ABSTRACT
Since Iran’s 1979 Revolution, women’s access to education has increased dramatically. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iranian universities, where women today make up nearly two-thirds of students. While prior to the Revolution, attending university was a privilege limited to the lucky few, today higher education is an uncontested right for women across the board. In this chapter, I draw upon ethnographic research conducted in 2012–2013 in Tehran in which I interviewed two dozen women who were the first women in their families to attend college and did so in the 1980s and 90s in order to tell the story of the dramatic expansion of women’s access to education following the Iranian Revolution. I focus in particular on the experience of women from religious families, highlighting the rise of a discourse of “revolutionary religiosity” in which women’s access to the public sphere was an “Islamic right” and was supported through government policy.
