Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution

by Haleh Esfandiari

Iranian women tell in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. The Islamic revolution of 1979 transformed all areas of Iranian life. For women, the consequences were extensive and profound, as the state set out to reverse legal and social rights women had won and to dictate many aspects of women's lives, including what they could study and how they must dress and relate to men. Reconstructed Lives presents Iranian women telling in their own words what the revolution attempted and how they responded. Through a series of interviews with professional and working women in Iran―doctors, lawyers, writers, professors, secretaries, businesswomen―Haleh Esfandiari gathers dramatic accounts of what has happened to their lives as women in an Islamic society. She and her informants describe the strategies by which women try to and sometimes succeed in subverting the state's agenda. Esfandiari also provides historical background on the women's movement in Iran. She finds evidence in Iran's experience that even women from "traditional" and working classes do not easily surrender rights or access they have gained to education, career opportunities, and a public role.

Genres: Iran

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Haleh Esfandiari is a distinguished Iranian-American public intellectual. The founding director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, she is the former deputy secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran and has taught at Princeton University. She has worked in Iran as a journalist and is the author of Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution and My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Shaul Bakhash, a professor at George Mason University.

Reviews

[Alex Shams · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does a good job describing how the 1979 Iranian Revolution affected educated upper- and upper-middle class professional women.

However, Esfandiari does not seem inclined at any point to mention that these women composed an extremely tiny fraction of Iranian women before the Revolution, and that the majority of Iranian women were from religious, conservative families and lived lives that did not resemble anything presented in the book.

She also intentionally misleads the audience by giving statistics without context- for example she points out that before the Revolution, women made up 30% of university students, but does not mention that the university system was extremely tiny compared to the contemporary system (where women make up 65%) and thus the women in attendance were an extremely minor percentage of society. The change in percentage is not only large in terms of percentage points, it is also MASSIVE in numbers, and the author makes no attempt to present the experiences of conservative women, religious women, or women from the lower-classes.

A number of her informants explain that they were utterly confused at the religious nature of the revolution, and the reader is left quite confused as well, since the status of Iranian women is explained entirely from the perspective of the educated secular elite that bore the brunt of the negatives of the Revolution (of which there were many).

This book does not, however, give any explanation as to why the majority of Iranian women supported the Revolution, nor does it explain the many varied effects- including extremely positive ones- that many Iranian women (and men) did in fact experience as a result of the Revolution.

If you want to read about the exact part of the population that experienced a significant decline in living standards and rights after the Revolution, this book is for you. If you want to gain perspective into the lives of poor, working-class, or even just average middle class Iranian women from the late 1970's onwards, this book does not offer much.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esfandiari examines the lives of several really great Iranian women of modern times. For example, Mahnaz Afkhami worked during the 1960s and ’70s to establish child-care centers, health-care clinics, and “consciousness-raising groups” for women across Iran. As a young activist, she publicized a case where a mother in Isfahan was locking her four children in the house for ten hours a day so she could work in a textile factory. In response, Afkhami began establishing “Houses of Women” that offered vocational classes, job counseling, and family planning services. The government eventually recognized her work by appointing her secretary general for the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), and in that role she helped to engineer the expanded Family Protection Law of 1975. This law raised the minimum age of marriage for women to 18, legalized abortion on demand for unmarried women up to the eighth week of pregnancy, and ensured that mothers got custody of their children if the father died. Akhami's WOI also got state support for new mothers to have three months paid maternity leave from their jobs. It got the law on “honor killings” changed after publishing a book called "Wife Murder in the Name of Honor." As Afkhami argued in 1973, “We are each and every one of us complete human beings. We are not the other half of anyone or anything”

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of 1995-97 interviews with post-revolutionary Iranian women that's all over the place organizationally, revealing to me how much behind-the-scenes work Studs Terkel did in arranging his books. This one keeps giving you all the same women in the same order, which does allow some commonalities to appear (wow, the number of women who note how men were paralyzed and/or revealed their essential lameness/paralysis after the revolution is stunning) but which also tends to produce the overall message that...people's experiences are complex and diverse. Which they are. That said, more context would be useful, especially in understanding the larger economic processes that led to, for instance, people losing their jobs in the 80s--who lost them and why? was it entirely or centrally ideologically-driven? A lot of these family stories come down to who suffered what and how. One doctor here says she and her husband had the same jobs before the revolution, as did their friends, and she's apolitical anyway, so the revolution was not revolutionary for her in any way, and also some women are to blame for men's crude reactions to them. The stories could bounce off of one another more powerfully and resonantly than they do, in sum.

Even so, this presents a useful time capsule of this post-fervor lacuna in the mid-90s where the government had realized that its most overtly, unrealistically ideological projects (compelling/impelling women to churn out kids for the glory of Shi'a Islam, which turned out to over-stress the social system) were running into the limitations of reality, and reformist leadership was in place; so there was at least some general vision of hopefulness, for some people--though a lot of the women here express incredible frustration, inertia, anger over where things stand and how bad the revolution has been for them.

The student with whom I'm doing this project is Iranian, and her mom was eight when it happened; she moved to the US after HS, and they still have family back there. But the student finds it almost incomprehensible why people would even want to move back there--for her, this is where her family came from, and that's it. Curious to see what we learn, and how and where things got worse (and occasionally better?) over the last 30 years.