Women In The Iranian Revolution

Inspite of always being suppressed in every social and political aspect, Iranian women, played an important part in the Iranian Revolution. What women lacked, was unity. They couldn‟t come together and form a single voice for achieving their rights. Women‟s movements are scattered throughout. A proper women‟s movement never really occurred in Iran, despite their important contribution to Iran‟s political and social history. Women of Iran never rebelled together as a whole to gain anything. They did not make use of collective power. State always used women as tool for achieving their own personal motives. At first, to bring westernization, Reza Shah used women as a medium by carrying out reforms. Later, after overthrowing the Shah‟s regime,

His idea of modernization program was continued in his son’s, i.e. Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign with a much stronger idealization of the West. There was some amount of denial inherent in Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule. Mohammad Reza Shah failed to recognize the social and economical problems of the country. The solutions he provided for every problem were insufficient and inadequate. Women felt that Mohammad Reza Shah was coming up with various inefficient and controversial reforms in the name of ‘Women’s rights’. Once again, partial and superficial changes did not address the roots of female suppression in Iranian culture and history. Most of the prominent interpretations of Shariav and Shi’i Islam put women in an inferior position to the men. This is visible through segregation of the sexes, the lack of education for women and the general gap between the treatment of genders. The issues could not be simply fixed by passing a law or by granting women the right to vote in elections which were, for the most part, symbolic instead of effective expressions of the citizen‟s wish. Mohammad Reza Shah wasn‟t keen or committed in positively changing Iran because he was not ready to address the underlying flaws of Iranian society as doing so might prove as a big threat to his power. Instead superficiality and the appearance of modernization took precedence over effective reforms. Though the veil never really vanished, it was not effective

That in turn encouraged a move towards more traditional values and ways of living, which included dressing more modestly for both men and women and even wearing the scarf or the veil for some women. For many women making the decision to wear the chador was not based on religious grounds, but it was a conscious effort to make a statement against the Pahlavi regime. It was against this backdrop that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 took place. It was a revolution, which without any doubt, could not have taken place without the active participation of