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The women’s movement in Iran, London 1982.Hammed ShahidianIraqShortly after the Iraqi Revolution of 14 July
1958, which toppled the British-backed Hashemite
monarchy, the new republic commissioned Jawàd
Salìm to build “The Monument to Liberty,” an
enormous sculpture in Baghdad’s Liberation
Square that tells the epic of the revolution. Among
its more famous images are two political demon-
strators of mixed gender. The woman marches one
stride ahead of the man, both fists raised in the air,
her face turned directly toward the monument’s
viewers; the two seem perfectly matched in physical
strength and forward momentum. Salìm’s powerful
depiction of a woman in protest was immediately
recognized by Iraqi commentators not only as a
symbol of the nation’s future but also as a repre-
sentative of its recent past.
The participation of Iraqi women in revolution-
ary uprisings during the first half of the twentieth
century is well established, and their roles in the
rebellions of 1920, 1948, 1952, and 1956 even de-
veloped into national legends. Women were active
in Arab and Kurdish uprisings, in urban and rural652 political-social movements: revolutionary
demonstrations, and in underground revolutionary
parties. This participation often took an unorgan-
ized form, as women spontaneously entered the
streets en masse with men. Well-known cultural
legends, as well as numerous accounts by histori-
ans, also illuminate a recurrent theme in Iraq’s nar-
ratives of resistance, in which a single woman leads
a group of men or of mixed gender in revolt. In one
such legend, a woman named Danuka is said to
have led a demonstration of male workers to the
house of Prime Minister Íàdir during the Wathba
(Leap) rebellion of 1948, and then addressed him in
front the crowd, waving a revolver in each hand.
This story resembles a number of well-documented
incidents in Arab as well as Kurdish regions of Iraq.
In October 1956, for example, a woman was shot
and killed by Iraqi police as she led the funeral pro-
cession of Shaykh Ma™mùd of the BarzanjìKurds
into an attack on the local jail, which was holding
one of the shaykh’s sons. The monarchy announced
in its defense that the woman was a “communist
sympathizer,” but she would become known in
national legend as “the martyr Akhtar.”
In addition to spontaneous participation in upris-
ings, women were involved in Iraq’s underground
revolutionary movements in more organized ways.
The Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the country’s
most significant revolutionary organization from
the Second World War through 1958, actively
recruited women for demonstrations, for example
by bringing truckloads of rural women into
Baghdad for nationalist marches, as well as for
long-term mobilization. Women’s cells were estab-
lished in the ICP during the 1940s, as was the posi-
tion of mas±ùl, the comrade in charge of organizing
and recruiting communist women. In 1952, female
members of the party founded its women’s auxil-
iary, the League for the Defense of Women’s Rights,
which distributed clandestine literature promoting
sexual equality and organized women to partici-
pate in the 1952, 1954, and 1956 rebellions. It also
attracted a number of the best-known female
artists, poets, and intellectuals of Iraq’s artistic and
political underground.
After the 1958 Revolution, the public visibility of
women at political meetings and street demonstra-
tions, while in many ways consistent with the his-
torical participation of Iraqi women in rebellion,
may have also gone beyond the earlier paradigms as
women organized their own mass demonstrations,
went door-to-door educating people in Marxist ide-
ology, and took up arms in the new republic’s civil-
ian militia, the People’s Resistance Forces. While
women were represented in many of the grassroots
organizations that emerged after the revolution,