ABSTRACT
This article aims to briefly examine the historical links between Iranian nationalism and Islam and the implications of this history for contemporary discourses on women and the family. In examining the complex evolution of Iranian political history this century, and the equally complex ways in which this has shaped women's rights and opportunities, any notion of the current discursive locations of women being a unitary effect of Islam is rejected. It will be argued that the histories of nationalism in Iran have had both particular significance and contradictory effects for women.
