International Women’s Day in Iran

March 8, 2019 • 12:00 pm

It’s International Women’s Day, and in the international spirit I present some women who are fighting very serious oppression—by religion. These are the women who are deemed by Iran and other such countries to be second-class (if not third-class) citizens, and who must adhere to antiquated morality, including covering themselves in veils and sacks lest they excite the lust of men. It’s very odd that the responsibility for this rests on the women rather than the men, but it’s Islam, Jake. Before the revolution in 1979, the women were much freer, and demonstrated against veiling when that regulation was quickly put in place. Now, beneath the covering, burns a spirit of equality. Who knows what these women could achieve if they were given full equality?

I find the video below very touching, and the women, who have broken the law by removing their hijabs, are very brave. If anybody can understand Farsi, please give us a sense of what the women are saying in the video. (When you click on the tweet, you’ll be transferred to Twitter to watch the video. Be sure to turn the sound up.)

From Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-born activist who started the “My Stealthy Freedom” campaign. She was of course jailed, and now lives in exile in America. Again, Farsi translation much appreciated.

Watch the video below by clicking on the tweet, which takes you to the Twitter page. This one has some pretty distressing scenes (not gore but misogyny).

Here’s an article from Foreign Policy, and I give one excerpt below (click on screenshot):

Forty years on, Iranian women—still on the streets making the very same demands—have turned into Tehran’s most indomitable opposition. Young and old, veiled and unveiled, they are staging the boldest acts of civil disobedience the nation has seen since the heady days of 1978. Last year, dozens of unveiled women mounted benches throughout the country and waved white scarves in peaceful defiance of the mandatory dress code laws. Peeling off their headscarves, girls walk on the streets filming themselves and their confrontations with busybodies and morality police. When two such women were arrested in Tehran and forced into a security van to be taken into detention, crowds surrounded the vehicle, took the door off its hinges, and set them free. What is taking place in Iran today can best be described as a rebellious sequel to the suffragettes to gain the right to dress just as their predecessors had helped women get the right to vote. Millett saw this trend decades ago, when she presciently said, “All the things we have fought for since the commencement of the women’s movement in 1847 are in great jeopardy in this society.”

Today, ordinary Iranian women, fed up with their second-class status, are refusing to obey the laws that do not protect them. . . Why are the feminists who so fervently defend the rights of Muslim women to don the hijab in Western countries silent about the plight of Iranian women who demand to have choice? As the leading voice of the anti-mandatory veiling movement, Masih Alinejad once eloquently said before the European Parliament, “We’re not asking you to come and save us. We’ll save ourselves.” Instead, she wanted Western leaders, especially women, to see that Iranian women simply want the same right that European women take for granted: the choice to dress as they wish.

And the money paragraph:

Defending the right of Muslims to don the veil is perfectly appropriate in Western societies where nativists and xenophobes are gathering political momentum. But failing to speak against the veil as a symbol of gender apartheid in countries where it is enforced by law is the betrayal of all the feminist and democratic values they hold dear. Often those who keep silent do so in the name of cultural relativism. Citing the sins of colonialism, they argue that meddling in the matter of the veil is meddling in the indigenous traditions of another people. But if the chief moral flaw of the colonial perspective was its inability to see those whom they ruled over as equals, then the current tolerant liberals can be accused of the same. They fail to see that freedom of choice—in this case, to dress—is not a luxury belonging only to those in the West but a universal right for all. As long as a group of powerful Iranian men impose their will on half of the nation, the right to choose how to dress must remain a global human rights struggle.

 

20 thoughts on “International Women’s Day in Iran”

  1. “…. It’s very odd that the responsibility for this rests on the women rather than the men”. Nah, not so odd. Even in the free west, as a teenager, I could be sent home if I wore a skirt above the knee or shorts because, as my vice principle said “it excites the boys”.

    1. Yep, they were OK with a “regulation” dress showing leg. (But slacks were a no-no. Was it because they didn’t show enough leg?) But oh no, not culottes, though culottes were less revealing than a dress. Or so I thought as an adolescent male observer of the adolescent sartorial scene of the early 70’s.

      1. I once got in trouble at a gym for wearing a shirt without sleeves as well. I think I was in my 20s. I know that women weren’t allowed to wear sleeveless dresses at work either when I started working – you had to cover your shameful arms with sweaters lest you arouse the men with your shoulders.

    2. I remember on Sports Day in our secondary school, our House’s cheerleading team was forced to change out of their skirts because they were too short… Into our phys ed uniform, whose shorts were even shorter.

      -Ryan

      1. Yeah! I had to wear a gym uniform too and the shorts were uncomfortably short!

  2. We in the US and UK should be especially supportive of the rights of Iranian women, since we bear our own measure of responsibility for their plight. We backed the 1953 coup against duly-elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh — who had the potential to be his nation’s Atatürk — and and installed in his place of the Shah, with his brutal SAVAK secret police.

    This left the Persian people thinking, two horrific decades later, that their only hope for deposing the Shah was to support the Islamists. Little did they know the new boss would be every bit as despotic as the old boss.

    2. I have read that during the period of the revolution there was a ragtag group of “leftists” for a while. Some seemed to have Soviet connection, some not (as usual) and I wonder whether or not their disunity also helped the Islamists.

  3. Under the Shah, women and men were treated more equally but they were by no means free. The Shah only looks good when you compare him to his successors who are truly evil.

    The Shah tortured, jailed and killed his opponent by the thousands.

    BTW, I enjoyed this book by a 10 year old son of an Iranian general life during the revolution.
    https://www.amazon.com/We-Heard-Heavens-Then-Memoir-ebook/dp/B005FLOG22/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=We+Heard+the+Heavens+Then&qid=1552073414&s=books&sr=1-1-catcorr

  4. The world Bank rankings of womem’s equality is available in different places on the net. The U.S. is not at the top of the charts on any of these, about 20th in overall average I think. They ranked down to 189 in total and you can guess most of those on the bottom, with Iraq at 183 and Saudi Arabia 179. Our standing in many things is currently on the way down and if you doubt it just look at the latest attempt in congress to pass a bill that should be for all, to make voting easier, to make election day a holiday and a whole lot of other transparencies. The vote in the house was unanimous all for by the democrats and all against by the republicans. But not to worry, it won’t even get a vote in the Senate because the speaker decides all by himself. That is your democracy folks.

    3. Iraq is currently ranking below Saudi Arabia?

      I am genuinely surprised by that. I suppose, cynically, I shouldn’t be, but what was that invasion all about?

      cr

    1. I listened to an interview on CBC one morning while driving to work. It was about a network of women that helps get women out of oppressive places like SA and how hard it is for even privileged, rich women to escape because they have to have a male escort everywhere they go….so even if they manage to get a passport then get the passport in their possession (they are usually locked somewhere in the house), they can’t trust a cab driver to not turn them in. It’s really terrifying.

  7. I agree absolutely. Banning the niqab in Denmark is as invidious as forcing it to be worn in Iraq. Surely the time for policing what women wear – and for blaming women’s clothing choices for men’s actions – should have been over long ago?

    PS. The Name and Email fields in the ‘Post a Comment’ box autofilled for the first time in weeks! Glitch fixed?

  8. I feel sorry for the Iranians. So far as I can tell, they’re an educated, intelligent people who (through accidents of recent history) have had a reactionary religious government foisted on them. (Not that different from some other countries I could name…)

    I hope they manage to free themselves – without violence of the Syrian kind – in the near future.

    In that context I’m certain sanctions don’t help. Sanctions usually cause the lower ranks of society to suffer and just cement the hierarchy in power because when all the world is against your country, disagreement is treason.

    Incidentally, I believe Iran does generally subscribe to evolution (googling was difficult because ‘evolution in Iran’ tends to get misdirected to ‘evolution of Iran’)
    But I found this video, for what it’s worth:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mY10xt_QHY

    cr

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