Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes, on the women's demonstrations of 1979 in Iran.
International Women's Day. March 8, 1979 Tehran woke up to snow and to the news of Ayatollah Khomeini’s new pronouncement on mandatory veiling only days after the victory of the Iranian Revolution. The snow made it hard to move around the capital. Iranian women poured onto the streets regardless, carrying umbrellas with handwritten slogans on them, chanting against the imposition of compulsory veiling. Men were also on the streets. But most of them came in support of Khomeini, the leader of their revolution, and his new decree. They occupied the main streets and squares of the city, blocking the women’s procession and chanting the taunt Ya roosari, ya toosari, “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.”
Arriving at one of the squares of the Iranian capital, a high school student broke ranks with the rest of the women, shouting in defiance, Dar bahar-e azadi, jay-e azadi khali! “In the spring of freedom, it is freedom that is absent!” This was the ur-form of a chant that in turn evolved, as would a meme on social media platforms today. As mediating practices connecting protestors, such chants and slogans would be adopted, reused, reworked, and redistributed on handwritten posters and by word of mouth during the Iranian demonstrations of 1978–79, playfully and strategically creating new cultural ideas in response to changing political and social needs.
Their voices, confident and self-assured the women called out to the men: Ma tamasha-chi nemikhahim, be ma molhaq shavid! “We don’t want spectators, come and join us!”
While Iranian women had participated in great numbers in the Iranian Revolution, they were by and large left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of the early post-Revolutionary decrees on the rights and obligations of women. Indeed when any of the major political factions in Iran spoke out on behalf of the women’s demonstrations in March 1979, they did so merely to condemn the harassment and abuse of women who refused to veil. The slogan of the women’s demonstrations, Hamleh be zan shekast-e enghelab ast, “The attack on women is the failure of the Revolution,” emerged in response to this kind of harassment on the streets. Fedayeen guerrillas and the People’s Mojahedin both condemned these attacks. They refused, however, to address the more divisive issues that were now confronting the Iranian people, namely the swiftly vanishing rights of Iranian women with retraction of the 1967 Family Protection Act: on abortion, divorce, the rights of women in the context of the culture of polygyny, as well as the various pronouncements on women’s emotional inability to serve as judges in the court system. The more secular Tudeh Communist Party refused to take any position whatsoever on these matters.
Thus in the demonstrations of March 12, as women and high school girls in the tens of thousands exited the gates of Tehran university and commenced on their great march through the streets of Tehran toward Freedom Square (Azadi Square), they joined in a resounding chant to establish their demands in relation to the men who were standing outside the university gates, now as spectators to the struggle for freedom. Their voices, confident and self-assured the women called out to the men: Ma tamasha-chi nemikhahim, be ma molhaq shavid! “We don’t want spectators, come and join us!” And then immediately, as if to emphasize their collective will to solidarity, their voices surged again, crying out: Baradar! Baradar! Rooh-e mobarezat ko? “Brother, brother! Where is your fighting spirit? Why don’t you join us?”
It was in the course of the six days of protests beginning on International Women's Day, March 8,1979, that Iranian women courageously took on the militant men with whom they had fought a revolution. Veiled and unveiled, Iranian women dared to stand, once again, for the freedoms they had fought for and the victory they had celebrated prematurely with their brothers. In doing so, they risked both death and extinction. This was an act, as the American feminist Kate Millett also noted, historically unlike that of any other women’s group anywhere. In these days of protest, the women’s radicalized actions gave voice to their will to cross into a self none of them could have ever imagined becoming and to do so on behalf of an as-yet-unseen future for all: "Azadi na sharghist, na gharbist, jahanist!” While, as the feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty has argued, the logic of neoliberalism in feminism today has collapsed “notions of collectivity into the personal,” eroding both power and political agency into acts of consumption, it is this collective leap toward a planetary freedom that has the capacity of reaching, in my view, beyond the politicization of the personal and toward a quality of social justice that will not, indeed cannot, be satiated by the selective logics of consumption. The Iranian women’s chant in March 1979 “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western, it is planetary!” speaks to this precisely.
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