not new. The pre-revolutionary state attempted to
approach the question by identifying itself as indis-
pensable to the securing of women’s rights in Iran
through such policies as making the veil illegal as
early as 1936 and instituting legal changes in the
arena of family rights in the 1960s and 1970s. In
this pre-revolutionary formulation, however, auto-
cratic modernization, secularism, and women’s
rights were intertwined in such a way as to fore-
close the possibility of civil society activism on the
part of the majority of women in Iran’s Islamic and
modernizing society. Women’s rights were mostly
conceptualized as a necessity to be promoted by the
modernizing elite sectors in the face of opposition
from the societal forces associated with tradition
and religion.
In the post-revolutionary political discourse, in
contrast, discussions about women’s rights and
civil society activism have been the inevitable out-
come of a political system that has pursued misog-
ynous policies in the arena of women’s individual
rights while insisting on an Islamic rhetoric that
nominally promotes the equality and dignity of
men and women in the political, economic, and
spiritual arenas. This tension has allowed women’s
civil society activism to be framed as a struggle for
a more egalitarian and democratic interpretation of
Islamic commands and precepts and not a rejection
of Islam and Iran’s native culture. Given the essen-
tially equal rights orientation of women’s activism
in Iran, the question of its relationship to feminism,
a movement generally identified as anti-Islamic and
in the service of foreign powers in the Iranian pub-
lic discourse, has naturally come to the fore. While
many women involved in agitation for equal rights
have resisted the term Islamic feminism, it has
slowly become part of the public discourse thanks
to pioneering feminist journals such as Zanàn,
which began operating in early 1990s with an
explicit commitment to both feminism and Islam.
The idea of agitation for reform in women-
related laws within an Islamic framework has also
brought forth questions about the relationship
between women’s civil society activism and the
broader movement to expand the civil society and
democratize/reform the Iranian Islamic state. One
set of questions has focused on whether there is a
distinct Woman Question in Iran. Many male intel-
lectuals associated with the reform movement, in a
forum held in Zanànmagazine in the mid-to-late
1990s, reasoned that the Woman Question was
part and parcel of the democracy question in Iran.
By implication they argued that civil society activ-
ism centering on women’s issues takes or should
take a back seat to the more inclusive struggle for44 civil society
democracy and human rights. Many women ac-
tivists and thinkers explicitly rejected this formula-
tion. The least this debate, still unresolved, showed
was that the women who were concerned with the
reform of Islam and the Iranian state had a differ-
ent understanding of the issue from that of their
male counterparts.
Another set of questions that has come to the fore
more recently deals with the question of whether
women’s civil society activism constitutes a move-
ment at all, with some arguing that at best it is a
proto-movement. Others have conceptualized the
character of women’s civil society activism in Iran
as essentially leaderless, decentralized, and yet
widespread. Still others have seen these types of
questions as attempts to devalue women’s activism;
that is, attempts to portray women’s struggle to
bring about change as less organized and hence less
effective or important than the movement for polit-
ical reform and democracy.
Given the important strides women have made in
the areas of education and employment, women’s
civil society involvement and debates about it are
bound to expand in Iran, particularly now that the
international community has acknowledged the
importance of women’s struggles in Iran by grant-
ing the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize to one of the coun-
try’s premier women civil society activists, the
lawyer Shirin Ebadi.Bibliography
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ually, is at odds with the equivalent feminist and