Gender

1900-Present Document 7: The Middle East

Hegland, Mary E. Women in World History: Volume 2: Readings from 1500 to the Present. Edited by: Sarah
Shaver Hughes; Brady Hughes

The 1990s have been characterized by great changes in gender definitions. Worldwide, we have
seen Israeli women accepted as soldiers in their armies; in fact, much like ancient Egypt, both men
and women are compelled to serve. However, in Afghanistan, we saw the religious fundamentalist
group, the Taliban, seize control and compel educated women into leaving their professions and
wearing the veil, much like ancient Assyrian women, whenever they have to be out in public. They are
being denied access to medical treatment, as well, since it is inappropriate for the male doctors to
examine other mens wives or daughters.
Turkey
Women in Turkey discarded their veils, voted, and ran for political office nearly a generation before
those in Egypt. Educated feminists, active backers of the nationalist Young Turks who overthrew the
Ottoman monarchy, entered professions after 1908. Halide Edip removed her veil in a 1919 nationalist
demonstration in Istanbul. In the 1920s, when Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) denounced women's veiling (as
well as men's traditional robes and fez) as "uncivilized," a new woman's identity was put at the forefront of
the Turkish Republic's secular politics. Rejecting the Shar'ia meant banning polygamy, giving women
equal rights to initiate divorce and to custody of their children, and allowing them to inherit equally with
men. The Women's League of Turkey envisioned "revolutionary women" being educated, voting, and
serving in the army. They won suffrage rights in 1934, and by 1937, the eighteen women elected to the
legislature constituted nearly 5 percent of its membership. Tansu Ciller became Turkey's prime minister in
1993 and, after her 1996 defeat, remained at the head of the True Path Party; yet only one other woman, sat
in the legislature during Ciller's ministry.
.
In 1990, 40 percent of women over twenty-five remained illiterate , although Turkey's elite women
held exceptionally high proportions of university professorships in engineering, science, and
mathematics. The military, the dominant force behind the scenes in contemporary Turkish politics,
remained exclusively male.

Women and the Iranian Revolution of 1978

Hegland, Mary E. Women in World History: Volume 2: Readings from 1500 to the Present. Edited by: Sarah
Shaver Hughes; Brady Hughes

Among Islamic countries, Iran is the foremost example of dramatic reversal since 1979 of women's
equalitarian gains. Conservative Iranian religious leaders of the revolution sought to repudiate the rights
women had gained over a century. In a country where the state provides modern education and health care,
where the economic system requires professional workers, and where women had experienced many rights,
the political struggle over whether women would be subjected to male patriarchy in the name of religious
fundamentalism has been particularly stark.
Twentieth-century emancipation of women in Iran under the Pahlavi monarchy compared more closely
to that of women in the Turkish republic than to the conservative monarchies of Saudi Arabia or Jordan.
The first public elementary school for girls opened in 1918, and expanded separate public secondary
education for young women opened admission to Teheran University to them in the late 1930s. By then,
the marriage age had been raised to fifteen for women and eighteen for men. When Reza Shah abruptly
banned the veil in 1936, he ordered police to deal harshly with modest women who insisted on covering
their heads and to protect unveiled women from harassment. The political repercussions from both men and

women who preferred to remain veiled forced the shah to allow the return of the veil in 1941. For Iranians,
this struggle identified Westernization and foreign domination with unveiling and greater rights for
women.
Nevertheless, the Pahlavi dynasty pursued its policy of secularization and economic development,
cooperating with European and United States governments while seizing a larger share of profits from its
oil industry. In 1963, women received the vote, and soon afterward divorce laws were reformed. The
prosperity from increasing oil revenues opened jobs for women at all levels, including professional.
Women's literacy had reached 56 percent in urban areas and 17 percent in rural areas by the mid-1970s.
Although feminists publicized these gains and lobbied for more, many women, especially outside the cities,
were unaware of most of these changes.
In 1978, demonstrations and strikes led by the religious leaders supporting Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni
broke out against the shah's government. The revolution reflected the disgust Iranians felt toward the
monarchy, its identification with Westernization policies, its corruption, and its brutal suppression of
dissent. Women actively participated and suffered imprisonment, torture, and death along with men.
The next year, the shah fled, to be replaced with a committee of mullahs (local religious leaders) who
proclaimed an Islamic republic. Attempting to restore a non-Western, traditional society meant
repressing all opposition and replacing secular legal codes with the Shar'ia. Religious conservatives
demanded the most ancient punishments, including
stoning for prostitution and adultery. The veil became
a center of contention. Mary E. Hegland, who was
living in a village, recounts an incident that illustrates
how revolutionary fervor spread:
In March of 1979, the welder...who lived in the village
and had taken a village woman as a second wife was
visited by his cousin, her fianc, and another young man.
The young woman was very properly seated in the back
of the car and wore a chadur (a black veil covering the
entire body except the face, the hands and the feet), while
the two young men sat in the front. When the young
people got out of the car at the village gate, people
stopped them and accused the young woman of being a
Preparing a woman to be stoned for
"madam." The three were able to reach the welder's home,
adultery in Iran, exact date unknown.
although they were taunted along the way. A group of some
thirty men and boys gathered outside of the courtyard,
shouting and swearing at the welder's village wife and claiming that she was lying, that the young woman
was a prostitute and not the welder's cousin. The couple had to get the police in a neighboring village to
confirm the truth of their statements. Incidents like this brought out large demonstrations of women in
response to initial moves of revolutionaries to force them to wear the chadur.
Once the Islamic Republic was firmly established, the government began to rewrite the laws and
rules relating to women's recently acquired rights. The new regime tried to force women out of the job
market in a variety of ways, including early retirement of government women employees, closing of
childcare centers, segregating women and enforcing full Islamic cover (hejab-e islami) in offices and public
places, and closing nearly 140 university fields of study to women. But the problems arising from the
enforcement of the veil and other Islamic tenets in the streets and homes showed clearly that there were
limits in Iran to what a fundamentalist regime could do. Women fought seriously for their rights, making
the strict enforce ment of government intent costly. The regime succeeded in putting women back in
the veil in public places, but not in re -socializing them into fundamentalist norms .

As the revolutionary zeal subsided, women reasserted themselves in other domains: in the arts, in
literature, in education and in politics, creating an atmosphere of tension and contradiction that has
propelled the issue of women's status to the center of the debate on the creation of an Islamic society in
Iran. Needless to say, loss of government support has cost Iranian women dearly. In addition to the
economic, social and cultural problems shared by all, women also lost significant ground in the struggle for
gender equality.
Almost immediately, the social and economic consequences of the disastrous war with Iraq between
1980 and 1988 forced some concessions to women. With a large portion of the adult male population in the
armed forces, women had to replace men in the workforce. Moreover, high war casualties created a surplus
of women and left numerous young widows with small children creating a serious obstacle to the mullahs'
aim of having every women married and confined to raising children.
In 1980, a new parliament was elected with four women deputies in a membership of 270. A woman
deputy's bill to permit women in the civil service and in government-owned companies to work half-time
with the permission of their superiors gained the support of the government. Women employees were
needed in wartime. Other inducements to mothers' employment included three months of maternity leave,
plus further leave to breast-feed infant children. Later, the Ministry of Education introduced a bill to extend
maternity leave for teachers to twelve months in order to persuade more women to teach. They were needed
because the government was encouraging girls to attend sex-segregated elementary schools, to reduce the
still high rate of illiteracy. The bill failed.
In November 1990, the Iranian president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, publicly recognized that women's
sexuality was important. He advocated temporary marriage for war widows. Shiite theologians have long
accepted temporary marriages. Shahla Haeri explains the requirements:
In its present form, temporary marriage is a form of contract in which a man (married or
unmarried) and an unmarried woman (virgin, divorced, or widowed) agree, often privately and verbally, to
marry each other for a limited period of time, varying anywhere from one hour to 99 years. The couple also
agree on a specific amount of bride-price, to be given to the woman. Unlike permanent marriage, temporary
marriage does not oblige a husband to provide financial support for his temporary wife. A Shii Muslim man
is allowed to make several contracts of temporary marriage at the same time. Women, however, may not
marry either temporarily or permanently more than one man at a time.
At the end of the mutually agreed period the couple part company without a divorce ceremony. After the
dissolution of the marriage, no matter how short, the temporary wife must observe a period of sexual
abstinence in order to prevent problems in identifying a potential child's legitimate father. The children of
such unions are accorded full legitimacy, and, theoretically, have equal status to their half-siblings born of
a permanent marriage. Although children inherit from their parents, temporary spouses do not inherit from
each other. . . .
The religious leaders perceive temporary marriage as distinct from prostitution. For them,
temporary marriage is le gally sanctioned and religiously blessed, while prostitution is legally
forbidden and therefore challenges the social order.

Women in North African Nationalist Movements

Stearns, Peter. World Civilizations, 3rd edition. 2000.
One important but often neglected dimension of the liberation struggles that African peoples waged against
their colonial overlords was the emergence of educated, articulate and politically active women in most
colonial societies. The educational opportunities provided by the European colonizers often played as vital
a role as they had in the formation of male leadership in nationalist movements. Missionary girls' schools
were confined in the early stages of European involvement in Africa to the daughters of low-class or

marginal social groups. But by the end of the 19th century they had became respectable for women from
the growing Westernized business and professional classes. In fact, in many cases some degree of Western
education was essential if Westernized men were to find wives with whom they could share their career
concerns and intellectual pursuits.
The seemingly insurmountable barriers that separated Westernized African men from their traditionaland thus usually without formal education-wives became a stock theme in the novels and short stories of
the early nationalist era. This concern was perhaps best exemplified by the works of Rabindranath Tagore.
The problem was felt so acutely by the first generation of nationalist leaders that many took up the task of
teaching their wives English and Western philosophy and literature at home. Thus, for many upper-class
African women, colonization proved a liberating force. This trend was often offset by the male-centric
nature of colonial education and the domestic focus of the curriculum in women's schools.
In Egypt, the British made special note of the powerful effect that the participation of both veiled women
and more Westernized upper-class women had on mass demonstrations in 1919 and the early 1920s. These
outpourings of popular support did much to give credibility to the Wafd's demands for British withdrawal.
In Egypt, female nationalists addressed special appeals to British and American suffragists to support their
struggles for political and social liberation.
When African nationalism became popularly supported after World War II, women, particularly the
outspoken and fearless market women in West Africa, emerged as a major political force. In settler colonies
such as Algeria, where violent revolt proved necessary to bring down deeply entrenched colonial regimes,
women took on the dangerous tasks of messengers, bomb carriers, and guerrilla fighters. As Frantz Fanon
argued decades ago, and as was later beautifully dramatized in the film The Battle of Algiers, this
transformation was particularly painful for women who had been in seclusion right up to the time of the
revolutionary upsurge. The cutting of their hair, as well as the wearing of lipstick and Western clothes,
often alienated them from their own fathers and brothers, who equated such practices with prostitution.
In many cases, women's participation in struggles for the political liberation of their people was
paralleled by campaigns for female rights in societies dominated by men. Upper-class Egyptian women
founded newspapers and educational associations that pushed for a higher marriage age, educational
opportunities for women, and an end to seclusion and veiling. These early efforts, as well as the prominent
place of women in nationalist struggles, had much to do with the granting of basic civil rights to women.
These included suffrage and legal equality that were key features of the constitutions of many newly
independent African nations. The majority of women in the new states of Africa have yet to enjoy most of
these rights. Yet their inclusion in constitutions and post-independence laws provides crucial backing for
the struggles for women's liberation in the nations of the postcolonial world.