by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian.
To many Western observers, Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement may seem like something new, as if Iranian women were just now waking up to that possibility. Actually of course, their fight spans centuries, and other great movements of Iran’s recent past have received little attention in the West. Here is one episode in this struggle from over a decade ago, which illustrates the strategies, heroes, limited victories, and international cooperation among women of mainly Muslim nations.
From 1979 to 2005, the number of known NGOs for women’s rights in Iran had slowly grown from 13, to 430 (Shirazi, 49). But as one woman in Tehran put it, “the laws concerning women are moving like a turtle while women [are] moving like a hare” (Rezai-Rashti, 483). With a mixture of rising hope and frustration, an association of leaders, including Parvin Ardalan, Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, and Shahla Lahiji, proposed a national movement of peaceful protest for gender equality. The idea, which was taken from a successful campaign in Morocco, was to collect one million signatures, calling for a specific set of reforms. The group officially kicked off its campaign in the summer of 2006 with a seminar entitled “The Impact of Laws on Women’s Lives” and a website called “Change for Equality.” In a blog named “Signature Drives Are the Most Civic of Activities,” Shahla Lahiji addressed the fairly new online nation:
… traditional families with strong religious beliefs, … recognize that a modern existence requires new rules. This is because traditional social relations, for which these laws were established, no longer exist. The legal status of women … who are employed, have an income and are full partners in carrying and handling the economic burdens of the family, must be reexamined with a new perspective. (Sameh, 43)
For Iranians who might assume that the existing family laws were of superhuman origin, Parvin Ardalan explained: “Islamic laws are not fixed. Since the revolution, some articles have been changed; it is possible. Many laws are political rather than religious and it is up to the government if they want to change them” (Ansary, 140). The petition to be presented throughout the country read in part,
The law allows a father who obtains court permission to marry off his daughter even before the age of thirteen—the minimum legal age of marriage—to a man as old as seventy. The law does not allow mothers to serve as the financial guardians of their children; or to make decisions regarding their child’s place of residence, foreign travel, or medical care. The law allows men to practice polygamy and gives them uncontested rights to divorce their wives at a whim … The undersigned ask for the elimination of all forms of legal discrimination against women in Iranian law, and ask legislation … based on the government’s commitments to international human rights … (Ahmadi Khorasani, 2009, 101–102)
As the campaign’s leaders consulted other interest groups, their representative Sussan Tahmasebi reported, “Even the most conservative groups we talked to agreed that our demands were just, and explained that they would not accept anything less for their own daughters” (Ansary, 186). Naemeh Eshraghi, a granddaughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, endorsed the campaign. Soon, a growing network of volunteers began collecting signatures from local women across the nation. As Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani explained, “Whether an interlocutor signs or refuses to sign, the campaign considers the encounter a success. Everyone receives what amounts to a short informational briefing on the issues, and even those who refuse to sign will probably begin following the topic with new interest” (2009, 49).
As tens of thousands of signatures accumulated, some of the activists conducting these conversations were arrested for “acting against national security.” To evade restrictions on public political protest, the signature-seekers learned to operate outside the normal reach of the police. Moving “face to face, street to street,” they spoke to women in women’s spaces such as the female sections on subways, in hair salons, factory lunch rooms, or private homes. The campaign’s website posted articles by activist writers like Jelve Javaheri, who reported that “The younger men who are joining the women’s movement are different from the young men I knew several years back. They have internalized the discourse on equality more seriously” (Sameh, 43).
At a rally on International Women’s Day in March, 2009, the campaign announced a coalition of over 40 women’s organizations. This coalition called on all candidates in the upcoming national election to publicly state their positions on each point raised in its petition. Ahmadinejad’s government had the police attack and beat the rally participants. It was a precursor of the violence that would follow the June 2009 election. In response, Ahmadi Khorasani reported with pride,
… each time we had a peaceful gathering, we were greeted by government forces with batons, pepper spray, and beatings, but never reacted in kind. Instead, we just sat on the ground, covered our faces with our hands, and took the brunt of the batons on our bodies. Even in those difficult situations, moreover, we sang songs of equality. When we were sent to prisons, we shared our experiences with our jailers and saw them also, much like ourselves, as fellow human beings forced to wear figurative balls and chains. (2009, 96)
Two of the presidential candidates in the 2009 election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Medhi Karroubi, responded to the campaign, announcing that they would support all the reforms called for in the petition (Afkhami, 252). And perhaps most people in Iran believed that these candidates actually received more votes than the state-designated winner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Several international organizations recognized the Million Signatures campaign with awards, such as the Simone de Beauvoir Award for Women’s Freedom, and the Global Women’s Rights Award from the Feminist Majority Foundation. Western organizations offered funding for the campaign, but the Iranian organizers turned them down. They felt enormous pressure to prove themselves an independent, indigenous movement with no foreign sponsorship, especially since the Feminist Majority Foundation had endorsed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the name of liberating Muslim women (Sameh, 50, 73). Still, the accusations that the campaign was foreign-backed were relentless. Where Morocco’s million signatures campaign achieved success in officially equalizing that country’s family laws (with a claim that Islam stood for equality), the Iranian campaign ground to a halt. After collecting perhaps 300,000 signatures, Ardalan and Ahmadi Khorasani were arrested and sentenced to three years in prison for endangering the state. The hardline newspaper Kayhan announced that the Million Signatures campaign had been instigated by European politicians for the sake of “producing and distributing naked prostitution in Iran” (Secor, 438).
According to Ahmadinejad’s government, the campaign had suffered a total defeat. But still the popular demand for legal reform showed some results. An old law requiring that children of Iranian women and foreign men must take their father’s citizenship was amended, allowing those children to apply for Iranian citizenship. In 2008 another reform required that insurance companies pay equal “blood money” for accidental deaths of insured men and women. A law passed in 2009 ensured that women could inherit the monetary value (but not the title deed) of a deceased husband’s real estate property. A proposal for re-allowing men to marry an extra wife without the first wife’s consent was defeated. A proposal to make women pay tax on their bride wealth was voted down. Parvin Ardalan said, “They know our population is seventy million, so if we gather one million signatures it is nothing … Of course we couldn’t gather one million signatures, but one million people know of us” (Peterson, 440–441). Shadi Sadr, a lawyer for the campaign who later served prison time, said “I assure you that if you look around carefully, everywhere you will see our footprints” (Milani, F., 2011, 127). Even a conservative female politician like Maryam Behruzi (of the Islamic Coalition Party) announced that “Women should participate actively in decision-making. There is no legal impediment toward women obtaining important numbers of seats in parliament. It is the predominant patriarchal system that wants to thrust women aside from the public sphere” (Kian, 31).
In retrospect, Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani claimed an important step in transforming public opinion:
With their creative yet strictly law-abiding way of doing things, the campaign’s mostly young and female activists have succeeded, for the first time in the history of the Iranian women’s movement, in crafting a balanced relationship with activists outside Iran. This time, all the helpful features of a movement united for change—openness to new methods, a reliance on making decisions by consensus, a readiness to forge practical alliances, and more—all arose from the very substance of domestic cultural developments and social needs, and hence come to the world as a true home-grown experiment in advocating and organizing for equal justice under the law. (2009, 84)
From the upcoming book Mother Persia
Sources
Afkhami, Mahnaz (2022) The Other Side of Silence. University of North Carolina Press.
Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin (2009) Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality: The Inside Story. Women’s Learning Partnership.
Ansary, Nina (2015) Jewels of Allah. Ravela Press.
Kian, Azadeh (2011) “Gendering Shi’ism in Post-revolutionary Iran.” In Bahramitash, Roksana and Hoogland, Eric (eds.), Gender in Contemporary Iran. Routledge.
Milani, Farzaneh (2011) Words Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom Movement. Syracuse University Press.
Peterson, Scott (2010) Let Swords Encircle Me: Iran—A Journey Behind the Headlines. Simon & Schuster.
Rezai-Rashti, Goli M. (2015) “The Politics of Gender Segregation and the Women’s Access to Higher Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Gender and Education, 25(5), 469–486.
Sameh, Catherine Z. (2019) Axis of Hope: Iranian Women’s Activism Across Borders. University of Washington Press.
Secor, Laura (2016) Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran. Allen Lane.
Shirazi, Farid (2012) “Information and Communication Technology and Women Empowerment in Iran.” Telematics and Informatics, 29, 45–55.