Women Are Risking -- and Losing -- Their Lives On the Front Lines of the Iran Uprising

By Barbara Crossette, The Nation. Posted June 24, 2009.

How much the world has learned. How different the reaction, and feminist activism, have been to the Taliban.

"From the beginning the entire philosophy of the Islamic Republic of Iran was a Taliban-like philosophy," Afkhami said. "It was based on the complementarity of the roles of men and women, and gender separation, gender apartheid. They took 140 university majors away from women because they led to studies which were not considered appropriate and to jobs which were not appropriate. In schools, in public transportation, in public spaces there was segregation. Of course, one of the first things that happened was the annulment of the family protection law." Family laws give women rights for themselves and over their children.

Nevertheless, she added, "this battle between women and the government just keeps going on. Right now it shows itself vividly. Because of the election, they allowed people to come out and get together. They wanted a big demonstration of participation--and then it backfired."

Iranian women are still relatively well-educated, filling 60 percent of university places. United Nations agencies work with them in a range of programs, most successfully in family planning. Though they have been socially restricted, at least until they appeared in large numbers in mixed company in the streets and on rooftops in the last two weeks, they hold many jobs, can drive cars (unlike their counterparts in Saudi Arabia) and have pushed their dress code to new limits.

Afkhami, who first came to the United States as a teenager with her mother and was educated at the University of San Francisco and the University of Colorado, returned to Iran in 1967 to teach at the National University of Iran. While there, she organized the Association of University Women and became secretary general of the Women's Organization of Iran. She said that 60,000 young Iranians had been educated abroad at government expense by then, and they were returning home to stay active in civic affairs. "By the mid-'70s, there were plenty of women," she said. "There were women governors, women in the military, women in all levels of the universities, parliamentarians and then of course my position."

The Shah appointed her minister of women's affairs in 1975, and she held the position until he dismissed her and closed her ministry in the summer of 1978 as a sop to the rapidly growing Khomeini revolution. She criticizes the Shah's regime bitterly for its ambivalent--she calls it "stupid"--strategy of savagely repressing dissent while appeasing Islamic militancy by getting rid of controversial programs.

"I was the most controversial because women were at the center of the argument," she said of her abrupt firing. "Remember, Khomeini's first uprising was against the franchise to women, in 1963. Two things he opposed: one was the women's franchise, which he called prostitution, and the other was land reform." The latter would have affected religious properties.

In Washington, Afkhami founded the Women's Learning Partnership, which has built networks of women in Islamic nations, including Iran. "We're showing women how to build democracy, accept diversity and learn across borders from each other's experiments," she said. "How to negotiate modernity and tradition--you don't give away your traditions, or your religion or your family ties, but how can you accommodate modernity and progress and rights while keeping your identity? All of this came from what we learned from the women of Iran in the '60s and '70s."

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