by Brian Griffith.
Iran’s Feminist Political Parties, WWI to WWII
The fact that Iranian women could not vote until 1963 didn’t stop them from organizing politically. Following the Constitutional Revolution and WWI, Sadiqeh Dowlatabadi’s magazine Zaban-e Zanan (Women’s Voice) took a stridently anti-colonial line, trashing the post-war Anglo-Persian treaty of 1919, and openly agitating for revolution. Dowlatabadi was done with asking men to be better guardians for women—she demanded no guardians. The dying Qajar dynasty took her threat seriously and banned her Isfahan-based magazine. The chief of police told her, “You have been born a hundred years too early.” She said, “I have been born a hundred years too late, otherwise I would not have let women to become so enchained by men today” (Paidar, 93). In 1921 she went to Tehran and founded an organization called the Society-Testing Women (Azmayeshe Banwan). Seeking to upgrade her strategy, she went to Paris for a B.A. from Sorbonne University, and in 1926 represented Iran at the International Alliance for Women’s Suffrage. After she returned home, the modernizing dictator Reza Shah decided that a woman of Dowlatabadi’s strength might be useful to the state. Noting that women had been a potent force against the previous Qajar dynasty, he attempted to channel her energies in less confrontational directions by appointing her head of his government-sponsored Women’s Society. To some degree it worked. In trying to use and retain her platform for what it was worth, Dowlatabadi directed her demands for justice toward the parliament’s leaders, rather than the shah.
When Mohtaram Eskandari and Mastureh Afsar formed the Patriotic Women’s League in 1919, their main concern was injustice in family law. They announced three aims: 1) setting a minimum age for marriage, 2) banning polygamy, and 3) protecting divorced women and their children. Reza Shah proved somewhat receptive to such demands, partly because regulating these things would put his government above the clergy. Hoping to gain goodwill from women without losing too much support from men, he sponsored a 1931 law to constrain “inappropriate marriage.” But rather than setting a controversial minimum age for marrying off girls, this law set a subjective rule that girls must be “physically apt” for marriage. They had to have reached puberty, at least in the opinion of the family heads and clerics concerned. The law also blocked “inappropriate marriage” between foreign men and Iranian women, thus preserving the nation’s women from those beyond the pale. (Somewhat similarly, until 1947 Canadian women lost their citizenship if they married a foreign citizen.) Furthermore, husbands were required to legally register their marriages with the government, with penalties for failing to disclose additional marriages. This was an indirect deterrent to polygamy, because as the Turkish writer Ahmed Bey had reported, the few Iranian men who openly practiced polygamy were “generally despised.”
Under the new law, a series of men faced prosecution for arranging marriages of girls between 12 and 14 years old. Crowds of women gathered to see justice done, and feelings at the courts “ran high.” But apart from that, the new Civil Code of 1931 mainly reaffirmed the ancient powers of men over women in areas such as polygamy, unilateral divorce, or divorce settlements. Parvin Paidar described it as a wholesale adoption of sharia law into the official legal system.
In Tehran during 1932, the Patriotic Women’s League helped to host the Congress of Eastern Women. Representatives from across the colonized Asian world gathered to share ideas and pass resolutions to defend women and oppose imperialism. A socialist leader named Iran Arani addressed the Congress, urging win-win solutions for an unjust world: “The woman’s movement … does not strive to replace the rule of one class by another. On the contrary, the fruits of the women’s movement will benefit the whole of society” (Paidar, 103). But some delegates endorsed fighting for justice by any means necessary. Mastureh Afsar objected when the Patriotic Women’s League endorsed an anti-war “peace plank.” She insisted that rising nations must prepare themselves in the arts of war if they hoped to win their freedom.
Some women’s organizations seemed to directly endanger Reza Shah. In 1927, an 18-year-old girl named Zandokht Shirazi formed an organization called “Women’s Revolution” (Enqelab-e Zanan). Hearing of it, the shah intervened, forcing Shirazi to adopt the less inflammatory name of “Women’s Movement.” Next, the growing Iranian Communist Party launched a direct appeal to women, forming an organization called “Women’s Awakening” (Bidari-ye Zanan). Hoping to eliminate such threats, the shah banned all socialistic parties in 1931. He called on all reformist women to work with him, not against him, and unite behind his Renewal Party. To help ensure this, a gang of thugs demolished the offices of the Patriotic Women’s League. The same thing happened to the Women’s Society office in Qazvin, with 24 members thrown in prison. The shah decreed that women’s organizations should promote non-political causes such as charities, sports events, or literacy campaigns. Later, he coopted the name “Women’s Awakening” for his own campaign to unveil and modernize women. It seems that during the 1930s, almost all political progress for Eurasia’s women happened because dictators such as Turkey’s Ataturk, Russia’s Stalin, or Iran’s Reza Shah coopted their ideas.
Source of quotes:
Paidar, Parvin (1995) Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-century Iran. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
From Mother Persia: Praise for Great Iranian Women, by Brian Griffith.