The recent partial legalization of women’s suffrage in Saudi Arabia has sparked debate over the progress of feminist groups throughout the Middle East. In the wake of such news, however, advances in women’s rights in arguably the freest Middle Eastern state, Iran, have been overlooked. The feminist movement in Iran builds upon a long history continues to gain strength. Its successes may serve as a model for women seeking political liberalization throughout the Arab states.
Freest—in the Middle East
At Columbia University in 2007, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad infamously claimed that there were no gays in his country, setting off a global firestorm. Yet what he said next might seem equally puzzling: that Iranian women were among the freest in the world. By Western standards, Ahmadinejad’s declaration may seem a stretch. However, Iranian women, though not the freest in the world, enjoy more liberties than most women in the Middle East. Iranian women are permitted to drive, and, while Saudi women just received the right to vote and run for municipal councils this year, Iranian women have been speaking through the ballot box since 1963. Two women have been vice presidents: Masoumeh Ebtekar from 1997 to 2005 and Fatemeh Javadi from 2005 to 2009. The 2010 Gender Gap Index, which measures equality between men and women in the 134 nations, gave Iran an overall score of 123, compared to Turkey at 126, Saudi Arabia at 129, Pakistan at 132, and Yemen at 134.
As Arzoo Osanloo, an expert on the Iranian women’s movement and professor at the University of Washington, told the HPR, the relative success of women in Iran might be attributed to the fact that “Iranians are the least religious of people living in Muslim-majority societies.” Osanloo points to the nation’s “high ratio of female literacy, education, and women in the work force.” Iranian women are also more involved in politics than their counterparts in other states, perhaps because of what Osanloo describes as a “long history of public activism for rights going back to before Iran’s Constitutional Revolution,” and an Iranian desire to be “well-versed in the language of democracy, equality, and civil liberty.”
A History of Action
The advances of the Iranian women’s rights movement spring from a variety of factors. The movement began at the inception of the twentieth century and grew steadily more prominent over the next seventy-five years. Focusing on education, specifically the literacy rate of Iranian girls, activists expanded in number and achievements, relatively unhindered by the government restrictions that hampered similar movements in other Muslim states.
Until the 1979 Iranian Revolution, women had improved their opportunities in employment, especially in politics, family law, and education, supported by initiatives from groups like the Women’s Organization of Iran. The revolution nonetheless reversed several of these advancements. A 2007 article for the Journal of International Women’s Studies by Iranian author Majid Mohammadi showed that the revolution saw representation in parliament drop from 7 to 1.5 percent; employment of women diminished by 4.3 percentage points to 6.8 percent, and the legal age of marriage plummet to nine years old from the previous sixteen. Interestingly, women may have benefitted from the revolution in other respects; Osanloo suggests that conservative families “felt they could let their female kin enter public fora,” given the new dress restrictions, perversely giving feminists a greater voice.
Regardless, circumstances have improved since reformist Mohammad Khatami’s presidency from 1997 to 2005. Though the laws of the 1979-1997 period imposed greater limitations on women, especially those advocating for more rights, the movement survived and evolved into its modern form, despite the turmoil that exists in Iran today. Said Osanloo, “Although the last eight years have been difficult for women’s rights advocates, it has been equally difficult to turn back the social, legal, and political reforms that have given women greater voice, visibility, and status in social life.” Her words echoed those of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi, who stated in a 2006 interview that Ahmadinejad “cannot actually reverse the rights that women have achieved, because the feminist movement inside Iran is very strong. Women will resist any attempt to reverse their rights.”
Calm Before the Storm
The widely disputed presidential election between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi in June 2009 sent Iran into political convulsions. But before countless cell phone videos were capturing the hundreds of thousands of protesters, Iran had already experienced surprising reformist strides, aiding the women’s movement.
Though past campaigns, including Ahmadinejad’s, neglected the issue of women’s rights, Mousavi’s embraced the subject. Where Ahmadinejad expanded the role of the morality police during his first term as president, Mousavi pledged to disband it outright, while speaking to female supporters in Tehran in May 2009. “We should reform laws that are unfair to women,” he added. Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, exhibited a similar form of tenacity, surprising political analysts by vocally campaigning alongside her husband in a display atypical of most spouses of Iranian political figures.
The volatile post-election fervor further catapulted women to the forefront of Iranian news. Pictures of protests disseminated via Twitter and Facebook showed women at the front-lines of the demonstrations, marching not behind men, but alongside them. The unprecedented visibility of Iranian women, from the artist and politician Zahra Rahnavard, to the world-renowned martyr Neda Agha-Soltan, may have signaled a long-awaited shift in Iranian politics.
“[B]oth in symbolism and content, the tenth presidential elections [in 2009] signified considerable progress in gender politics in Iran,” Nayereh Tohidi, Chair of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at California State University, wrote in a 2009 paper. But the sudden burst of progress, she argues, was not spontaneous. It was the result of years of slow but persistent activism, including the work of numerous feminists and feminist organizations—the most famous being the One Million Signatures Campaign against discriminatory laws—that persisted despite state repression and threats.
Exporting Feminism?
Even if the protests had highlighted the active role of women in Iranian politics, the dedication and vitality of the women’s rights movement over more than a century of activism remains of interest more broadly. Indeed, the experiences of the women’s rights movement in Iran illustrate how social movements can survive even the most repressive regimes. After all, Iranian women represent a prime example of organized yet effective protest. Today, through film and Facebook, television and Twitter, they have managed to make their message compelling and their work incessant. Through their dedication and persistence, the Iranian feminists have become the inspiration for protesters in not only the Middle East, but around the world.