Iran Primer: The Women's Movement

[ primer ] Iranian women made considerable progress during the Pahlavi era (1925-1979). Education for both girls and boys was free. When Tehran University opened in 1936, Iran's first university admitted both men and women. In 1963, women acquired the right to vote and run for parliament. Under the Family Protection Law, women won the right to petition for divorce and gain child custody. A husband could no longer unilaterally divorce his wife or automatically gain custody of the children. The marriage age for girls was raised from 13 to 18. And men needed the court's permission to take a second wife. By 1978, on the eve of Iran's revolution, 22 women sat in parliament and 333 women served on elected local councils. One-third of university students were female. Two million women were in the work force, more than 146,000 of them in the civil service.

The 1979 revolution politicized the mass of Iranian women. But women's expectations were not realized. The new theocracy systematically rolled back five decades of progress in women's rights. Women were purged from government positions. All females, including girls in first grade, were forced to observe the hejab, or Islamic dress code. Family laws were scraped. For the next three decades, however, the energy Iranian women displayed during the revolution propelled them deeper into the public arena to regain their rights. The result is one of the most dynamic women's movements in the Islamic world, and female activists who have won international recognition in a wide array of professions.

The Khomeini decade: 1979-1989

Under revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's new theocracy gave priority to Islamic tradition over modern mores. One of the revolutionary government's first acts was to suspend the Family Protection Law and dismantle Family Courts. Men were once again free to divorce their wives by simple declaration; they also gained exclusive custody of their children. Women could no longer file for divorce unless the right was stipulated in marriage contracts, and they lost the right to child custody. Restrictions on polygamy were also removed. The marriage age for girls was reduced to puberty, which is nine under Islamic law. In 1981, parliament approved the Islamic Law of Retribution, introducing flogging, stoning, and payment of blood money for crimes ranging from adultery to violation of Islamic dress codes.

Professionally, women were slowly pushed into traditional female fields, such as teaching and nursing. Women were barred from becoming judges. Government-run day care centers were closed, making it difficult for women to stay in jobs anyway. At universities, the idea of segregating women and men was soon abandoned as impractical, but it took several years before bars were removed on certain fields of education -- in turn affecting job prospects.

Politically, women held on to the right to vote and run for parliament. Four women were elected to the first parliament in 1980, and later sat on local councils. But most women in decision-making positions were either dismissed, given early retirement, or demoted. A decade passed before the first woman was named deputy minister, 17 years passed before a woman was appointed vice president, and 30 years passed before the Islamic Republic named its first female minister. The constitution bars women from the position of supreme leader -- the highest post in the country -- but does not stipulate the gender of the president or cabinet members. Women have tried to run in presidential elections, but they have all been disqualified.

On social issues, the theocracy's initial policies were harsh. Hejab, or Islamic dress and head cover, was forcibly imposed. Showing a bit of hair became punishable, with penalties ranging from heavy monetary fines to 70 lashes. The regime also attempted to segregate men and women in public places, but did not succeed. But the eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) had a galvanizing influence on the status of women. Women were drawn into the work force as nurses, doctors, and support for soldiers on the war front. In the absence of men, many women became the family bread winners. During the revolution's first decade, women in the work force fell from about 13 percent to 8.6 percent.

The Rafsanjani presidency: 1989-1997

After the war, women became pivotal politically. They voted in substantial numbers for Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for president in 1989, and again in 1993 because he was pragmatic on women's issues. Rafsanjani gradually eased social controls. Women were harassed less on the streets. They benefited from minor changes in the personal status law and were able to participate in international sports competitions. The number of girls in schools and universities soared.

Rafsanjani also reversed the Islamic Republic's policy of encouraging large families and launched a family planning program to curb Iran's alarmingly rapid rate of population growth. The success of this program is one of the Islamic Republic's most striking achievements. The total fertility rate (the average number of births per woman) dropped from 5.6 in the early 1980s to 2.0 in 2000, and to 1.9 births per woman in 2006. The decline has been particularly impressive in rural areas where the average number of births per woman dropped in one generation from 8.1 to 2.1. As a result, the annual rate of natural population increase declined from 3.2 percent in early 1980s to 1.8 percent in 2006.

The Khatami years: 1997-2005

Women fared even better during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami. Riding on a wave of pro-reform sentiment, he appointed a handful of women to prominent posts. Among them: Masoumeh Ebtekar was his vice president for the environment and Zahra Rahnavard became the first woman chancellor of an Iranian university. In 2004, 13 women were elected to parliament -- the largest number since the revolution.

Under Khatami, women also scored several legal victories. Pressure from women led the government to reintroduce modified parts of the suspended Family Protection Law. Women judges became special advisors to presiding clerics on special family courts. In 1994, parliament enacted a law awarding a woman monetary compensation when her husband initiated divorce proceedings and she was not at fault. In 2002, parliament raised the age of marriage for girls from nine to 13. The ban on unaccompanied single women studying abroad on government scholarships was also lifted. Khatami's presidency also saw the burgeoning of non-government organizations that laid the foundation for a more vibrant civil society. Many were founded around women's issues.

The Ahmadinejad years: 2005-present

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad struggled to balance rival trends at a time women carried growing weight at the ballot box. He faced deepening resolve among hardliners to curb the female quest for full equality; he was also confronted by public pressure from women not to be relegated to second-class status again.

Under hardliners, women generally fared poorly on several fronts. The momentum for change built up over the previous 16 years virtually evaporated. The government closed down Zanan, the country's leading feminist magazine. In 2007 elections, only 43 women were elected to local councils out of tens of thousands of seats. In the 2008 parliamentary elections, the only two reformist women in parliament were voted out. Of 7,168 candidates, 585 were women, but only nine were elected. Police cracked down on women for dress code violations. Ahmadinejad also called on women to have more children.

In the June 2009 presidential campaign, tens of thousands of women from all social classes supported the two reformist candidates who backed greater women's rights. For the first time, candidates had women advising and campaigning for them in public. After the election, Ahmadinejad lost the support of a large number of conservative women because of atrocities committed by the security forces against protesters. He was noticeably silent on the trials and harsh on the sentencing of women, allegations of rape and torture of detainees, and the mistreatment of women protesting the detention of relatives.

After his reelection, Ahmadinejad nominated three women to his cabinet. But only one of his nominees, Marzieh-Vahid Dastjerd as minister of health, was approved by parliament because of objections by a number of leading clerics and conservative politicians.

Factoids

* In 2009 elections, 42 women registered to run for the presidency. All were disqualified by the Guardian Council. But for the first time, the council also indicated that women were not banned from running for the top political job.

* Because of growing pressure from both reformers and conservatives, women's rights became one of the four top issues in the 2009 presidential election. All four candidates developed positions on women's issues.

* In 2010, 65 percent of all university students were female.

Prominent women

Farrokhru Parsa, the minister of education, was the first woman named to a cabinet position in 1968.

Mahnaz Afkhami was named minister of state for women's affairs in 1975.

Simin Behbahani, Iran's greatest living female poet, used her poetry to describe social and cultural deprivations, both before and after the revolution. Born in 1927, she was beaten up by police during a demonstration on International Women's Day in 2006, and in 2010 was prevented from leaving Iran to accept a prize in Paris.

Masoumeh Ebtekar became Iran's first female vice president during the reform era of President Mohammad Khatami. She was also a spokeswoman for the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979.

Shahla Sherkat, editor of Zanan, the leading feminist journalist under the Islamic Republic. Zanan was shut down in 2008, after 16 years of publication.

Faezeh Hashemi, Rafsanjani's daughter, became a symbol of women's expanding role in the 1990s. She founded the Islamic Countries' Women's Sports Solidarity Council In 1992. She was elected to parliament for one term in 1996. And in 1998, she founded the first women's daily newspaper, Zan, or "Woman." The paper was closed by the authorities in 1999.

Samira Makhmalbaf, one of several female filmmakers, was the youngest director to show a film at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival -- at the age of 18. She won her first prize at Cannes for her second film at the age of 20.

Shirin Ebadi, the first female judge in Iran during the monarchy, and a human rights lawyer, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The first Iranian and first Muslim woman laureate, she used the prize money to establish the Center for Defense of Human Rights, which was closed by security officials in 2010. Ebadi went into exile.

Under Ahmadinejad, Nasrine Soltankhah was vice president for science and technology and Fatemeh Javadi was vice president for the environment.

Zahra Rahnavard was the first female university chancellor and wife of former Prime Minister and 2009 presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Appointed by Khatami, she was removed when hardliners took political control. Ahmadinejad questioned her academic credentials during the televised campaign debates, a move that backfired on him among women. She was the first wife to campaign for her husband. She later became a spokesperson for the opposition Green Movement after her husband lost.

The One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality is a movement launched in 2006 to secure one million signatures on petitions demanding equal rights for women in all spheres. Under Ahmadinejad, several organizers were arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to prison terms. The government tried to crush the campaign, but did not succeed.

The future

* Since 1979, women have persistently emerged as one of the most dynamic political forces in the Islamic Republic. Despite many obstacles, they have won considerable freedom in education, employment, the public sphere and personal dress -- all of which will be difficult to completely roll back.

* The struggle for women's rights is central to the larger struggle for individual rights. It has become one of the four top issues in national elections.

* Women's issues are important to both the modern and traditional sectors of society. So the pressure for expanded rights will continue, no matter who is in power.

Haleh Esfandiari is director of Middle East Programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the author of "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution" and "My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran." This article is presented by Tehran Bureau, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as part of the Iran project at iranprimer.usip.org.