Nazenin Ansari joins IWF Visiting Fellow Ellie Cohanim in this She Thinks Podcast pop-up for Women’s History Month. They discuss the role of women in ancient Persian civilization and the landmark legal rights women attained during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 20th Century Iran, only to see women’s status in society regress starting with the 1979 Islamic Revolution in the country. Today, under the Islamic Republic of Iran, women are facing a gender apartheid.
Transcript
Beverly Hallberg:
Hey everyone, it’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of She Thinks, your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women and sometimes men, about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy.
Ellie:
I’m your host Ellie Cohanim, visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum, and former deputy envoy at the United States State Department. I’m so pleased to have us today in this conversation, Nazenin Ansari, who is publisher and editor of Kayhan London and Kayhan Life. She’s a trustee of the Foreign Press Association in London, and she was elected to join its governing and serve as president, vice president, and organize the symposium, Women As Agents of Change. Nazenin has also co-edited the Foreign Policy Center’s Iran Human Rights Review, and she is just one of the most sought-after people on this important conversation we’re going to have today about the status of women in Iran today, but also, we’re going to cover what life was like for Iranian women prior to the 1979 revolution.
So, with that, and without any further ado, I’m so happy to welcome Nazenin Ansari to our edition of the IWF Podcast. Nazenin, so wonderful to have you.
Nazenin:
Thank you so very much, Ellie, for your kind invitation. May I first start by wishing you a happy Nowruz. It’s a new start, it’s spring, and it’s a new year for Iranians. What you have done, creating, spreading, and echoing the history of Iranian women and the developments in Iran is really exemplary, and I’m really proud to know you, Ellie. Thank you very much for your invitation.
I was talking about the history of Nowruz, which goes back to 2,500 years ago. When we look back to the history of women, Iranian women, we can see that… and this is based on tablets that were found under the Persepolis, the palace of the Achaemenian kings. They are at the University of Chicago. What we have learned from these tables about the role of women in ancient Persia and since is fascinating. They were not only respected, but they were considered equals to man, and they could own land, conduct businesses, received equal pay, and they could travel on their own. And in the case of royal women, they could hold their own council meetings, and even choose their husbands.
We know that, for example, Shahnameh that was written is considered like the Canterbury Tales about the history of Iran. The women of Shahnameh, for example, choose their men, they fight in wars, and, for example, women even during the Achaemenic period, they could serve in the military, and there is written and physical evidence about that. And also in the workforce, in those days, there were supervisors and managers, and there’s the record of highly paid female supervisors receiving large amounts of wine, and grain, for overseeing men working. And even pregnant women received higher wages than new mothers.
So, all of the history and what was happening to the Persian women, unfortunately, we do have a lot of recorded history up to the end of the Sasanic period, but with the conquest of Iran by the spread of Islam throughout the world, what happened was a lot of our libraries, books were burnt, and there’s not a lot of recorded history until very recently. I mean, we know a lot of our history through the Greeks and the Romans rather than through our own books. But what we do know is that any change that was brought out happened usually were brought out by women in the royal household. And this continued until… for example, we come to the era of… I’ll fast forward to 1906 when We see this shift in Iranian history and political history. Because until 1904, Iran was ruled by the constitution like a divine right of kings.
Ellie:
Isn’t that incredible, Nazenin?
Nazenin:
Yes.
Ellie:
Nazenin, I want to make sure that our listeners understand this rich and ancient Persian history, which you just outlined. And so you’re talking about an ancient culture, an ancient people. And so, thousands of years ago, what you just described is a country where women had rights and certainly exercised power. So, now you’re fast-forwarding to 1903, where we start to see the rise of the monarchy in Iran. Is that correct? And you can tell us a little bit about what were the changes that took place in that time period, and I think also, under the Shah Pahlavi dynasty, if you can talk a little bit about the status of women then.
Nazenin:
Yes. The history of monarchy and kingship goes back thousands of years of recorded history. What we do have from the first empire is around 2,500 years ago. But what happened in 1904, we see a shift from the rule of the king by divine right, where we had it in Europe as well, but we see… because during the Qajar period, at that time, who ruled Iran for 300 years, they really Europeanized Iran in the sense that they loved Europe, and so they opened the doors to Europe. There was travel. Naser al-Din Shah came to the court of Queen Victoria. There are books in Britain, in the UK I found written in a cockney accent, describing the day the Shah came to visit Queen Victoria and how he was dressed.
So, the Qajars opened the door, and modernization and all those thoughts and philosophies started coming to Iran. So, it is the age of reason, a lot of people talk about in Iran. And so, there is this massive movement to take away the divine role of the king and give the rights to the people.
So, we have the constitutional revolution in Iran, which was founded, actually, on the age of reason in Europe, by Voltaire, the Age of Enlightenment. And so, what happened, these ideas came, and there were a lot of Qajar princesses. We have recorded that they were active in the constitutional revolution, they were very active in social work, in writing books. But at the state level, from a government perspective, the rules and the laws were still very much based on Sharia laws.
So, because the constitutional revolution happened and the rule of the divine king was thrown away and given to the people, legitimacy then became transferred from the people to the king during the constitutional revolution. Still, the women lost a lot, because it was the clerics who actually controlled the society at that time, and they really didn’t allow any breathing space for women. But women continued at the street level, at the grassroots level, through education, through writing to spread…
When Reza Shah came from the Qajar period, the Qajars were overthrown, if you would like, it changed. Actually, the last king abdicated and did not want to come back to Iran. And power was transferred to a young Cossack commander of the army, who was by then, Prime Minister, called Reza Khan. Reza Khan was known as a very modernizer in the sense that the modernization of Reza Shah was structured on not only education but also bringing roads, also, secularization. For example, one of the things that happened with Reza Shah was that the justice system was transferred… religious courts were abolished and were replaced by civil courts, and then marriage contracts for women no longer had to be registered with the cleric, but they would be registered with the Ministry of Justice. He encouraged the education of women.
Ellie:
So, Nazenin, may I ask?
Nazenin:
Yes.
Ellie:
At this point, do you think this was a turning point for the status of women where you see Reza Shah Pahlavi westernizing Iran, importing this kind of European ideas, and changing the legal system? Do you see this as a turning point for the status of women?
Nazenin:
Yes, especially because… we were talking about how powerful women were always in royal households, were princesses. Reza Shah had a daughter, who was the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Shah, Princess Ashraf, and a lot of Iranian historians… and she’s known to have been the tough one. There is a story that she visited Stalin after Russia after the Soviets had invaded north of Iran, and Stalin had given her 40 minutes audience. She ended up staying for three hours, she was there. And she herself compared herself as a black… she wished she could be a black leopard, in one of her writings in her book, Faces in a Mirror, looking into the eyes of her enemies and striking feet. But she was the biggest champion.
So already, what started under Reza Shah, which was the encouragement for the education of women, for the first schools for girls, primary school, was started in 1907… actually was before Reza Shah, but by the time Reza Shah came, he had brought in… this government was helping too, not only provide financial support to women to study abroad, but they also set up teachers’ training colleges, and they were admitted to the university, Tehran University, and education became compulsory in 1944.
So, education opened a lot of inroads for women, and this continued until we come to the really blossoming of the Iranian women’s movement. I think you could say it’s in 1963. I mean, it is in the 1960s. And basically, it started with the White Revolution. You were not born then. I had just been born, Ellie. But it was a white revolution of the Shah for his people, and it changed the economic structure of Iran in the sense that until then, land ownership and proprietorship were very much based on big landowners. If you would like to compare it to European ways, Western, it was more like a feudal system.
So, Mohammad Reza Shah, Reza Shah’s son, brought in this 1960s white revolution that actually three of the points of the white revolution concerns women. And we see that, for example, they started to have a special court for women, education. So, by 1963, women were given the right to vote, and to enter office, and to be able to have…
And this was all against opposition from the clerics, but still, they were able to push this through. But at the same time, in the 1960s, they established the Women’s Organization of Iran, which was a nonprofit grassroots organization, and it worked mainly through volunteers, educating women for change to work towards securing economic and independence for women. It tried to remain in the spirit of Islam but it worked at local branches, and it had literacy classes, vocational training, counseling. And so, women entered the diplomatic corps. By 1968, there was a minister of education, and she was the first woman to hold a cabinet position. By 1969, the judiciary was open to women. Shirin Ebadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, was one of the women who became the judges, and women were elected to town, city, and county councils.
But what is very interesting is, Ellie… and this is what made me cry when I was revisiting the history… we come to the family protection law of 1967, which actually gave women rights for their own sake in the family life, and they were no longer under the man’s authority within the family, and there were laws that provided for childcare in workplace, full-time benefits for halftime work for mothers of children up to the age of three, and equal pay for equal work. By 1975, the United Nations General Assembly had proclaimed 1975 as International Women’s year. And at the World Conference on Women in Mexico City, they selected an Iranian woman to chair the Consultative Committee for the World Conference of that yeah. And this was the first world meeting that devoted the subject of women at the level of a government delegation. And the chair of this committee was Princess Ashraf again. Not only women working from the grassroots, but also governments also being a supporter and an encourager and empowering women to do so.
But what made me really emotional is that, within a few months of the Mexico conference, nearly two-thirds of the heads of state and governments of the world had approved a declaration on International Women’s year. The declaration had been brought to the attention of the world community by an Iranian woman. And by 1976-
Ellie:
This is fascinating. This is fascinating to hear. And so, I think for our audience, just to recap, so you’re talking about from the 1960s till 1975, this tremendous leap forward for women in Iran following. You’ve got the White Revolution, which kind of reframed the economy of the entire country, and then you’ve got the legal structure put into place where women are protected, women are given equal status, you said equal pay for equal work, and then you lead up to this 1975 international forum where it’s an Iranian woman who’s taking this leadership role. And so, Nazenin, the way that I look at Iranian history, here we are in 1975, we’re four years away from what would become the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And certainly, that then becomes a complete shift in the history of Iran and the status of women.
So, before we get to the revolution, I just want to stay on this prerevolutionary moment. So, what do you describe the life of an average Iranian woman? What was life like then? Because I think when we describe what life is like now, it will be a huge contrast, and I would love for our audience to understand that. Could you tell us a little bit about what was life like for an average Iranian woman before 1979, and maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and your history and where you were during this time?
Nazenin:
Yes. I’ll tell you the story of my grandmother, actually, because she was born under Reza Shah.
Ellie:
Sure.
Nazenin:
She walked out on her husband because she couldn’t put up with… usually, Iranian men, they could have, not only four wives but over like 99 concubines, even maybe more. So, she could not put up with it. She left, but because she left, she lost guardianship of her children. So, the children were given to their grandfather to be brought up. Although she had been educated at that time under Reza Shah… primary school was opened in 1907 for girls, but afterward, it was either you would receive education at home or there would be no other education. She had received education and she had become a working woman.
As I was growing up, I would see my grandmother every day while she would come and stay with us, wake up in the morning, do her exercise, and then walk to work where she worked for the newly established… it was called [inaudible 00:21:10], where all the medicines… it’s still there actually… where over 80% of Iranian medicine is homegrown and homemade. And this organization, this institution had just started then, so she would go and work there. But also, when she would go and read newspapers, she could read newspapers that were about women who had joined the military, who had become pilots, who were teaching at university, who had become judges, who owned businesses, but who, more than anything else, aspired.
My grandmother had a friend of hers, who was also a single woman because she wouldn’t put up with the strict traditional ways that Iranian men in those days would treat their women. But she had lost all her money, but she started sewing, and she had set up sewing at her home, but then it became bigger. She was employing seven other women, and she had become an entrepreneur herself.
There were also my teachers at school that I went to, who was very well… Although I went to school, for high school, to an international school, my elementary school in Iran, I was born in a year that, because as I mentioned, we had the first minister who was education ministers, a new curriculum had been brought and instituted for education in Iran, and a lot of women had become teachers. There were women also in Parliament, but there were also women who really were into art. I mean, artists, writers. It was a period of flourishing. I mean, girls had aspirations. Personally, I wanted to enter into public service. I wanted to go back to Iran to serve. It was a period of a lot of energy.
The school I went to, elementary school, I later found out that I was going to school with boys and girls… I went to a mixed elementary school. It was one of the first mixed schools… and with children, that now later, after the revolution, I found… and I’m still in touch with them, they didn’t know I was a Shia, or that I was a Sufi, that I would go to the mosque, and I didn’t know they were Bahais, or they were Jewish, or they were Armenian, it was an entirely different world, and it was truly heavenly, Ellie, it was.
Ellie:
And so, Nazenin, I want to capture one phrase that you just said, which is, “Girls had aspiration, and women were achieving.” So, here is the picture of women pre 1979 revolution, and now I want to take our listeners there. So, you have the protest movement, which leads to the rise of the radical Islamic Revolution, the 1979 revolution in Iran, you have Ayatollah Khamenei taking power and brutally so, and once they take power, we start to see the status of women in an almost immediate decline. And so, Nazenin, if you could let our viewers or listeners know, what happened after the revolution? And then I would love for us to talk about what’s happening today on the streets of Iran to women.
Nazenin:
Yeah. As I mentioned before, the Civil Code of Iran was updated to include rights for women. And this was it with a family protection law in 1967, 1975, giving us all these rights. And certainly, in 1968, we had Mrs. Parsa becomes Minister of Education. With the revolution happening, overnight, everything changed. They erased 1979, ’67 legal provisions, and immediately, overnight, the Civil Code of Iran switched back to 1931 under Sharia. So, suddenly, overnight, we became worth half of a man, rights of a man. I mean, Iran’s constitution after the… And before I move into the Constitution, this is a symbolic story, because Mrs. Parsa, the first female minister of Iran was executed, and their crime, they told her she’s a prostitute. That’s why she was hanged, for prostitution.
Ellie:
Such a horror.
Nazenin:
Why? Because she opened education for women.
Ellie:
It’s a horror.
Nazenin:
It is horror.
Ellie:
And I know that this charge, this false accusation against women has continued to this day where they have this accusation of facilitating “corruption and prostitution” for merely not wearing a hijab. And so, it’s kind of shocking to hear that it started this attack on womanhood, it started with the very first minister in Iran who was a woman.
Nazenin:
Yes. By 1978, before the revolution, women had convinced the government to resolve all governmental, economic, social, and decision-making requiring cabinet approval to be cleared for gender impact. Overnight, everything changed, Mrs. Parsa was executed, Iran’s Civil Code went back to the 1930s on the principles of Sharia, and 1979, for example, when all countries were signing the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Iran did not sign it. The Islamic Republic did not sign it, even though this was one of the conventions, one of the things that were started in 1975.
So, on every international level, national level, there was a whole shrouding of Iranian women’s achievements. So, that’s why today, in the World Economic Forum Annual Report on the gender gap, Iran ranks 148 out of 153 countries as far as the gender gap, with only Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Congo having a bigger overall gender gap.
Ellie:
That’s a sad list to be on. And I have to say, if I’m hearing you correctly, Nazenin, I think what you’re saying is that, basically, following the Islamic Revolution, women went backward, rather than going forwards in Iran.
So, now I want to take our listeners to the status of women today. You and I were on a different conversation where we described what’s happening in Iran as gender apartheid, and gender apartheid is very strong language. So, I’m hoping that you can explain, why do we use this language? Why is there actual gender apartheid taking place in the Islamic Republic of Iran today?
Nazenin:
Yes. When you look at the Constitution, and when you look at the legal framework of the Islamic Republic, you will see that… Let’s start with the Constitution. Article 20 of the Constitution, says that all men and women have equal protection of the law, and all human political, economic, social, and cultural rights as long as it’s in conformity with Islamic criteria. That goes back to Sharia law. Article 21, and this is the only article in the constitution that explicitly mentions women’s rights, provides that, I quote, “The government must ensure the rights of women in all respects is in conformity, again, with the Islamic criteria.” So, it is the duty of the government to impose unequal laws on women in Iran, because it’s the principle of Islam, and thus, Article 21, strictly limits the rights of women according to the principles of Islam, and it ensures that every dialogue about women’s rights must be understood in the religious context.
This is the problem of the Constitution. If we are ever going to have equality with men and have women’s rights in Iran, these two articles have to be changed.
Now, let’s go back to the Civil Code. As I mentioned, the Civil Code went back overnight at the time of the revolution, it was back to the 1930s Civil Code that is based on Sharia. So, it’s girls can be married at the age of 13 unless their guardian approves the marriage and the competent court determines that the marriage is in her best interest, and in this case, they can be married younger. And a boy can be married at 15. Although women are considered citizens and can vote, but they can only be elected to certain offices that are according to the Islamic criteria. Women cannot study at university all the topics.
One thing I have to add, Ellie, after the revolution, wasn’t only the bad thing that happened to us. We had the Cultural Revolution on top of the Islamic Revolution. For two years, the universities were closed. All Western-educated professors were cleared from universities. So, women were subjected to a cultural revolution as well. And there were a lot of areas of study that women could not study. For example, at the time of the revolution, I was in the United States, and I was studying public affairs and government. That was one of the areas that were bad for women. So, even according to the Iranian laws after the revolution, I wasn’t able to study, if I had been in Iran, what I had wanted to study.
One of the only areas I was open for them was writing and journalism. That’s why a lot of women went into journalism. And they say, despite the intentions of the regime, you have this brilliant younger Iranian generation going out into the bosom of the Iranian society and bringing out the stories. And also, women, mothers passing on the story of… What I told you today, these stories were passed on from mothers, grandmothers, to mothers, to daughters, and they were carried forward.
So, what we see today in the Iranian women’s movement… and if I may go on another tangent, at a time when there are so much money and investment in the studies and conferences for the role of Middle Eastern women, and not so much for Iranian women, yet we see in Iran, this voice of the Iranian women refusing to be shut up. And we hear it nowadays in the news, whether it is the girl of the streets of the revolution, that they went, they took out their hijab and stood there with a white flag, or whether those that… the White Wednesday campaign of Masih Alinejad, they are shouting. But I think what has been lacking until now, and I’m not sure it’s going to be better, because these past 40 years has been a dearth of any fundamental appreciation of what women had and what women lost simply because of the politicization of the women’s movement by the Islamic Republic.
Ellie:
Nazenin, if I may, I think this is a perfect transition because I want to ask you one last question. And so before you get to it, I want to ask this question. What do you think women in the West, and so that would be American women, European women, and Iranian women in the diaspora, but specifically American and European women, many of whom consider themselves feminists, what do you think they can be doing to support the women in Iran who are facing these horrific conditions, where they are not even second class citizens, they’re third-class citizens, they’re facing gender-based violence, they are being imprisoned and tortured for the mere fact of leaving the house without putting a veil on them, which is mandated by the state and not because they want to be wearing a veil? What can Western so-called feminists do to support these women?
Nazenin:
Thank you, Ellie. We need to learn from each other and share our experiences, and we need to have access to best practices in social relations, information technology, political interaction, but at the same time, I think it’s important that the values, and the visions, and the solutions that Iranian women find to be represented in international forums, where models are developed, discourse is determined, and resources are allocated. Unfortunately, since 1978, the views that have been expressed in those international forums have been represented by the Islamic Republic, and that has been an anomaly as far as women’s rights are concerned. Also, supporting women’s aspirations for gender equality, political participation, should become synonymous with the aims of any government that wants modernization and development.
But at the same time, there are certain things that national and foreign companies can do. And these are some recommendations made by Human Rights Watch, actually, that they have to adopt anti-discrimination policies, that bans all forms of discrimination when they go in the workplace. When companies enter into negotiations or relations, Western companies, with companies set up in Iran, there has to be that intense adoption of anti-discrimination policies, and that they ensure that there is gender equality in their hiring. But at the same time, I think there’s a lot that United Nations can do, and the European Union, to ensure that the voices of Iranian women and what they have been fighting for, it is not fair to be reflected, because that is how it is at the street level, at the community level in Iran, and in the hearts of Iranian women as well. So, sisterhood international, I would say.
Ellie:
Absolutely. Well, I think that is an incredible note for us to end on in honor of Women’s History Month. It was truly a pleasure to have with us, Nazenin Ansari, publisher and editor of Kayhan London. And I thank everyone for joining us on this She Thinks Podcast. Thank you.