Back to the Chador

One striking feature of the anti-Shah demonstrations has been the presence of masses of Iranian women. In Tehran they marched by the thousands, encased from head to foot in black, shapeless chadors, while their men formed a protective chain on either side of the street. The women chanted pro-Khomeini slogans, but they also carried banners calling for the establishment of women's political, social and economic rights in any new Islamic regime.

That demand reflected a dilemma for Iran's 14,589,000 women. Under the Shah's rule they have become the most emancipated women in the Middle East, except for those in Israel and Lebanon. Among its other efforts to modernize Iranian society, the Tehran regime has worked to improve the condition of women. Nearly 40% of the students in Iran's universities are women. The government-financed Women's Organization of Iran has set up day care centers, marriage counseling centers and classes to teach women to read and write. Women now do much of the farm work, form a substantial proportion of the skilled manual labor force and serve in the army and navy.

Conservative mullahs, in their quest for a return to the old traditions, want this trend reversed. They accuse the Shah of degrading Islamic womanhood by exposing females to Western ways and destroying the former practice of sex segregation. But any return to the strict Islamic codes would affect the status of Iranian women and doubtless bar them from a number of jobs that they now hold.

The future of women under an Islamic government has become a controversial issue. Ironically, many educated women are taking more traditional views as a form of political involvement and protest against the Shah's autocratic rule. The day care centers are now almost deserted. Many of the young women who took to skirts, slacks and blue jeans as signs of their emancipation have gone back to the ankle-length chador. Intended to hide the female form, it has been worn in Persia since the ninth century. Religious law requires that it be worn outdoors at all times and indoors in the presence of strangers. Because it has no buttons or hooks, it is difficult to keep from slipping off. It must be held at all times at the neck or clenched in the teeth.

Iranian reformers have long sought to abolish the garment, which they consider a symbol of women's subordinate status. But even after the Shah's father, Reza Shah, outlawed the chador in the 1930s, rural women continued to wear them. After his abdication from the Peacock Throne in 1941, chadors began to reappear in Iranian cities. Today, four-fifths of older Iranian women wear the chador, as do an increasing number of younger women. But today's chador does not always fulfill its intended purpose: some are quite diaphanous. In an ironic display of Iranian women's desires for both more freedom and a return to traditional ways, many of them are worn over blue jeans.

One chador-clad 30-year-old mother in Tehran, who studied business administration in the U.S. at the University of Houston and now holds a $1,000 a month job in an import-export firm, told a Western journalist: "I don't know which is best, Khomeini or the Shah. But my people want democracy, and that is what we are protesting about." Shi'ite leaders say they are not necessarily opposed to women's rights. Islamic law, says Abdul-Reza Hejazi, an influential Tehran mullah, does not bar a woman from working, "provided she is properly covered and avoids improper contacts with men." The chador, he adds, is not essential attire for a proper Iranian female: "She just has to be dressed so that all the ups and downs of her body cannot be discerned."

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