Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran.
I don’t know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution’s symbolic martyr, as some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran over the past week and the women’s rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past several years.
In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook revolution,” as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women’s groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.
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Just on FOX, new video via one of those 10,000 miniature pen cameras sent over to Iran…crowds chanting “death to the Iranian Republic”. Some people are going to begin to get real nervous.
I applaud the Iranian women of all ages, who are taking on the state sanctioned misogyny that has been fostered by the Mullahs for decades. Until the women teach theirs sons, brothers, husbands and fathers that this abuse is wrong, there will be no change. Cultural change comes from within a society and its up to the women to change that dynamic. Just watched a program on BBC about an Indonesian woman who has been married seven times – she was not interested in being the 2nd wife in a polygamous marriage. She asserted her rights under secular law to divorce her husband and retain the right of inheritance and support for her children.