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• 1 media/947px-8_March_1979_Protest_in_Tehran_(03).jpg media/947px-8_March_1979_Protest_in_Tehran_(03).jpg 2024-09-18T10:25:24-07:00 Revolutionary Women 36 Iranian feminism pre-1979 image_header 2024-12-08T20:02:43-08:00

  Leading up to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iranian women were stuck in an imposed binary between the traditional woman and the modern (sometimes Western) woman. However, the social upheavals in the early and mid 20th century laid the foundation for women to become educated players-- with varying takes on religion --in the revolution. Iranian women were often held to the standard of a traditional woman- meek, religious, veiled, and rarely out of the house. The antidote, that Afsaneh Najmabadi argues is somewhat imported, is the polar opposite - an uncovered, sensual woman, educated in the secular sciences.
  
  In the late years of the 19th century when Iran began its transition into a modern nation state, the position of Iranian women began to shift from what Afsaneh Najmabadi describes as, “a pernicious all-female space,” into a public, heterosocial one (para. 23). The former of the two (inhabited by Iranian women in pre-modern Iran) saw the complete subordination of women in the privacy of the household as housekeepers and sexual servants to their husbands, but also featured women’s spaces in which, “all-female theatrical games,” were acted out by women, in front of other women, and contained vulgarity and erotic exaggerations (para. 43).
  
  Najmabadi claims this tradition, among others, is drawn upon by Bibi Khanum, a late 19th century Iranian feminist satirist, who mocks a misogynistic treatise detailing the specifics of a properly subordinate wife. In her satirization of this text (here in its original Persian), she employs Quranic passages, classical Persian poetry, pornographic imagery and crude Iranian, “street rap,” simultaneously, demonstrating a confidently diverse literary knowledge which starkly contrasts the dim-witted portrayal of Iranian women found in her subject of satirization (para. 44). 
  
  

  This diverse, and more importantly indigenous, sourcing of rhetorical support for a feminist literary work would become a less popular method of discourse throughout the duration of Iran’s project of modernity throughout the early 20th century. While Khanum’s satirical and vulgar Vices of Men was made for a private audience of women, early modern Iran was beginning to publish works of its female populace, circulating them within heterosocial audiences. Thus, the language of these works became, “desexed,” and “sanitized,” in order to avoid disrupting social order, (para. 5, 8). 

  As names of body parts were swapped for less provocative counterparts, a metaphorical veiling of the female body through education in the New School for Girls began, in which modern sciences became a tool of modernity and equality for Iran and its women. Iran’s new, modern institutions sought to transform Iran into a modern nation state, modeled after European nation states of the same era and this use of modern sciences to transform Iran into Europe’s equal, was mirrored by Iran’s efforts to transform women into men’s equals.
  
  Therefore, after disposing of traditional Islamic thought as an intellectual foundation, they identified scientific thought as their medium of modernity, and began implementing curricula in which Iranian women were to learn of their duties as wives and caretakers on the basis of modern science. This dichotomization of intellectualism between Islamic thought and modern sciences parallels the split between pre modern Islamic thought and (retroactively) modern, “pre Islamic Mythologies,” and, “Persian high poetry,” which, “previously had constituted an interrelated cultural universe,” seen in Khanum’s work (para. 23).

  The date that perhaps best summarizes the nature of early Iranian feminism is March 8, 1979. The previous day, Ayatollah Khomeini had announced new mandatory veiling laws. The next day on International Women's Day, thousands of women flooded the streets chanting "Either death or freedom" in protest. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 had united women of all kinds-- urban, rural, educated, religious, secular-- in anger towards the shah. While Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the popular opposition figure, even amongst women, the March 8 protests showed that the shah's abdication did not equal total liberation for Iranian feminists.
  
  
  
  In many ways, the protests broke the Western-traditional binary in the same way did with "Vices of Men." One could argue that the Woman Life Freedom movement dates back to to 1979, if not by name then in virtue. The image of womanhood that Iranian women fought for in 1979 did not exemplify either the traditional, veiled, submissive woman nor the sexually empowered, modern, Western woman. Instead, the call was for autonomy and individuality, themes that have both carried into the Woman Life Freedom movement.
  
  - M.A. and Hatcher Stanford
  
  References
  Najmabadi, Afsaneh. “Veiled Discourse-Unveiled Bodies.” Feminist Studies 19, no. 3 (1993): 487–518. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178098.