation. An emancipated woman is one who drinks, smokes, wears trousers, and miniskirts, who indulges in sexual promiscuity, who refuses to have children.16

Machel’s statement, so typical of many Third World images of the women’s movement in the West, in fact encapsulates the most reactionary tenets of nationalist thinking about women. Women’s rights are often trampled upon in the name of rejecting the “mechanical equality between men and women.” And what is culturally imperialist about women drinking, smoking, wearing trousers, miniskirts, indulging in sexual promiscuity and refusing m have children (what a crime against the notion!)? If someone tract sail that drinking, smoking, and so forth, in general (and not only for women) constituted “cultural imperialism,” he or she would in all probability be accused of being totally ignorant of the rich cultural traditions of the Third World. Did not tobacco smoking come from American Indians, what about Khayyam’s poetry about “a cup of wine and a loaf of bread and thou,” and didn’t our indigenous women in the rural hinterlands always wear trousers? But such statements, if applied to women, are lauded as a clear rejection of “cultural imperialism.” In fact, if one reads Machel’s statement carefully, his anger is not directed against penetration of imperialism into African culture at all‑whatever that might be. He is angry at the women who have broken with traditional roles and images of women, be it through drinking, smoking, or wearing particular clothes. Machel does not like women rejecting sexual morality or desiring to do something with their lives other than preparing food and producing babies. This break of some African women with their past‑regardless of the form it takes‑brings out Machel’s backward nationalist wrath.

Another context in which the elusive “cultural imperialism” struck again was at the Non‑Governmental Organizations Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in July 1980. Here is Leila Ahmed’s account of the incident.

During the World Conference of the UN Decade for Women in Copenhagen, UNICEF issued a statement saying that it was committed to assisting governments (Third World, of course) to fight the practice of clitoridectomy and other forms of genital mutilation. Surely a harmless, well‑meaning statement that no feminist could object to? Some Third World feminists did. They felt that the crusading zeal with which Western women had seized on the issue was a mute, but nevertheless blatant, declaration that as usual it was up to the good of paternalistic West to come and save the Third World. . .from its own nasty, backward habits. The very fuss over the issue seemed to contain an insidious implication that only in the Third World were truly misogynistic things done to women. Therefore, Western women’s involvement with this issue was seen as an attempt to assert. . .their own culture’s superiority. Some Third World feminists felt this so strongly and found it so objectionable that they actually protested UNICEF’s statement.l7

To her credit, Ahmed concludes: “That these women should find themselves protesting because UNICEF or anybody else chose to declare war on clitoridectomy is surely just plain ludicrous.” Others have argued for an “understanding of the cultural context.” Lourdes Bencriu described a workshop on female circumcision organized by the Association of Africa Women for Research and Development in response to the proposal of the United Nations Children’s Fund for an official UN condemnation and call for eradication of this practice. She cited African women who made it clear that they were opposed to genital mutilation but “were very firm in calling for a hands-off policy on the part of non African and international institutions.” The African women argued that

first, female circumcision is a complex issue that must be understood within the whole context of deeply ingrained rituals and traditions that play important roles in African women’s lives. For example, for many girls in West Africa, this practice represents a form of passage to adulthood and the occasion for learning about sex in general. For the older women in charge, it is a source of prestige in the community. Thus, women themselves look upon female circumcision as necessary and normal. Second, non-African condemnation of this practice is likely to generate accusations of Western manipulation of African affairs and create a negative backlash. Action generated from within African countries by African women is likely to be much more effective.”

Of course, in order to change effectively an outrageous and barbaric social custom, such as clitoridectomy (a practice that is not ‘circumcision,” which implies a very minor procedure, one must understand the context of such traditions. But the point at issue is not one of understanding. By posing such problems in a presumably “objective,” detached fashion, empty of any moral outrage, one crosses that fine line whereby “understanding in order to change” slips over to “understanding in order to tolerate.” If, after all,  clitoridectomy is a ritual of passage to adulthood, if women themselves consider it necessary and normal, if it constitutes an important tradition in African culture, then maybe it is not so bad. The issue becomes one of a “different culture,” and then maybe we are simply misunderstanding that culture.

Cultural relativism becomes a banner under which oppression becomes tolerable. Listen to how Patricia Higgins argues against Kate Millett’s passionate commitment to defending Iranian women’s struggles against Khomeini’s onslaught:

Millets recognizes that “general as patriarchy is, it has its own flavor and experiences everywhere” gyp. 125/, but there is no indication that she expects the feminist order of the future to take different forms in different cultures. Equal education; equal pay; equal opportunity; access to abortion, contraception, and sex education; and childcare facilities are left unquestioned as the universal minimal accoutrements of sexual equality. Having accepted a single basic model for sexual equality, Millett is forced into a simplistic understanding of the events she witnessed. She can assume that the chadori must be more opprc, amlthan their sisters who do not wear the veil. Similarly, she can dismiss all counterdemonstrations as fanatically opposed to women’s rights rather than view them as purveyors of alternate cultural values.19

Indeed, quite logically, Higgins echoes the silence of many feminists in the West at the time of the initial attacks on women’s rights in Iran: “’How can we help? Millett asks. Perhaps we cannot.”20 Fearful of the imaginary ghost of “cultural imperialism,” many Western feminists silently watched the consolidation of a religious monstrosity. But why should geographical and cultural borders make what is conceived as oppression in one context an acceptable cultural norm in another?

A fourth factor that fueled the emergence of the women’s movement in Iran--and in the coming period the most important factor in keeping it alive--is the political character of the state that  replaced the shah’s regime. For historical, as well as immediate

political, reasons, the mass movement for the overthrow of the shah was led to victory by the hegemonies Islamic movement, under the leadership of a faction of the shi’ite clergy in Iran. The program of this movement for building a new state and a new society in Iran according to Islamic precepts is an extremely regressive one, affecting the situation of women in particular. The clash between the requirements of such a state and the goals of the women’s movement occur at two levels.

One is of a fundamental character and exists between any version of an Islamic government and the whole notion of women’s liberation. An Islamic government is based on the precept that all social and individual life is determined by norms derived from the Quran, the Shari’a (religious law/, the sunna traditions of the Prophet/, and various other authorized interpretations of the holy “will.” Various Islamic tendencies may differ on the application of various aspects of Islam. They may also differ on who has interpretive authority and what are authentic interpretations. But they all share the basic notion of Islam determining social and individual good. It is this imperative in an Islamic government that conflicts with the basic notion of women’s liberation, namely, that the woman in her individual sell--not the state, church, community, family, nor any other body--should have the right to choose. Here, the conflict with Islamic government arises from its denial of the rights of its citizenry to determine their own social and individual being. This, of course, affects women and men both. It denies any form of independence, choice, or decisive participation of citizens. It is a highly conformist notion of government, intolerant of diversity, deeply antidemocratic. Its clash with the goals of women’s liberation is particularly sharp because the very emergence of this movement was and is an indication of a new awakening among Iranian women as individuals with claims to equal rights, freedom to choose a life companion, to hold a job, to travel without a husband’s permission, to divorce and obtain child custody, to get out of a bigamous marriage, and so forth.

Less than a month after coming to power, Khomeini made his famous statement that “women are permitted to hold office jobs provided they go to work with the hejab,” the Islamic covering for women. This precipitated a clash between the exigencies of an Islamic government--with top religious leaders ordering women what to wear--and the claims of women on their individual rights which exploded onto the streets of Tehran. Women felt deeply insulted and outraged that someone--albeit the most popular person in Iran at the time, was taking it upon himself to tell them what to do. Instinctively, they felt that this was just the beginning of a whole series of measures that would lead to the seclusion of women from social, political, and economic activity. This they would not accept. This clash between a system that is set on determining the details of individual behavior and the awakening claims of individual women accounts for the severity and cruelty with which punishments such as flogging, stoning, and sanctioned rapes of women sentenced to death are carried out daily.

The second level of clashes between women’s rights and Khomeini’s regime arises from the particularly reactionary version of Khomeini’s Islam. Not all Islamic schools have the same barbaric codes of punishment that he promulgated. Very few conform to his notion of the velayat-e faqih, the government of the jurisprudence--a concept introduced by Khomeini of late into Islamic political thinking.

In the coming period, this Islamic character of the state will be most important in the continued significance of a women’s movement and its growing influence in the shaping of Iranian politics. This needs further elaboration. The first three factors I discussed--the changing socioeconomic structure of Iranian society, the changed political map that allows internal struggles to flourish, the impact of the women’s movement internationally--account more for the emergence of a women’s movement in Iran immediately after the overthrow of the shah’s regime. The present and future explosive political significance of the Iranian women’s movement, on the other hand, stems from the Islamic character of the state.

The establishment of a theocratic Islamic regime has confronted society head-on with the task of de-Islamizing the state. This is something completely new. Because of the nature of Islamic laws regarding women, the women’s movement will carry a tremendous weight in challenging Islam as a governmental system. For a woman in today’s Iran, resisting a state that is set on pushing her to the depths of backwardness has become an existential question. It is the only way she can stop the suppression of her individuality into deadening conformity. To exist has become to rebel. Such a challenge has clear implications for the general development of society.

Today we see this general impact of a feminist challenge to Islam only indirectly. Despite the defusion and defeat of the initial wave of women’s struggles in 1980, today, for the first time in Iranian politics, every political organization feels obliged to take an explicit position in defense of women’s rights. This includes the Islamic organization of the Mujahedin which now explicitly opposes compulsory veiling and accepts certain notions of equal rights for women, even though so far it has not specified its positions on such matters as family laws. The existence of numerous Iranian women’s groups in exile, in various European and American cities, is another expression that this rebellion is here to stay. It is very hazardous in politics to make precise and distant predictions. Yet, I would venture to say that a radical movement of Iranian women on a large scale is bound to become a striking feature of politics in the rebuilding of Iranian society over the ashes of the Islamic state.

NOTES

The present article was written in winter 1984. Since then important new material ha: been published on some of the debates touched upon here. See, for instance, Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, “Challenging Imperial Feminism,” Feminist Review, no. 15

Autumn 1984: 3-19; and Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, “Ethnocentrism and Socialist-Feminist Theory,” Feminist Review, no. 20 (Summer 19851: 23-47.

I would like to thank Maxine Molyneux and Rayna Rapp for their extensive comments and criticism on an earlier draft of this article.

The photo that accompanies this essay appears in Kate Millett, Going to Iran (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1982. Photo reprinted by permission of Sophie Kier.