AN UNREPENTANT FEMINIST
I had grown interested in women’s issues during my last years at Kayhan. When my friend Mahnaz Afkhami, the secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), invited me to join her team, I welcomed the opportunity to work with her.
The WOI, established in 1966, was the umbrella organization for almost all women’s groups and women’s activity in Iran. Mahnaz, a dynamic American-educated feminist, had taken over a dormant organization in 1970 and turned it into an effective instrument to promote women’s causes.
The struggle for women’s rights in Iran began in the late nineteenth century. Women took an active part in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, but the constitution that was wrested from Mozaffar al-Din Shah of the former Qajar dynasty did not give women the right to vote. A handful of women campaigned for women’s education, and established the first schools for girls in the early years of the twentieth century. Under Reza Shah, the government established a system of public elementary and secondary schools for girls as well as boys. When Tehran University, the country’s first modern university, was established in 1936, it admitted both men and women. Reza Shah had already ordered the abolition of the veil. He saw it as a symbol of Iran’s backwardness and a barrier to the education of women and their introduction into the workforce and society. The marriage age for girls was raised from nine to thirteen—a radical step at the time. Women entered the workforce, initially in the civil service.
This process continued under his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, much to the discomfort and sometimes the fierce opposition of traditional members of the clergy, who, for example, forced the government in 1962 to withdraw a modest proposal to allow women to vote in local council elections. In his commitment to the principle that traditional restrictions on women should be removed, the shah was encouraged by his wife, Queen Farah, and by his twin sister, Princess Ashraf. Women in Iran’s burgeoning and better-educated middle class pushed for change as well. Similar movements were under way in other countries of the region, including Egypt and Tunisia, but Iran was breaking new ground.
Despite clerical opposition, women received the right to vote in 1963. The 1967 Family Protection Law, amended and expanded in 1975, restricted the ability of men to take more than one wife and to secure divorce on demand. It gave women the right to seek divorce, and strengthened women’s rights in child-custody cases. The marriage age for girls was raised from thirteen to fifteen, and then to eighteen. Women’s employment grew fairly rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, and the number of girls in schools and higher education expanded dramatically. Whereas women had made slow, steady progress in previous decades, the WOI accelerated this process, giving it direction and taking it into new fields.
During the period when I was involved with the organization, the WOI made working-class women its focus. It established branches and family welfare centers all over the country. These provided working-class women with literacy classes and vocational training, helping them earn a living independent of their husbands. It ran family-planning clinics; it provided women with legal advice; and guided them on their rights in child custody, divorce, and spousalabuse cases. It made inroads at establishing day-care centers for working-class women. It lobbied with the government and the private sector to open up more executive and managerial positions to women.
None of this was easy. Resistance to change and skepticism that it was necessary or practicable were widespread. Both phases of the family-protection law required patient negotiation with cabinet ministers and members of parliament. The endorsement or acquiescence of leading members of the clergy was crucial for new legislation affecting women. In 1967, the minister of justice journeyed to the shrine city of Najaf in Iraq, the center of Shi’ism’s most prestigious religious seminaries, to persuade Ayatollah Kho’i, then the highest ranking and most eminent clerical leader in the Shi’ite world, to lend his support to the new family-protection law.
My responsibilities as deputy director for international affairs included disseminating information about the WOI’s activities and sponsoring programs to educate both men and women on women’s issues. I traveled fairly widely inside the country. I found the women eager, but the men resistant. On one trip, for example, the driver of the car that was taking me to Qom was loud in his praise of the cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, then living in exile in Iraq, for his opposition to the 1962 attempt to extend limited suffrage to women. I was also responsible for the WOI’s relations with international organizations and women’s groups abroad, which enabled me to travel to China, Thailand, and the United States for meetings and international conferences, and I established links between Iran and the international women’s movement.
Just before I left the WOI in 1976 to accept a new position, I took part in drafting the National Plan of Action on the Improvement of the Status of Women in Iran. Approved by the cabinet, the plan called for the full integration of women into all aspects of social and economic life. It was, of course, a statement of goals that were yet to be accomplished, but it committed the government itself to work toward women’s equality in several areas.
The WOI was subsequently criticized for a strategy of change from above, for relying too much on official support, rather than organizing middle- and working-class women. But the criticism was misplaced. We were not in the business of organizing mass political movements, which would have been impossible in Iran at the time. As an activist organization, the WOI was in its infancy. Opposition, especially from the clergy, was considerable; and the support of the shah, his wife, and his sister was crucial if the government was to be persuaded to risk taking measures that challenged tradition. Much of the WOI’s work in the last decade before the revolution benefited working-class women far more than members of the elite. Elite women had education, were aware of their rights, knew how to get divorces, understood birth control, and could obtain employment. It was working-class women whose lives were changed the most by the WOI’s victories.
After the revolution, the clerics sought to undo as many of our accomplishments as they could. But even Ayatollah Khomeini and the clerics who had fiercely opposed the extension of suffrage to women in 1962 and 1963 realized they could not turn back this particular clock. They continued to allow women to vote. The new government, however, suspended the Family Protection Law, encouraged women in the civil service to take early retirement, and discouraged women in general from working. It barred women from judgeships and certain fields of higher education and specialization; lowered the marriage age for girls to nine (the age of puberty in Islam); tried to dictate what women wore; and segregated men and women in university classrooms, beaches, ski slopes, and public transportion. It even inserted clauses into the constitution defining the principal role of women as mothers and housewives.
Iranian women, young and old, from all classes, courageously resisted these measures. Young women fought the Islamic dress code, wearing loose headscarves rather than the chador or the maghan’eh, showing a bit of hair under their scarves, the bottoms of bluejeans underneath their robes, and a hint of lipstick on their lips. In this, they risked arrest, even lashings, but gradually won for themselves more freedom in matters of dress. Women voted in large numbers. Working-class and traditional women continued to be at the forefront of the struggle to reinstate the Family Protection Law. It was principally women from working- and lower-middle-class families who embraced opportunities for education, pushed for places in the universities, and demanded and seized opportunities for employment. That women fought back was partly the result of the revolutionary upheaval itself, which politicized society and, contrary to the intention of the clerics, thrust women into the public sphere. But I believe the WOI played a role in making a new generation of women conscious