by Nina Ansary
♦The Wellesley College Center for Research on Women assessed the collective studies of adolescent girls’ learning experiences,114 surveying more than 1,300 studies. Documenting a shortfall for adolescent girls in receiving equitable amounts of teacher time, it cautioned that America might in fact be responsible for nurturing a generation of women with low self-esteem.115
♦Dr. Rosemary Salomone, Associate Dean and Director of the Center for Law and Public Policy at St. John’s University, published findings that support and corroborate those of earlier studies regarding the benefits of single-sex schools for adolescent young women.
♦In 1990, Dr. Cornelius Riordan, Professor of Sociology at Providence College, released the first of many publications arguing that all-girls schools consistently provided a more effective educational atmosphere over coed schools.116 In 2008, he published the results of a three-year study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, confirming the innate biological differences in the learning styles of boys and girls, overall positive student/teacher interaction, decreased distractions, and teacher testimonials for less serious behavioral problems in single-sex schools.117
While the very notion of separating boys and girls in the twenty-first century is considered by some to be an outdated approach, the extensive research exposing the natural learning differences between males and females has led many educators to view the single-sex model as creating more positive and equitable outcomes. Indeed, the benefits of a segregated learning environment tend to be especially pronounced for adolescent girls, frequently resulting in increased confidence, academic engagement, and achievement.118
How do these Western findings pertain to traditional schoolgirls of post-revolutionary Iran? Since single-sex schooling is inherently compatible with the underlying culture of modesty in Iranian society, girls have no choice but to learn within a segregated environment. And the benefits described in the Western studies apply to female Iranian students as well. The eradication of coeducation at the elementary and secondary levels may have proved to be blessing for Iranian girls, as it led to the avoidance of the obstacles affiliated with co-ed classrooms—difficulties that the studies have shown to interfere with women reaching their full potential. Furthermore, for young women born and raised in a patriarchal society, the benefits associated with a single-sex learning environment are priceless. The “girls-only” classroom becomes a haven, a place where female students can feel empowered.
The fact is that the so-called Islamization of education has proven to be responsible for generating unprecedented educational gains for the vast majority of the female population. The mandate for single-sex schools by the Islamic Republic created an atmosphere in which adolescent girls are allowed to have a voice without the constraints of a coeducational learning environment and consequently are given a platform to excel.
Single-sex education has dramatically contributed to providing Iranian girls with the social and psychological capacity to challenge the misogyny of the regime—and we will explore this further in the following chapter on the current women’s movement in Iran.
FEMALE LITERACY SURGE
In the three-and-a-half decades since the Islamic Revolution, there has been an unprecedented surge in female literacy in Iran. On the eve of the revolution, the overall literacy rate for the country’s female population stood at 35.5 percent. In 2007, it was an astonishing 80.34 percent.119 Today, Iran exhibits one of the highest female-to-male ratios at the primary level among all sovereign nations. In 2006 the gender gap in Iran’s universities closed, reflecting a 50/50 ratio, and by the 2007/2008 academic year it had shifted in favor of women.120 The trend towards the “feminization” of higher education continues as women have begun to outnumber men at the post-graduate level by a ratio of 127/100.121 A 2006 BBC article poignantly captures the obvious surplus of women in higher education:
Twenty post-graduate students are sitting in a plush classroom listening to a lecture on environmental management at the Islamic Azad University—a private institution with 1.6 million students across Iran. Three quarters of the students in the classroom are women. The five men in the class are huddled together in a corner.122
This unique and unprecedented trend has been distinguished as a major stimulus fueling women’s empowerment to resist and combat their mandated subordinate status. In this process, Iranian women are in effect obstructing the regime’s envisioned objective of giving rise to the “ideal Muslim woman.”123 One is thus compelled to reflect on this irony: a nation that has legally handicapped half of its population has nonetheless systematically spawned a society noted for its surge in female literacy. Author Hamideh Sedghi points out that with their presence in the educational arena, “women have begun to pose indirect challenges to the political and social taboos that uphold womanhood and wifehood as a woman’s primary responsibility.”124
Iranian schoolgirls in post-revolutionary Iran.
Women in Iran continue to outnumber men in higher education.
PERSIAN “ROSIE THE RIVETERS”
Based on a popular song from 1943, “Rosie the Riveter” was not a real person. She symbolized the thousands of American women who joined the workforce during World War II in order to fill positions vacated by male workers who had been sent to war. Many of these women worked in munitions factories and at other jobs traditionally considered unsuitable for women.
During the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), Iranian women were similarly called upon to take on positions outside the home during this time of crisis.
The Iran-Iraq War began when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, following a long history of border disputes. Partially motivated by fears that the 1979 Iranian Revolution would inspire insurgency among Iraq’s Shiia majority, Iraq hoped to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran and attacked without formal warning. The war was costly for Iran, both in terms of lives lost and economic damages. But there was an unintended—and liberating—consequence for women.
Women during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).
When Ayatollah Khomeini referred to the war as “a blessing” and called on women to assist in the war effort, he underestimated how women’s participation would challenge the ideology of women’s role in a patriarchal society.125
Initially paralyzed during the war by the absence of fathers and husbands, and burdened by their dual roles as providers and caregivers, women nevertheless responded with valor and conviction to the requirements of a daunting task. Women’s rights activist, Azam Taleghani, recalls the nature of cooperation among women at large during this challenging time:
During the war we joined the Sisters Mobilization Organization. We worked in the mosques, prepared food, blankets and medicines for the men at the war front.… In the war zone areas, women were involved in the distribution of arms amongst the population and the soldiers. In other areas, women set up mobile hospitals and looked after the injured. As the war continued, women had to return to their homes, but they still continued their voluntary work, and had to organize their time in a way that would allow them to do their housework and their voluntary work in order to keep their family members happy.126
Iranian women were mobilized in both urban and rural areas to cook, provide medical assistance, and seek employment to support their families—much in the same manner as World War II had compelled many women to do so. Women from traditional backgrounds, most of whom had not participated in mainstream society during the Pahlavi era, were now inspired to do so due to the exigencies of war. Reinstated Islamized dress codes meant they felt comfortable enough to emerge from their homes in order to earn an income and contribute to the war effort.
Author and researcher Dr. Elahe Rostami-Povey writes that the war reduced the supply of male labor and increased the number of women seeking work. Despite the “rigidities in the system, determined by the ideology of a gendered division of labor,” the demand for workers meant that women filled positions in a number of fields previously deemed improper for females:
The
demand for female teachers and nurses increased, despite the initial attempt to stop women tending to male patients and teaching male students. Also, a significant number of women were employed, and even occupied important positions for the first time.127
They worked at home, producing handbags, blankets, sheets, etc … They sold them to the co-operatives, neighbors and local shops. Some worked as cab drivers. Their income was essential to cope with inflation, paid for their families’ debt and mortgage, etc.… Furthermore, no one ever asked them what they did, and they thought if they were asked for statistical purposes, they would call themselves housewives, because they produced the commodities while they were doing the housework.128
Rostami-Povey reports that women also worked for small businesses that paid them less than the minimum wage. By not reporting these workers, employers avoided paying taxes to the state and benefits to the workers. This lack of recordkeeping also accounts for the fact that there are no statistics regarding how many women were employed during the war years. (By contrast, figures pertaining to the American workforce during World War II reveal that between 1940 and 1945, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945 nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home.)129
Unfortunately, Iranian women’s expanded roles during the eight-year war did little to alter the legal barriers erected by the Khomeini regime that barred them from their inherent rights in the family and in society at large. War widows, in particular, were outraged when Sharia-based laws assigned guardianship of minors and childcare payments from the Martyrs Foundation (Bonyad-e Shahid) to the child’s paternal grandfather.130 In 1985, as a result of vehement protests and petitions, the parliament approved a bill granting custody of children whose fathers had been killed in the war to their mothers.131 Sporadic concessions such as this one signaled the state’s need to rely on women in a calamitous time. Rising to the occasion, Iranian women took pride in their wartime resilience and self-sufficiency in the absence of men.
Author Louise Halper believes that as difficult as those years may have been, they were instrumental in “altering the consciousness of many women, particularly popular class132 women [who] not only felt empowered, but [also] obliged to discuss their status and establish the continuity of their participation in public life.”133 And legal anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini asserts that in light of women’s wartime efforts, “a door from within was opened that could no longer be closed.”134
In other words, having worked outside the home during the war, Iranian women proved to themselves and others that they could play an important role in the survival of their families and in the society at large.
ENVISIONING OPPORTUNITY
Certainly Khomeini did not intend for women to become empowered when he consolidated his rule. But as we have learned in this chapter, due to several of the policies he put into place—namely, single-sex schools and compulsory veiling—a majority of pre-adolescent and adolescent girls were able to glimpse the expanded opportunities that might await them. Many attended school for the first time, and through Western-influenced textbooks from the Pahlavi regime that had barely been altered, these girls learned about a way of life that fostered more self-determination and equality for women.
I believe that this unintended exposure likely accounts, at least in part, for why a new generation of women in Iran do not subscribe to the gender ideology of the Islamic Republic. I also contend that the quasi-westernized education that these girls received in single-sex schools is one of the underlying reasons that a women’s movement has developed in post-revolutionary Iran.
I often get asked: How is it that Iran is experiencing a feminist movement within a patriarchal Islamic climate? Why don’t women who were born and raised in Iran after the revolution subscribe to the Islamic Republic’s gender ideology? And what is fueling Iranian women’s quest for empowerment despite continuous obstacles? My briefest answer is this: even within a repressive environment, girls who are exposed to empowered female role models through books and a decent education—and who are free to learn and express themselves in a girls-only classroom—have a fighting chance.
In the next chapter we will discover how the schoolgirls of the Khomeini era grew up to participate in an unexpected yet fervent women’s movement and are being joined by thousands of others, both secular and religious.
Chapter Five
A RELIGIOUS/SECULAR SISTERHOOD
Old enemies may turn into new political allies when it comes to resisting the onslaught of male supremacy.1
Parvin Paidar, author
We know that secular women do not share our convictions, but this does not give us any problems, since we are all working to promote the status of women.
Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh (aka Zahra Ommi), women’s rights activist and editor in chief of Farzaneh, a post-revolutionary women’s journal
If religion goes against freedom, it will lose.
Mohammad Khatami, former president of Iran (1997–2005)
With Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989, his successor, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who served as Iran’s president from 1981–1989, continued to uphold the sacredness of divine authority and supreme leadership of the nation. The gender-bias disposition of the ruling establishment continued, with Khamenei’s numerous pronouncements, including:
The real value of a woman is measured by how much she makes her family environment for her husband and children like a paradise .…and the fundamental job assigned to a woman is marriage and motherhood.2
While the war years had been marked by ideological stability, the presidency of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997), following Iran’s cease-fire with Iraq, marked the emerging stages of a more tolerant atmosphere. Although patriarchy continued to be the dominant force, the moderate changes instigated by Rafsanjani spread the seeds of a more lenient atmosphere for women in Iran. This new trend further gained momentum during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), whose more progressive reforms, including those advancing women’s rights, briefly displaced the conservative restrictions, facilitating the country’s passage into what one journalist referred to as a “thrilling Tehran spring.”3
In this chapter we will explore the post-revolutionary climate that inadvertently led to an unlikely sisterhood and a flourishing women’s rights movement. Refusing to succumb to the demands of an ongoing misogynistic ideology, religious and secular women found common ground in challenging their subordinate status. Despite the fact that the majority of religious women seek reform within a non-Western, indigenous, or Koranic framework, and their secular sisters subscribe to a separation between “church and state” (and to the egalitarian principles enshrined in the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), Iranian women disregarded their personal differences and gave precedence to eradicating an inferior existence.4
To provide a context in which to understand how Iranian women from such disparate factions became united in their goal to expand their rights and opportunities, we will examine the shifting political tides after Khomeini—from the reconstruction period of President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani through the reformist era of President Mohammad Khatami.
We will also survey the wide range of women’s publications from this era that reveal female commitment to free expression and political struggle. And we will listen to the remarkable voices that gave birth to religious-secular solidarity—and what is referred to by some as Islamic feminism.
A DRIVING FORCE OF MODERATION
Following Ayatollah Khomeini’s death, Aytatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei was appointed as Iran’s Supreme Leader and Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential Shiite cleric, was elected as the fourth president of the Islamic Republic.
Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei
In the late 1950s, Ayatollah Rafsanjani had been a pupil and disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini at the Qom Theological Seminary, the largest
center for Shiite scholarship in the world and a major pilgrimage destination. During the 1960s, Rafsanjani was imprisoned for organizing anti-Shah riots and for his political activities promoting Islamic resurgence. With the victory of the revolutionaries in 1979, he was elected Chairman of the Iranian Parliament and served as de facto commander in chief of the Iranian army during the Iran-Iraq War.
During Rafsanjani’s presidency, Iran embarked on a period of reconstruction following the devastation of the war years. As a moderate facing serious challenges and a declining economy, he advocated a free market economy and favored privatization of state-owned industries.5 He chose to have a cabinet of predominantly “well-educated technocrats rather than revolutionary ideologues,” declaring that he wished for a “government of experts, not politicians … as is needed in the period of construction.”6 Criticized for having a significant number of “Western-educated” ministers, he responded by stating that “studying in American universities was not and is not a negative point.”7 Furthermore, he declared: “Iran cannot live in today’s world without the material capabilities and the advancement of science and technology,”8 an attitude that was in direct contrast to Khomeini’s ideological disposition and cultural revolution.
President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997)
Rafsanjani’s shift in gender principles became apparent with his removal of quotas for women in fields of higher education and the launching of a nationwide campaign to stabilize the massive population growth.9 His government reversed the Republic’s opposition to family planning, and the Ministry of Health authorized clinics throughout the country to promote and dispense contraceptives as part of its family planning services, resulting in a dramatic reduction in population growth from 3.2 percent in 1986 to 1.5 percent by 1996.10 According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Iran experienced one of the fastest-known reductions in fertility, with the most significant decreases occurring in rural areas.11
