Women in Iran Since 1979

Social Research, Summer, 2000 by Nikki R. Keddie

ALTHOUGH all countries are unique, Iran may have claim to more surprising political changes in the past century than any other country existing continuously during that period. Among these changes have been notable alterations in women's roles and status. The birth of urban mass politics during the constitutional revolution of 1906-11 saw women's first political activism, which continued after World War I, though that independence was eventually much diminished under the new Pahlavi dynasty of Reza Shah (1921-41) (Afary, 1996; Bayat, 1978; Paidar, 1995; Sanasarian, 1982). Reza Shah forcibly unveiled women in the 1936-41 period, thus going further than his model, Ataturk, in Turkey, and took steps promoting women's public education at all levels. His civil code regarding women and personal status was mostly a codification of Islamic law, however, and favored males in many ways. A return to more constitutional rule in the 1941-53 period saw the rise of the first successful mass nationalist movement in an independent country in the global South, with the nationalization of the hugely important British-owned oil company. In the politics of this time women participated mostly as members of nationalist or leftist parties. After the overthrow of nationalist prime minister Mosaddeq in 1953, with U.S. and British complicity, there was a return to ever more autocratic royal rule under Mohammad Reza Shah, who again homogenized women's organizations and created an umbrella organization with royal patronage, while at the same time accepting as part of his modernization program some women's proposals to better women's legal and educational position.

As part of his "White Revolution" from 1962 on, the shah ratified important women's rights measures, including votes for women and especially the Family Protection Law of 1967, modified in women's favor in 1975. While the Civil Code of Reza Shah had mostly codified Shi'i Islamic law in matters of marriage, divorce, and child custody, the Family Protection Law moved in a more gender-egalitarian direction. Under it strict limits were put on polygamy; husbands could no longer get a divorce with only a thrice-repeated statement; both husbands and wives had to go to court for a divorce; and grounds for divorce were similar for both. Child custody, which under Shi'i law went to the husband and his family, though the mother kept boys to age two and girls to age seven, now went to family courts for adjudication, and could go to either parent. As Shi'i law, like some other Islamic legal schools, allowed special conditions that might protect wives to be put in the marriage contract, the main provisions of the Family Protection Law were put into every marriage contract as a way to try to render them Islamically legitimate. In the same period increasing numbers of women were educated and began to work in a variety of jobs outside the domestic sphere. Although these changes, which had been promoted by activist women, affected mostly the new, western-oriented middle class, they also began to have effects on the popular classes.

Most of the clergy (a western term that is applicable to Shi'ism, because unlike in Sunnism all Shi'i believers must follow a cleric) never accepted the Family Protection Law. A strong clerical opposition movement, in which the intransigent Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini soon came to the fore, opposed both the Shah's autocratically-induced reforms and his de facto alliance with the U.S., Great Britain, and Israel--and particularly what was seen as subservience to the U.S. The first targets of this movement were the shah's land reforms and voting rights for women (and also, implicitly, for Baha'is, whom the orthodox saw as apostates). A mass demonstration led by Khomeini in 1963 led to his house arrest, and his continued agitation brought about his exile from Iran from 1964 until his triumphant return in early 1979. From abroad he continued to attack what he considered un-Islamic laws and practices, and said that couples married or divorced under the Family Protection Law were not truly married or divorced.

To clarify terminology used below: First, the term "Islamist" came in the 1970s to be applied to Islamic political trends and at first had considerable coherence. It referred to populist Islamic politics that appealed to Islam for socioeconomic justice and anti-imperialism, and called for a "return" to Islamic law, the sharia. Islamist movements enforced "Islamic dress" for women and most opposed gender-egalitarian, western-style legal reforms. Today, so many Muslims of different stripes, from conservative to radical or gender-egalitarian, from peaceable to violent, appeal to political Islam that it is often confusing to speak of Islamists now, as so much political discourse can be called Islamic, though its real content varies hugely. Second, rather than using the controversial term "Islamic feminist," I will instead refer to Muslims who believe in more equal rights for the genders as "gender-egalitarian", a term that I also use for appropriate secularists. Even though not all of them believe in absolute equality of rights, that is their predominant direction.