ABSTRACT
This study, apart from being an academic project, has also been a personal journey. I am a child of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. I make this claim to distinguish myself from other Iranian feminist writers such as Mehrangiz Kar, Azadeh Kian, Shirin Ebadi, Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Nayereh Tohidi. 1 These are writers whose brilliant feminist consciousness seems intrinsically linked to a time before the Iranian Islamic Revolution, while I grew up in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. At the age of three I lost my father to that war and became a martyr’s daughter. 2 As a result I grew up in an allfemale family, consisting of my mother, my sister and me. I grew accustomed to my mother’s fights for rights. She fought her family for an independent life. She fought my paternal grandfather for our guardianship. She fought male colleagues for rights at the work place. She fought her status as a war widow. She was one of the only female lecturers in the field of horticulture (1989-1992) at a time when horticulture was still an exclusively male subject. 3 My mother, like so many women in the Islamic Republic, was a paradox. Veiled in a dark maghnae 4 and wearing a long dark manteau , 5 she taught
1 Mehrangiz Kar, Raf-e Tabeez Az Zanan, Moghayesey-e Convension-e Raf-e Tabeez Az Zanan ba Qavaneen-e Dakheliy-e Iran (End Discrimination against Women: A Comparison between the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and Iranian Laws) (Tehran: Nashr-e Qatr-e Publications, 2000). Azadeh Kian, “Women and Politics in Post-Islamist Iran: The Gender Conscious Drive to Change,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24, no. 1 (1997), 75.
