When in 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the Islamic Revolution, opposition to the Shah united most of Khomeini’s followers. While Khomeini spoke of an Islamic democracy and insisted he had little interest in personal power, he left to his followers’ imagination what might come next. As he and his clerical allies consolidated power, resistance among many Iranians—especially more secular and liberal ones—grew. Khomeini’s strict religious interpretations hit women hard. While some women rallied around Khomeini—most famously Masoumeh Ebtekar, the spokeswoman of the hostage-takers—many others were aghast at forced veiling and efforts to curtail the professions and education available to women. This is among the reasons why Steven Erlanger, at the time a young editor at the Boston Globe (he is now chief European diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times) wrote just days before the U.S. embassy seizure that clerical rule could not last.
It did, of course. A main reason was the Iran-Iraq War. The September 1980 invasion by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq created a crisis that rallied Iranians around the flag. The military history of the 1980-88 war, the political history of the period, and even Iranian art and graphic design of the era are well studied. Farzaneh, a history professor at Northeastern Illinois University and a volunteer during the war, contributes a missing piece to the literature with an in-depth and well-written study of women during the war.
Farzaneh notes that millions of Iranian women participated in the war effort, some fighting alongside men, and others gathering intelligence, as doctors treating war wounded, truck drivers, journalists, and blood donors. Many donated gold and money to fund the war effort. Many suffered sexual and physical violence. Most served as catalysts for men in their family to volunteer and fight. Farzaneh argues that the significance of women’s contributions was that it allowed them to escape centuries-long “gender roles and sociocultural limitations.”
While Farzaneh focuses on women during Iran-Iraq War, he provides ample background both to the diplomacy and to the politics that preceded Saddam’s invasion, and the situation of women in the decades prior to the Islamic Revolution. He carefully differentiates between groups of women—religious and secular, urban and rural, Persian and ethnic minority. Such nuance and appreciation for Iran’s complexity differentiates Farzaneh’s historical approach from the more theoretical takes fashionable in today’s Middle Eastern and gender studies programs.
Separate chapters take either a geographical focus, for example, about the women of Khorramshahr and Abadan, two cities which took the brunt of the initial Iraqi invasion and subsequent fighting, or examine various roles—women in the government and women founding and working in grassroots organizations. A separate chapter on female prisoners of war based on their own primary source accounts expands knowledge of the broader conflict. Iranian authors and filmmakers have better covered war widows, perhaps because there were so many, but Farzaneh here too does a superb job. In his final two chapters, Farzaneh considers the continuing impact of the war on women, especially for those married or related to those missing or killed, and the role of women in Iranian society today. Many Iranian propagandists laud the Islamic Republic’s advancement of women. Farzaneh is no apologist, however, and takes a more honest approach to the problems women face. “There is a long list of unmet expectations by women who participated in the war,” he notes. “Women’s education and participation in the war have not, however, provided them with a broader say in what is decided on their behalf by the patriarchy.”
While Farzaneh does undercut the seriousness of his narrative at times by introducing extraneous political tangents, for example, discussion of America’s post-9/11 rendition program, these are relatively few and far between and do not detract from the broader contributions Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War.
