In recent months I have seen some surprise here and there at the leading role of women in the uprising against the Iranian regime. Like: they have nothing to say, right there with those mullahs? But then you have missed the rebellious woman in Iranian history. I just took an antiquity course, so I’m starting with the fifth century BC and Queen Parysatis, wife of Darius IIwhich I came across in the chapter ‘Women, beware of women’, in Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ book The Persians. Perhaps not a nice woman, but a decisive one: she poisoned and impaled anyone who bothered her. Yes, a skewer through it from bottom to top. She lived in the shadow of men, writes Llewellyn-Jones, but “she managed very well to keep them all under control.”
Fast-forward to the twentieth century. I also read for you The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911 by Janet Afary. But where The Persians highly recommended, this book is a must. Gray pages crammed with facts and facts and endless names – but with a subtitle about ‘The Origins of Feminism’.
The Constitutional Revolution was a (temporarily) successful popular uprising against the then shah, which arose from, among other things, an economic crisis and the plundering of the country by the British and Russians, and which was also inspired by the first Russian revolution of 1905. I struggled to the women’s chapter, with numerous examples of prominent women who defied patriarchy and the conservative clergy, organized themselves into semi-secret councils and associations, addressed women’s rights and whether to wear the veil in leftist newspapers, and established girls’ schools. Between 1906 and 1911, sixty girls’ schools opened in Tehran alone. Afary describes the Constitutional Revolution as a turning point in the history of Iranian women.
The revolution was eventually crushed by Russian troops, but what they got done was not an end but a beginning. Take those schools – today women make up the majority of university students.
More rebellion. In 1978-1979, women fully participated in the Islamic revolution, in which some of them even started wearing the headscarf as a protest against the Westernization imposed by the Shah. They regretted that. Revolution leader Ayatollah Khomeiny immediately set to work wrapping them in Islamic cloth, first at work. Imagine all that nakedness in the office! “Women should not show themselves naked in Islamic ministries,” he said on March 7, 1979. The next day, International Women’s Day, tens of thousands of angry women took to the streets in Tehran. And they continued to protest for days even though they were constantly besieged by conservative opponents. “Back to dog status”, quoted The New York Times a protester.
The authorities still appeased that Khomeini’s decree was actually advice, but you know how that turned out. Sharp-grinders who wanted to abolish music or chess or the pre-Islamic New Year at the time encountered so much popular resistance that they had to give up their plans. “If there had been such unanimity about the compulsory headscarf, we could have done what we wanted,” a female professor told me years ago. But the women fight on.
Caroline Rolands is a Middle East expert and separates the facts from the hype here every week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 6, 2023