Women and Politics in Iran
Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling

The relations between gender and politics in Iran's development over the past 100 years.

Hamideh Sedghi (Author)

9780521835817, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 July 2007

360 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.7 kg

'[T]he book delivers access to many primary sources unavailable outside Iran. Sedghi's historical analysis of role of women's body by three consecutive regimes in modern Iran enriches the existing literature on the contested terrain of politics, religious ideology, and gender narratives.' Shahin Gerami, Iranian Studies

Why were urban women veiled in the early 1900s, unveiled from 1936 to 1979, and reveiled after the 1979 revolution? This question forms the basis of Hamideh Sedghi's original and unprecedented contribution to politics and Middle Eastern studies. Using primary and secondary sources, Sedghi offers new knowledge on women's agency in relation to state power. In this rigorous analysis she places contention over women at the centre of the political struggle between secular and religious forces and demonstrates that control over women's identities, sexuality, and labor has been central to the consolidation of state power. Sedghi links politics and culture with economics to present an integrated analysis of the private and public lives of different classes of women and their modes of resistance to state power.

Part I. Women in Early Twentieth Century Iran: 1. The Qajar dynasty, patriarchal households, and women
Part II. Women in the Kingdom of the Peacock Throne: 2. The Pahlavi dynasty as a centralizing patriarchy
3. Economic development and the gender division of labor
4. The state and gender: repression, reform, and family legislation
5. Gender and the state
Part III. Women in the Islamic Republic: 6. The 1979 revolution and the restructuring of patriarchy
7. The gender division of labor
8. Politics and women's resistance.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Political control & freedoms [JPV], Comparative politics [JPB], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1]