ABSTRACT
The forced unveiling of Iranian women in the second half of the 1930s was, of all of Reza Shah’s modernization policies, the one that contributed most to his unpopularity among ordinary Iranians. Between January 1936 and the monarch’s abdication in 1941, the police and Gendarmerie used physical force to enforce the ban, thus violating the innermost private sphere of close to half the population. Most accounts of Iranian women’s history mention this episode, but its details are not always rendered accurately. Thus many accounts speak of an unveiling ‘law’, and others aver that Reza Shah imitated the modernist leader of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The truth is that unveiling was not enshrined in a law, for the simple reason that it went against the tenets of the religion that Reza Shah had sworn to uphold and propagate when he took his oath of office as Shah in 1926. Moreover, there was never any forced unveiling in Turkey. Atatürk discouraged veiling, but it was banned only for women in the public sector, such as teachers and government employees. While some municipalities issued ordinances banning veiling, 1 physical force was not used on Turkish women. 2
Veiling and purdah in pre-Pahlavi Iran
Iran partakes of the tradition of veiling in the Muslim Middle East, which is anchored in the religious injunctions on hejab. 3 But hejab refers not merely to the piece of clothing that protects women from the gaze of men, but also to the proper mode of interaction between the sexes, which aims at minimizing contact between unrelated men and women and has visual, acoustic 4 and behavioural dimensions. 5 In the following the sartorial practices that derive from hejab are called ‘veiling’, whereas the segregation of the sexes is referred to as ‘purdah’. 6 The two are not always kept sufficiently separate analytically. This vitiates our understanding of gender relations, for while there is no logically necessary connection between veiling and purdah, the issue of a woman’s proper dress is linked to her participation in public life for both opponents and supporters of the veil: the idea that women can wear a veil and still be active and have access to a common public sphere with men, i.e. veiling without purdah, does not seem to have occurred to many people in the Iran of the 1920s and 1930s. 7
As elsewhere in the Muslim world, the coverage of women varied according to region and social class: as a rule, tribal women were less covered than settled women, and urban women more so than rural women. 8 By the early decades of the twentieth century the most common outer garment of women in urban Iran was the chador, a loose, enveloping, sleeveless piece of cloth that covered the whole body, and in addition to this a face mask known as picheh was worn. The idea was to avoid any form of feminine appeal in public. The degree of sexual segregation varied roughly according to the same variables. In rural and tribal areas men and women worked together, but in the cities a woman’s seclusion was proportional to her husband’s social standing.
