NEARLY 70 per cent of the population in Iran is under the age of 35 and half of them are women. Iranian women have undergone profound changes in the past three decades and the signs of their changing attitudes are evident. Last summer over 63 per cent of the students enrolled in the university were women. The figure has steadily increased since early 2000, with women now making up more than half the student population; in 1982, only 30 per cent of students were women.

Not only are Iranian women more educated today, according to government figures one in five marriages end in divorce – a fourfold increase in the past 15 years.¹ The number of women who have refused to get married in the past ten years has increased threefold.² All this suggests that young women are displaying a growing determination to achieve greater control over their lives, not only in society but within the family as well. With better education, women are demanding their rights, respect and power. In the meantime, as a consequence of their cultural and social suppression, many have become politicized, and are demanding democratic changes that would further enhance their rights.

This paper looks at elements that have contributed to the changing attitudes among women and explores two areas of public culture – Iranian movies and novels since the early 2000, as reflective of women’s changing attitudes. It will also examine the role of women during the 2009 uprising and how they became a powerful political force, continuing to voice dissent even when the government waged a brutal crackdown.

 

The struggle of young women against sexual discrimination faces resistance from a society that wants to retain its traditional outlook and a political establishment that denies women rights based on what it calls Islamic values. An increasing number of educated women are scrambling for employment amidst high unemployment rates, resentful that the jobs offered to them tend to be limited to much lower positions compared to those offered to men. Their desire to work outside the home for economic independence is being blocked by male family members who wish to restrain women to household jobs.

Dealing with harassment is a part of daily life in society. Women are constantly exposed to government dictats over Islamic dress codes in public. Public spaces, ranging from buses to schools, are segregated and women can be barred from entering public areas over the colour or the shape of what they wear. They can be fined, jailed and even flogged if their clothing is deemed unIslamic.

They also have to deal with legal restrictions that were imposed after the 1979 Revolution, when the secular legal system was replaced with an Islamic one. Girls can legally be forced into marriage at the age of 13. Men, however, have the right to divorce their wives whenever they wish, and are granted the custody of children over the age of seven. Men can restrain their wives from working outside the home and leaving the country, while they are free to engage in polygamy. Women inherit half the share of men and their testimony in a court is half the value of that of a man. Adulterous women are punished to death by stoning.

 

Confronted with new cultural and legal restrictions following the 1979 Revolution, many young women turned to higher education as a way to get away from home, postpone marriage and earn social respect. Many religious women too, who had earlier refused to sit in classrooms with men, started attending university once they were segregated.

All this has helped narrow the gap between religious and secular women. After the revolution, when a segregation of sexes was enforced, many traditional families felt more comfortable in allowing their daughters to attend school, and even university. The Campaign For One Million Signatures (founded in 2005; its members include both religious and secular women) shows how women from diverse backgrounds came together to demand the elimination of misogynist laws from the legal system. For example, Zahra Eshraghi, the grand daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the revolution, was one of the early signatories to the campaign.

For those women for whom college was not an option, the availability of the internet and satellite television has opened up windows into the lives of women living in the West. In 2002 there were already over a million internet users in Iran; the number reached nearly 20 million in 2009. In the course of researching an article for The New York Times in 2002, I found that many young women looked to the internet as a liberating space, to talk and write about subjects such as love and sexuality that were thus far taboo.

Iranian youth and women flooded Yahoo chatrooms to freely exchange nude pictures, discuss love poems, and express their views about how they wished to dress under the Islamic Republic. A woman blogger under the pseudonym Khorshidkhanoom, meaning Lady Sun, for instance felt free to write about her relationship with a boyfriend. I traced a few other anonymous bloggers, only to discover that they were teenage women in search of cultural and social freedom.

 

Through the internet, these young women not only learned about western women, they also started to communicate in Persian with other young Iranians who had grown up in the West. Internet thus become a liberating space where they could discuss and post anything that was culturally and politically deemed unacceptable.

For other traditional women in Iran who did not have access to the internet, satellite television provided an opportunity to see how western women lived and enjoyed more rights alongside men. Incidentally, despite being banned by the government, satellite television is commonly available in Iran. The bulky equipment housed on rooftops is visible in most remote towns and villages. Women are portrayed in television serials and programmes as decision-makers holding senior jobs as court judges or even, what appear as more adventurous ones, such as investigators and reporters. In the family, they are given due respect and enjoy more rights even after divorce.

 

For many women, divorce became a way of revolting against suppression at home. In a culture that considers divorce a disgrace (an old saying encourages young women to enter their marital homes in white gowns and leave in white shrouds), divorce rates have become alarming. According to government figures, one in five marriages ends in divorce. More and more young women are refusing to live under the circumstances that their mother had lived. Surprisingly, divorce is not limited to educated or professional women. According to government figures, in 2006, some 68 per cent of women seeking divorce were housewives.³ 

Janet Afary, a Professor of Middle East and Women’s Studies at Purdue University, and author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,⁴ says the country is moving inexorably toward a ‘sexual revolution’. She argues that though the laws of the land deny women many basic rights in marriage and divorce, government policies have also contributed to numerous state initiatives promoting literacy, health and infrastructural improvements that have benefited the urban and rural poor. She writes that the mandatory premarital programmes teaching about sex and birth control, instituted in 1993 to control population growth, not only helped women delay pregnancy but also changed their views about marriage. By the 1990s, she says, young people were looking for psychological and social compatibility and mutual intimacy in marriage.

Young women and their changing attitudes have already left an impact on the movies and novels. The demand for change and their self-confidence as agents of change, also manifested itself in the political protests of 2009.

 

Since early 2000, the Iranian film industry has seen an outpouring of movies made both by men and women that have taken up women’s issues. In previous years only a limited number of movies, made mostly by a handful of directors, had focused on such themes. This began to change in the late 1990s. A famous film, Leila (1996, directed by Dariush Merjooi), was about polygamy, and considered avant-garde at the time. However, along with a few other feminist films, it helped unleash a wave of similar documentaries and movies. A majority of movies that have attracted large audiences in recent years have been around the subject of sexual discrimination. Movies and documentaries reflect societal realities and address issues in need of resolution. The increasing popularity of such themes clearly indicates that Iranian society is receptive to the subject. As a result, they also began to redefine gender roles.

Mehrdad Ostkui, a prominent documentary filmmaker, for example, won many international awards for his movie Behind the Burqa, which focused on women in the impoverished and traditional southern is land of Qeshm. It highlighted the predicament of women who chose to commit suicide because they felt trapped in bad marriages. A comedy called All Women Are Angels, made in 2007, ruled the box office for weeks. It showed the struggles of a rich woman to get a divorce after she discovered that her husband had secretly married her best friend.

 

Over the past decade, Iran’s best-selling fiction lists have been dominated by women writers, another sign that women have become more vocal about being discriminated against. The number of women who have published novels has reached 370 according to Hassan Mirabedini, a scholar of Iranian literature, whose findings appeared in the feminist magazine Zanan in the fall of 2007. That number is 13 times more than a decade back, and equals the number of men writers today.

Interestingly, the books written by women far outsell those by men. Some critics claim this is because of the simple language and compelling personal narratives. While the average Iranian novel is issued in print runs of 5,000 copies, some women’s books have enjoyed print runs exceeding 100,000.

In addition to government censorship over subjects such as love and romance, writers have to deal with cultural restrictions as well. Traditionally, it was considered inappropriate for women to express their feelings and desires in print. From the 1930s to the ’60s, there were only about a dozen women writing fiction, and many of them used pseudonyms. But the new writing by women today explores cultural restrictions and the desire of women to liberate themselves.

The first top-selling novel by a woman was Drunkard Morning by Fataneh Haj Seyed Javadi, published in 1998. The novel, set in the 1940s, tells the story of a woman who defies her aristocratic family to marry a carpenter. But he turns out to be abusive, and she decides to leave him, a radical act at the time, and subsequently remarries. Drunkard Morning was followed by a wave of novels written by other women, generating much public discussion about what the plots and characters revealed about the situation of women in Iran.

 

Though the pioneers of women’s fiction in the early 20th century tended to be well-educated and from elite families, many of today’s successful novelists have had a fairly traditional upbringing. They are primarily homemakers who write between their daily chores, drawing heavily on their personal experience. For instance, Fariba Vafi, 43, whose novel My Bird won three major Iranian awards in 2002, said in an interview that she had never attended college.⁵ As a young girl, however, she travelled every couple of months to Tehran from her hometown of Tabriz, 335 miles away, to buy books and show her writing to a teacher of literature. Marriage and children delayed her plan to become a novelist and her husband, according to her, opposed it as well.

Her inspirations included the year she spent attending a police training course after the 1979 Revolution. In Tarlan, named after the main character, she describes women from poor families who enter the harsh environment of a police school. The book aroused reader sympathy for policewomen charged with enforcing the strict social code of Islam and thus widely resented for harassing women who deviated from Muslim dress rules.

In another best-seller, We Get Used to It by Zoya Pirzad, Arezou, a 41-year-old divorcee, begins running the real estate agency that once belonged to her father. In Iran, such work is dominated by men. Outside the office, Arezou struggles to satisfy her mother and daughter, shallow characters preoccupied with shopping and entertainment. Her one comfort is Shirin, a friend and colleague at the agency. Both women are independent-minded and wary of men. But then Arezou falls in love with a client, over the objections of her mother, daughter and even Shirin. Arezou is emblematic of middle-aged women in Iran, caught between tradition and modernity. She has confronted prejudice against a woman working in what was seen as a man’s job, and left her husband. But her weakness becomes apparent when she yields to society’s bias against a middle-aged woman’s remarriage; she believes that she has no choice but to continue caring for her daughter.

 

Women writers also ignored cultural and political restrictions on narrating scenes of intimacy, deemed highly unacceptable in Iranian society, by being creative. ‘Two figures were moving under the sheet,’ is how Haj Seyed Javadi informs readers that two characters in Drunkard Morning have a sexual relationship. The readers of Pirzad’s We Get Used to It learn that Arezou and Sohrab kissed when Arezou asks Sohrab if he prefers the taste of the toothpaste to lipstick. ‘All three,’ he says, meaning both and her lips, which are never directly mentioned.

Women were a dominant presence in the demonstrations that broke out in the aftermath of the 12 June 2009 presidential election, during which many accused President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of falsifying the election results. Women, young and old and from different backgrounds, took part in the anti-government protests, and also clashed with pro-government forces. Women have been the most suppressed group in society in the past three decades, especially since 2005, after the election of Ahmadinejad, when the government imposed tougher restrictions on women’s Islamic clothing, which led to increasing frustration. Their massive and bold presence during the protests and confrontation with government forces boosted their confidence. It created a sense of agency and collectivity that they could challenge the government.

 

Women were also among the dozens killed in the clashes and thus entered the realm of martyrdom, which so far had exclusively been a male preserve. Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year old woman protester, whose last moments were captured on a video and circulated worldwide on the internet, became one of the prominent martyrs and a symbol of the movement.

Women continued to voice dissent even when the protest started going dormant because of the brutal government crackdown. They initiated a creative tactic: writing love letters to their husbands who had been jailed. The letters became a call to defy repression. At the same time, by expressing love and affection for their husbands, they confronted a cultural taboo that restricted the expression of love only in privacy.

One of the first love letters was written by Fatemeh Shams, a young wife in her twenties, in July 2009. Dozens of women followed her example and began writing letters. In her letter, she wrote:

‘From now on I will write to you about what happened out here after they jailed you and filled your ears with lies. I will tell you of the epics people created and the blood that was shed for our common goal. I will tell you so that I would not feel guilty that I was useless or passive. When you come back, I will have stories to tell you that I cannot write. But I will write these lines to keep your name and memory alive, so that your jailing does not make me bitter. I am writing so that you will know, if you cannot be here, that I am standing and there is still a voice that despite all of their efforts, they have not been able to silence.’⁶ 

 

The letters continue to appear by the dozen, with women publicly expressing love for their husbands. The letters first appeared on the women’s personal blogs or on Facebook pages and were then circulated widely on the internet. In October, Massih Alinejad, a well-known journalist, who went into exile in London last summer, wrote a public letter to the wife of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, summarizing what the letters had intended:

‘The voice of Iranian women these days probably sounds different to you and to the supporters of your husband. Despite what happened in the political and social arena in the recent years, they addressed their husbands publicly, with no fear, in passionate terms. That means those women who considered their vote and political views as their rights, and fearlessly demanded them, also proudly acknowledged loving their jailed husbands. They put an end to sitting behind the curtains. They learned that if they longed for their detained men, there was no reason for them to hide their faces behind a black veil or to censor the beauty of their love. Therefore, every detention became a reason to introduce a romantic discourse into the political discourse of Iran these days. Every handcuff that was locked, provided an excuse for women to enter politics so that they would no longer be embarrassed for expressing their love and to sit behind a curtain.’⁷ 

The second move by women came in December 2009 when Alinejad called on men on her Facebook page to wear headscarves as a sign of solidarity with Majid Tavakoli, a student leader. Authorities had claimed to have arrested him for wearing women’s clothing, but this was widely seen as an effort by the government to discredit him. Thousands of men responded to her call, wearing headscarves at universities in Iran, at events outside the country and posted pictures of themselves in headscarves on Facebook.

 

Iran is a changing society mainly because of its young population, but its young women have undergone a much more profound change. They are a growing reality in Iranian society and their demands, both within the family and society, can no longer be ignored. Their demands have both political and cultural implications. The profound change has given women a general awareness of basic rights, meaning they want equal rights with men both at home and in society, along with respect and power. They have started to define new roles and new identities for themselves, very different from the traditional roles historically defined for them. Their awareness and participation in political events has boosted their self-confidence and they now increasingly believe in their role as agents of change in the country.

 

Footnotes:

1. Persian Daily, Jam-e-Jam, ‘Divorce is Increasing in Iran’, 1 March 2007.

2. BBC Persian, ‘Educated Women Marry Less’, 11 May 2010.

3. Amanollah Faraee Moghadam, a sociologist and university professor, is quoted as saying that 68 per cent of women getting divorced are housewives while another 10 per cent are government employees. www. Aftab.ir Website, 25 May 2006.

4. Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 337-338.

5. Nazila Fathi, ‘Women Writing Novels Emerge as Stars in Iran’, The New York Times, 29 June 2005.

6. Fatemeh Shams, http://mowjcamp.com/ article/id/1018, 19 July 2009.

7. Massih Alinejad, http://mowjcamp.org/ article/id/51100, 26 October 2009.