The Unfinished Revolution

For Iran's women, the real struggle goes on

Three weeks ago, in the wake of the upheavals that deposed the Shah, Iran's women took to the streets once again. As they saw it, the new Islamic regime was threatening to deny them freedoms they thought they had already won. TIME'S Jane O'Reilly went to Iran for a look at the "women's revolution." Her report:

As suddenly as they had begun, the women's marches ended. Three weeks ago, thousands of women spontaneously rose up to protest the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's apparent opinion that women should return to the veil, or chador (a shapeless garment that covers a woman from head to toe). When they shouted, "In the dawn of freedom, there is no freedom," they were supported by many others who feared that the promises of the revolution were not being kept: workers, ethnic and religious minorities, landless peasants, middle-class men.

By last week the protesters were off the streets. For one thing, Khomeini had backed down, saying that he had merely been suggesting modest dress. Also, the women were reluctant to endanger the already hard-pressed government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, who has been receptive to their complaints.

But the chief reason the marches ended may have been that the women felt they had presented their case. Said one: "The point of the marches was freedom to choose. We have nothing against the chador; we are only against compulsion. We marched for everybody's rights." Harder-line elements of the new government condemned the marchers as "CIA inspired" and "counterrevolutionaries." When Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, director of national radio and television, called for a counterdemonstration, 100,000 people flooded into the spring sunshine, half of them in chadors. Earnest men passed out leaflets to uncovered women reading: "Sister, I value your modesty above the blood I have given." Women marched under banners supporting the Islamic republic and shouted support for Ghotbzadeh, under whose tenure unveiled women have disappeared from TV screens.

Was the women's protest, then, a short-lived eruption, a minor blip in the revolution? No. Many who protested against the chador respect Khomeini, are devout Muslims and believers in an Islamic state, and above all fear being separated from the revolution and divided among themselves (as they have been traditionally). But for them the anti-Shah revolution and the outbreak against the new regime's edicts proved an experience that, in the West, would be called consciousness raising. "We women don't yet know who we are," says Lily Mostafavi, a government worker. But, she adds, "we have begun a great dialogue."

So last week they were meeting to safeguard their stake in the revolution--not in the streets but just about everywhere else: hospitals, oil company offices, government ministries, courts, factories. The theme of each meeting was, as a woman pharmacist put it, "the unfinished revolution for both men and women." The refrain was the emerging pattern of exclusion of women: religious opinions implying that women are too weak to be judges, objections to coeducation, the absence of any women in the new government. "We would prefer to support Islam," said Mrs. Jaleh Shambayati, a lawyer, "if the government supports us. But I don't think, even if they need women, that they want to work with us."

To be a woman in Iran is to be better off than a woman in most other Middle Eastern countries. But Iran is still a deeply patriarchal society, in which a woman is seen as needing protection and separation from predatory males, her greatest purpose in life to provide her husband with a son. Under Islam, women are equal, in theory. In practice they are not. They are often literally excluded from men's society.

"The principles of Islam are very advanced," says Mrs. Shambayati. In the 7th century, Islamic practice established that women should not be chattel and gave them the rights to reject marriage proposals and to own property--radical ideas at the time. Yet, says Mrs. Shambayati, "although Islam gave women life 1,400 years ago,the right only to breath is not enough today."

It was a radical idea in 1967 as well, when the Shah, over great religious opposition, passed the Family Protection Law. On paper, the law was a great advance for Iranian women; in fact it proved very difficult to enforce. In 1975, a second version of the law was enacted to work out some of these difficulties. In the case of divorce, fathers or grandfathers have custody of children over the age of two (boys) and seven (girls). Marriage before 18 for women is forbidden, but allowed at 15 in special circumstances. To take a second wife, a man may plead nine special circumstances, including "consent of the first wife" and "wife's insubordination to husband." The most radical changes: women were permitted to divorce their husbands under a greater variety of circumstances, and men had to show cause when shedding wives. So it should have come as no surprise that when Khomeini advised suspension of the Family Protection Law, women were outraged, including those who eagerly cover their heads. The Ayatullah backed down.

In Iran's villages, where 53% of the country's 33.6 million people live, the old customs survive. Fifty-three percent of Iranian women remain illiterate, and for them the only means of survival is marriage, their only protection the family. A girl is frequently married by her late teens. On the wedding night, her parents expect to be able to show proof of her virginity. The girl often goes to work and lives in her mother-in-law's house.

As agricultural mechanization and new industries sent people flooding into the cities, the old ways began to disintegrate. The first women urban migrants sat alone and frightened in jerry-built shacks in the urban slums. But those women, who once would not have dared to be so bold as to look a man directly in the eyes, had daughters who went to school, developed a taste for clothes and took jobs. "When they needed us to work," says Masoumeh, a secretary whose mother still covers her lower face with a chador, "they decided that a scarf would be sufficient covering." Yet families still expect to choose a woman's spouse and to restrict her behavior away from work.

This kind of conflict is still very painful for Iranian women, and it helps explain their misapprehension of "Western" feminism. Their view is colored, first of all, by the fear that "feminism" means abandoning responsibility toward the family. Last week, when members of the recently formed International Committee for Women's Rights arrived in Tehran as a gesture of support (just about the time Feminist Author Kate Millett was expelled by Khomeini's supporters as a troublemaker), they were greeted with skepticism. A female journalist in Iran, age 34, demanded: "Where were you when we were being tortured? Why have you come now to 'protect' us? We don't need to be told how to get our rights."

Indeed, they have known for a long time. Women carried guns in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. In 1922 members of a women's organization campaigning for literacy were harassed. In 1941 women textile workers began organizing. Poor women were the first to march into gunfire during last year's protests, and chadori hid the wounded. Women fought in the revolutionary guerrilla groups.

"We did not fight because we had been 'modernized' too fast," said a secretary. "We fought because the Shah's regime was greedy and wicked. We hoped this would be a revolution for all the people. We did not expect to be harassed because we were without a veil or scarf."

To Western women, the chador must seem the least convenient garment ever devised. No buttons, no hooks, nothing to do but clutch and, when desperate, hold it in the teeth. But to Iranian women, 60% of whom wear a chador at some time, it is simply a garment, not restrictive once one gets used to it. These days it is many other things as well: a continuing protest against the Shah (whose father summarily snatched away veils in 1936, an act then the equivalent of cultural rape), a statement of support for Khomeini, something worn to fulfill the religious duty of hejab (veiling or modest dress). Today, for both zealots and some liberals, it is a reaffirmation of a woman's own, specifically Iranian identity, a way of saying "Iranian is beautiful," something like the statement that wearing an Afro or a dashiki makes.

For the most fundamentalist chadori, those who kiss Khomeini's picture in reverence, the revolution is over. The Shah has been replaced by Khomeini as their religious father, who assures them that under Islam they will be respected as"serious and effective human beings." Those women face their educated sisters across an enormous gap. Said one middle-class woman who was menaced by screaming fanatics during the marches: "I could have been speaking Chinese, I was so misinterpreted. We must find a shared concern."

For liberal Iranians also searching for shared concerns, there is a growing fear that their revolution has just begun. They see surveillance, press censorship, crowded prisons and secretive rule, theocratic instead of autocratic. They are waiting for this week's referendum, waiting for the constitution few have been allowed to see.

And it was not only the women who were saying: "If we do not achieve what we deserve, we will go on fighting.''

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