Politics of Veiling in Iran and the Non-Religious Left in the Early 1980s

• In Event: 066 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Politics of Gender

Abstract

On March 8, 1979, the first International Women’s Day after the Iranian revolution, thousands of women marched on the streets of Tehran. A footage of the event, filmed by a French reporter, shows women demonstrating against mandatory veiling, chanting: “We did not participate in the revolution to go backward,” and “Neither Eastern, nor Western, Women’s rights are global.” This demonstration and others in the following week resulted in an official announcement confirming women’s freedom of choice. This brief success, however, did not last long.
An important “subject” of rapid modernization before the revolution, women’s rights became a central topic of political debates after the revolution. The revolution affected all aspects of women’s lives including their appearance in public and soon women were forced to adhere to an “Islamic dress code” imposed by the new regime. In this paper, with a focus on nonreligious leftist groups, I examine how social and political discourses of the revolution became crystallized in women’s appearance in public. While other scholars have argued that for Islamic groups, controlling women’s appearance was the solidification of their most fundamental beliefs, I suggest that for nonreligious groups (especially for the leftists), it was a symbol of resistance against the previous regime, its dominant “Western” values, and Western imperialism in general. By examining leftist publications with regards to mandatory veiling, I show that while leftist groups did not necessarily support limiting women’s rights, they did not think of it as worthy of negotiation, political discussion, or resistance either.

Author

• Jaleh Jalili, Brandeis University