Women, work, and ideology in the islamic republic

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1988, Pages 221-243

  Moghadam, Val ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84971946920     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743800033948     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Disagreements on policy are linked to the debate about “women's culture” and whether or not women have needs and concerns that are distinct from those of men. This debate is a difficult one because “different” has usually been translated into “unequal.” Some of these issues are discussed in the controversial study by Sylvia Ann Hewett entitled A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America (New York, 1986). Some feminists raise questions about protective labor legislation for women, such as a law passed in Iran in the 1970s prohibiting night employment and “heavy or dangerous” work for women. (Similar laws exist in many countries.)
2. Janet Z. Giele, “Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Women,” in Janet Z. Giele and Ann C. Smock, eds., Women, Roles and Status in Eight Countries (New York, 1977).
3. Erika Friedl, “State Ideology and Village Women,” in Guity Nashat, ed., Women and Revolution in Iran (Boulder, Colo., 1983).
4. See, for example, Mahnaz Afkhami, “Iran: a Future in the Past—The ‘Prerevolutionary’ Women's Movement,” in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Global (New York, 1984).
5. Haleh Afshar, “Khomeini's Teachings and Their Implications for Iranian Women,” in Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh, eds., The Shadow of Islam (London, 1982), pp. 75–90
6. and “Women, State and Ideology in Iran,” Third World Quarterly, 7, 2 (April 1985), 256–78.
7. Farah Azhari, Women of Iran (London, 1983).
8. Adele Ferdows, “Shariati and Khomeini on Women,” in Nikkie Keddie and Eric Hooglund, eds., The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic (Washington, D.C., 1982)
9. and “Women and the Islamic Revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15, 2 (May 1983), 283–98.
10. Guity Nashat, “Women in the Ideology of the Islamic Republic,” in Guity Nashat, ed., Women and Revolution in Iran (Boulder, Colo., 1983).
11. Azar Tabari, “The Enigma of the Veiled Iranian Woman,” MERIP Reports, 12, 2 (February 1982), 22–27.
12. Eliz Sanassarian, “Political Activism and Islamic Identity in Iran,” in Lynne B. Iglitzen and Ruth Ross, eds., Women in the World: 1975–1985 The Women's Decade (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1986), pp. 207–24.
13. A very different approach from that taken by the writers above is Patricia Higgins, “Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Legal, Social and Ideological Changes,” Signs 10, 3 (Spring 1985), 477–95.
14. She raises the question of the paucity of opposition by Iranian women to the official ideology of sex roles and suggests that it is because neither the legal changes nor the social pressures have had a major impact on the lives of the majority of the female population, who are rural and poor. This is borne out by female labor statistics. Iran's female participation rate of 9 percent in 1976 was comprised of 40 percent in agriculture, 33 percent in industry, and 16 percent in services. “Industry” largely consisted of rural manufacturing, much of it unpaid family labor, which is primarily a female category. See ILO, Yearbook of Labor Statistics, 1981, Table 2B, p. 110 for data on 1976.
15. Afshar, “Khomeini's Teachings,” pp. 84, 86.
16. Nashat, “Women in the Ideology,” p. 195.
17. Afshar, “Women, State and Ideology,” p. 272.
18. Refer to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, A Clarification of Problems, Hamid Algar, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1982)
19. and Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, Nezam-e hoquq-e zan dar Islam [the system of women's rights in Islam] (Tehran, 1974). Motahhari's critique of Western relations and his essentially functionalist arguments in favor of polygamy and temporary marriage were serialized in the popular woman's magazine, Zan-e Rouz, in the years before the Revolution.
20. Ayatollah Yahya Nuri, Hoquq va hodud-e zanan dar Islam (Tehran, n.d.).
21. Nashat, “Women in the Ideology,” p. 200.
22. Ferdows, “Shariati and Khomeini,” p. 78.
23. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, Hamid Algar, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1981). Ayatollah Khomeini is not as conservative as other mujtahids on the question of women. When Ayatollah Kho˓i was in Najaf, both were asked whether women could meet with men to discuss political questions. Kho˓i issued a fatva saying that under no circumstances, except for Friday prayers, could men and women who were not married gather together. Khomeini, on the other hand, licensed it in his fatva.
24. See Fatna A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (New York, 1984).
25. Quoted in Nashat, “Women in the Ideology,” p. 204.
26. Personal communication, July 15, 1986.
27. Islamic Propagation Organization, The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Tehran, 1984), pp. 14–15.
28. Nashat, “Women in the Ideology,” p. 197.
29. Again, many countries have similar laws, presumably to ease the burdens of mothers, but in practice to legitimize and strengthen sex roles. Collective bargaining contracts often provide for an earlier retirement age for women, while labor and social legislation assign the roles of postnatal care and childrearing to women, not to men. For example, the Employment of Women Law in Israel provides for a 12-week leave for postnatal care for mothers only (excluding fathers who may wish to care for the newborn themselves) and the severance Pay Law provides that a mother may resign within nine months after giving birth and be eligible for full severance pay. See P. Lahav, “Raising the Status of Women Through Law: The Case of Israel,” in Wellesley Editorial Committee, ed., Women and National Development (Chicago, 1977).
30. Joan Scott, “Is Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” Paper presented at the meetings of the American Historical Association, December 27, 1985. Scott's observations are made in the context of an analysis of the relationship between gender and power and the reorganization of inequality. The question she poses—What is the relationship between laws about women and the power of the state?—would be a fruitful line of inquiry for the new and developing field of Middle East women's studies.
31. This apparently varies across government agencies. A government employee informs me that some offices are less rigid, allowing male and female employees to sit at a lunch table together; elsewhere men and women share offices (large ones) and visit field sites together. On the other hand, many female physiotherapists, whose services are critical in a war situation, have been consigned to office jobs, as they are not supposed to come into close physical contact with male patients. (Personal communications, September 6, 1987, and September 19, 1987.)
32. Personal communication from a former employee of the Plan and Budget Organization, March 24, 1986. There are, of course, two ways of looking at this quota system: one is that women are not to exceed the quota; the other is that they are to at least meet it. According to the above source, mining was apparently one area of study that was off limits to women. Other sources reveal that agronomy is discouraged as a field of study—a peculiar prohibition, considering the large numbers of women engaged in agricultural work.
33. World Bank, World Development Report 1985, Table 20, p. 213.
34. Iran Times, April 19, 1985;
35. Iran Times, March 28, 1986, p. 5.
36. Iran Times, October 19, 1984.
37. Afshar, “Women, the State, and Ideology,” p. 260.
38. In using these data, I am fully cognizant of the serious methodological problems in female enumeration in labor statistics. This is true not only for Iranian statistics but also for data on women throughout the Third World. The nature and scope of women's productive roles (especially outside of paid work) are not captured in standard sources such as population censuses. Women's underrepresentation in the figures is well known and the subject of many reports, studies, and proposals by international agencies. For Iran, it is particularly ludicrous to suggest, as does the Census for 1976, that only 14 percent of rural women were economically active, or that 88 percent of women over the age of 10 in Iran were said to be “inactive”; according to Shakhes-haye ejtema˓i [Social Indicators], some 85 percent of the huge “inactive” female population of 1972 were considered housewives! (Zahra Nafez, an anthropology graduate student from Gilan, informs me that during the winter, women in her province were far more economically active than men, whose activity was mostly social and concentrated in the teahouses.) For these reasons, I prefer to deal with labor statistics pertaining to female participation in the formal/modern sector of the economy and in the urban areas, as they are more reliable and less subject to methodological problems, cultural prejudices, and the personal biases of the enumerators.
39. Central Statistical Office, National Census of Population and Housing, 1976 (Total Country) (Tehran, 1981), Table XL;
40. Central Statistical Office, Statistical Yearbook 1984/85 (Tehran, 1985), pp. 59, 60–62.
41. Afshar, “Women, State and Ideology” (p. 262) writes that only 15 percent of Iranian women are literate.
42. In fact, the figure for 1971 was 25.5 percent, or 48 percent of urban women (see S. Kaven Mirani, “Social and Economic Change in the Role of Women, 1956–1978,” in Guity Nashat, ed., Women and Revolution in Iran (Boulder, Colo., 1983), p. 79. According to the 1976 census, the figure was 35 percent; for the urban areas today, 55 percent of the women are literate.
43. Census, p. XLII 1976;
44. Statistical Yearbook 1984/85, p. 64. In 1966 the female share of urban employment was 11.7 percent, according to the 1976 Census, Table 3–1. This indicates that the share has remained fairly constant over the past 20 years.
45. Statistical Yearbook 1984/85, p. 63.
46. Statistical Yearbook 1984/85, pp. 62–63.
47. Ministry of Plan and Budget, Central Statistical Office of Iran, Statistical Yearbook 1984/85 (Tehran, 1985), p. 68.
48. United Nations Decade for Women, Bulletin no. 12, October 1985, p. 14.
49. Plan and Budget Organization, Statistical Yearbook 1976 (Tehran, 1977), Table 35, p. 76.
50. Central Statistical Office of Iran, Statistics for Large Industrial Establishments 1984/85 (Tehran, 1985), p. 263.
51. Statistics for Large Industrial Establishments, 1984/85, p. 301.
52. Statistical Yearbook 1984/85, p. 418.
53. Statistics for Large Industrial Establishments, 1984/85, p. 263.
54. Census, p. 87 1976.
55. See Linda Y. C. Lim, “Capitalism, Imperialism and Patriarchy; the Dilemma of Third World Women Workers in Multinational Factories,” in June Nash and M. P. Ferdandez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men and the International Division of Labor (Albany, N.Y., 1983), pp. 70–91.
56. International Center for Research on Women [ICRW/AID], Keeping Women Out: A Structural Analysis of Women's Employment in Developing Countries (Washington, D.C., April 1980).
57. See also Elizabeth Jelin, “Women and the Urban Labour Market,” in Richard Anker, Mayra Buvinic, and Nadia Youssef, eds., Women's Roles and Population Trends in the Third World (London, 1982).
58. ICRW/AID 1980, p. 92. Other rates are: 18 percent in India; 23 percent in Indonesia; 35 percent in parts of the Caribbean; 40 percent in parts of Kenya; 45 percent in the urban slum areas of Brazil and Venezuela, It is estimated that between 1960 and 1970, the proportion of female-headed households increased by one-half in Brazil and one-third in Morocco.
59. Abbas Alnasrawi, “Economic Consequences of the Iran-Iraq War,” Third World Quarterly, 8, 3 (July 1986), 869–95.
60. See, e.g., Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1982).
61. Middle East Economic Digest, Special Report on Iran (November 1983), 14.
62. International Labour Organization, Women in Economic Activity: A Global Statistical Survey (1950–2000) (Geneva, 1985).
63. A personal acquaintance, a young chemical engineer who left Iran in 1985, was the production manager of a major chemicals plant, overseeing 1,500 workers and six lines of production. She told me that, in addition to economic need, her educational achievement led her to seek employment. Personal communication, April 22, 1986.
64. ICRW/AID 1980.
65. Hamza Alavi, “State and Class under Peripheral Capitalism,” in Hamza Alavi and Theodor Shanin, eds., An Introduction to the Sociology of Developing Societies (New York, 1982).
66. Oil revenues for 1986 were projected at a maximum of U.S. $9 billion. This has placed a severe strain on the economy and might explain the rumors of a long-term loan being sounded out with Japan (which would be the first time Iran has gone on the market since the Revolution). The Islamic Republic is also negotiating a loan from the IMF. See “Roads to Damascus,” South (London, July 1986), p. 26.
67. V. Moghadam, “Islamic Populism and the Transitional State in Iran.” Paper presented at the 18th annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, San Francisco (November 1985).