Reconstructed Lives

Reconstructed Lives PDF

Author: Haleh Esfandiari

Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Published: 1997-07

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780801856198

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Iranian women tell in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. The Islamic revolution of 1979 transformed all areas of Iranian life. For women, the consequences were extensive and profound, as the state set out to reverse legal and social rights women had won and to dictate many aspects of women's lives, including what they could study and how they must dress and relate to men. Reconstructed Lives presents Iranian women telling in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. Through a series of interviews with professional and working women in Iran—doctors, lawyers, writers, professors, secretaries, businesswomen—Haleh Esfandiari gathers dramatic accounts of what has happened to their lives as women in an Islamic society. She and her informants describe the strategies by which women try to and sometimes succeed in subverting the state's agenda. Esfandiari also provides historical background on the women's movement in Iran. She finds evidence in Iran's experience that even women from "traditional" and working classes do not easily surrender rights or access they have gained to education, career opportunities, and a public role.

Women And Revolution In Iran

Women And Revolution In Iran PDF

Author: Guity Nashat

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-28

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1000010090

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Iranian women acquired greater legal, social, and economic opportunities during the past three decades than in any other period of history, yet they participated in large numbers in the 1979 revolution to overthrow Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Ironically, they may have lost. more than any other group from the changes introduced and stand to lose even more from changes contemplated by leaders of the current regime. The role of women in the revolution, the reasons for their participation, and their subsequent fate are documented in this volume. The authors examine the status of women in pre-revolutionary society, the ways in which their lives were affected by Islamic principles, and the changes that occurred throughout the twentieth century as increasing numbers of women entered the labor force and public life. They then turn to recent political events, describing the participation of working-class, rural, and educated women and activists from both the right and left. Finally, they consider the implications of recent government politics aimed at limiting women's activities outside the home and encouraging a return to more traditional roles.

Women in the Muslim World

Women in the Muslim World PDF

Author: Lois Beck

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 9780674954809

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Examines the place of Muslim women in contemporary law and society, their historical roles in cultural and political development, their status within nomadic, rural, and urban societies, and the impact of ritual and religion o ther lives.

Populism and Feminism in Iran

Populism and Feminism in Iran PDF

Author: Haideh Moghissi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1349252336

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Women presented the first effective challenge to the Islamic regime and the clerical authority in post-revolutionary Iran. Women's activism in support of their legal rights and personal freedom, however, did not develop into a strong movement against the rising fundamentalism. The Iranian socialists did not support women's autonomous organizations. The convergence of the Left's populism with Islamic populism, and the influence of the Iranian/Shiite political culture that promotes male authority and female submission, could not reconcile with women's claims to individual rights, choice, and personal freedom and their struggle for autonomy and self-determination in private or public life.

Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War

Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War PDF

Author: Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2021-02-22

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0815655169

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Eighteen months after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, hundreds of thousands of the country’s women participated in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in a variety of capacities. Iran was divided into women of conservative religious backgrounds who supported the revolution and accepted some of the theocratic regime’s depictions of gender roles, and liberal women more active in civil society before the revolution who challenged the state’s male-dominated gender bias. However, both groups were integral to the war effort, serving as journalists, paramedics, combatants, intelligence officers, medical instructors, and propagandists. Behind the frontlines, women were drivers, surgeons, fundraisers, and community organizers. The war provided women of all social classes the opportunity to assert their role in society, and in doing so, they refused to be marginalized. Despite their significant contributions, women are largely absent from studies on the war. Drawing upon primary sources such as memoirs, wills, interviews, print media coverage, and oral histories, Farzaneh chronicles in copious detail women’s participation on the battlefield, in the household, and everywhere in between.

Women in Place

Women in Place PDF

Author: Nazanin Shahrokni

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2019-12-24

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0520304284

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While much has been written about the impact of the 1979 Islamic revolution on life in Iran, discussions about the everyday life of Iranian women have been glaringly missing. Women in Place offers a gripping inquiry into gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran. Author Nazanin Shahrokni takes us onto gender-segregated buses, inside a women-only park, and outside the closed doors of stadiums where women are banned from attending men’s soccer matches. The Islamic character of the state, she demonstrates, has had to coexist, fuse, and compete with technocratic imperatives, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, international influences, and global trends. Through a retelling of the past four decades of state policy regulating gender boundaries, Women in Place challenges notions of the Iranian state as overly unitary, ideological, and isolated from social forces and pushes us to contemplate the changing place of women in a social order shaped by capitalism, state-sanctioned Islamism, and debates about women’s rights. Shahrokni throws into sharp relief the ways in which the state strives to constantly regulate and contain women’s bodies and movements within the boundaries of the “proper” but simultaneously invests in and claims credit for their expanded access to public spaces.

Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling and Reveiling

Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling and Reveiling PDF

Author: Hamideh Sedghi

Publisher:

Published: 2014-05-14

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 9780511296574

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Why were urban women veiled in the early 1900s, unveiled from 1936 to 1979, and reveiled after the 1979 revolution? This question forms the basis of Hamideh Sedghi's original and unprecedented contribution to politics and Middle Eastern studies. Using primary and secondary sources, Sedghi offers new knowledge on women's agency in relation to state power. In this rigorous analysis she places contention over women at the centre of the political struggle between secular and religious forces and demonstrates that control over women's identities, sexuality, and labor has been central to the consolidation of state power. Sedghi links politics and culture with economics to present an integrated analysis of the private and public lives of different classes of women and their modes of resistance to state power.

Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic

Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic PDF

Author: Lois Beck

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780252029370

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The role of women in Iran has often been downplayed or obscured, particularly in the modern era. This volume demonstrates that women have long played important roles in different facets of Iranian society. Together with its companion, Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, this volume completes a two-book project on the central importance of Iranian women from pre-Islamic times through the creation and establishment of the Islamic Republic. It includes essays from various disciplines by prominent scholars who examine women's roles in politics, society, and culture and the rise and development of the women's movement before and during the Islamic Republic. Several contributors address the issue of regional, ethnic, linguistic, and tribal diversity in Iran, which has long contained complex, heterogenous societies.

The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran PDF

Author: Arzoo Osanloo

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-03-09

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1400833167

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In The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo explores how Iranian women understand their rights. After the 1979 revolution, Iranian leaders transformed the state into an Islamic republic. At that time, the country's leaders used a renewed discourse of women's rights to symbolize a shift away from the excesses of Western liberalism. Osanloo reveals that the postrevolutionary republic blended practices of a liberal republic with Islamic principles of equality. Her ethnographic study illustrates how women's claims of rights emerge from a hybrid discourse that draws on both liberal individualism and Islamic ideals. Osanloo takes the reader on a journey through numerous sites where rights are being produced--including Qur'anic reading groups, Tehran's family court, and law offices--as she sheds light on the fluid and constructed nature of women's perceptions of rights. In doing so, Osanloo unravels simplistic dichotomies between so-called liberal, universal rights and insular, local culture. The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran casts light on a contemporary non-Western understanding of the meaning behind liberal rights, and raises questions about the misunderstood relationship between modernity and Islam.

Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran

Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran PDF

Author: Parvin Paidar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-07-24

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780521595728

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In a challenging and authoritative analysis of the role of Iranian women in the political process, Parvin Paidar considers the ways they have been affected by the evolutionary and revolutionary transformations of twentieth-century Iran. In so doing, she demonstrates how political reorganisation has of necessity redefined the position of women, and that, contrary to the view of conventional scholarship, gender issues are fundamental to the political process in contemporary Iran. The implications of the study bear on the broader issues of women in the Middle East and the developing countries generally.