The Role of Women in Leading the Change

Western sanctions have slowed Iran’s economy, causing protests against the absence of freedom and opportunities — teachers their lack of pay; farmers their lack of water; retirees their fear of economic insecurity.  But at the heart of this powerful new movement has been Iran’s women, whose frustration with Iran’s misogynist theocracy had been mounting for four decades. 

This week on International Horizons, RBI Research Associate Ellen Chesler is joined by Mahnaz Afkhami, former Minister of Women’s Affairs in Iran, and Kelly Shannon, Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University, to discuss the rise of the women’s movement in Iran.  The interviewees describe how the different interpretations of the Quran have influenced politics and the role women play in Muslim societies, the prospects of the protests in Iran, and the importance of collective action in bringing about change.

Listen to the podcast episode here:

Transcript

Ellen Chesler  00:03

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute (RBI) for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is Ellen Chesler, and I’m currently a senior fellow at RBI. This past September, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian died in police custody having been detained for the alleged crime of wearing her hijab improperly. Arrests and killings are nothing new in Iran. But the death of this beautiful and promising young woman ignited a protest movement that shows no sign of abating, despite numerous public executions. I think there’s been 30 deaths and other crackdowns, all intending to inspire fear and stifle dissent.

Ellen Chesler  00:50

Western sanctions have slowed Iran’s economy, causing protests. For instance, students are protesting their absence of freedom and opportunities, teachers their lack of pay, farmers their lack of water, and retirees their fear of economic insecurity. But at the heart of this new powerful movement, there has been Iran’s women whose frustrations with – what many would argue is – a misogynist theocracy had been mounting for four decades.

Ellen Chesler  01:18

We are fortunate to have with us today two experts on Iran and the situation of women within it. First is the distinguished Mahnaz Afkhami, former Minister of Women’s Affairs in Iran under the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Mahnaz found refuge in the United States during the Iranian Revolution, when she was declared an apostate – an enemy of the Khomeini regime – and placed on a death list. She has since been a prominent voice in the global women’s movement. She is the founder and president of Women’s Learning, Partnership and Alliance of Advocacy, a training organization in 20 countries of the Global South, which promotes women’s leadership and human rights in 28 languages across 60 countries. She is the author and editor of six books, most recently The Other side of Silence, an elegiac – I would say – memoir of exile Iran and the global women’s movement, published recently by the University of North Carolina Press. Second guest is a young and rising scholar of Iran, Kelly Shannon, Associate Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University, Executive Director of the Center for Peace, Justice and Human Rights there, and author of US Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights. Kelly is currently working on a new book about US-Iran relations in the first half of the 20th century.

Ellen Chesler  02:41

Welcome to you both. My first question to Mahnaz. As you know, I was trained as a historian at Columbia University in the 1970s, I’ve since spent most of my own 40 plus year career in government and philanthropy, but always with the view that politics and public policy are invariably path dependent. Meaning that we need to understand our history to move forward in the future, and to understand our present as well to move forward in the future. So can you begin today by outlining the highlights of your own poignant and powerful story, as you’ve just told it in a memoir, and its relevance to Iran today, as poached protesters chant “women, life, freedom.”

Mahnaz Afkhami  03:26

Thank you, Ellen. And thank you for including me in this conversation. The moment that the revolution happened is a good place to outline the place where women were at the beginning of the revolution. For one thing, I was at the time in the United States, negotiating with the UN the creation of INSTRAW, the Institute for Global Training and Research on Women, which was supposed to take place in Tehran. Already we had the Asia Pacific Center in Tehran, headed by Elizabeth Reed, who is an exceptional feminist. Additionally, the 1980 Conference was supposed to take place in Iran.

Mahnaz Afkhami  04:18

These three were the international – or sort of a sign of – the international progress of Iranian women. The internal situation was that we had the most successful, I would say, support system for leadership of women in both politics, economics, and others. This included childcare on the premises, half-time work for mothers up to when their child(ren) reached the age of three, seven months’ pregnancy leave in addition to other parts of the progressive Family Protection Law. All of this had happened in sort of a thoughtful process that included a generation of women before us, and had been, obviously, amazingly successful. So the reason I’m reviewing that is to say that Iranian women were exceptional even then. But after the revolution, which they participated in at first like many others thinking that things were going to be better, the immediate reaction of Khomeini was to nullify all of what women had gained, and include also limitations such as their movements – where they can go and where they couldn’t go – and of course, the Hijab, which is a really a symbolic thing. It’s not really the cause of either the revolution or lack of the revolution. So the first revolution was in February after the arrival of Khomeini. Then in March, we had the first outburst of women, which was cruelly harassed and violently stopped.

Mahnaz Afkhami  06:27

After that, the progressive and thoughtful work of the women has continued. Especially in the last two decades, the thing that started the whole movement and made it more carefully organized, was the one million signatures. And we’ve worked with women leaders to bring them outside of the country, so that the training, learning and the sharing of ideas could take place for them. Also, they could get to know other people and other leaders in different parts of the world. So the one million signatures had, you know, some of the characteristics which were very nicely followed later and expanded. It was based on door to door campaigns, and bringing in the men, which is I think a very vital part of the women’s movement in Iran. It also had the use of technology, which originally was weaker and then it became stronger and stronger.

Mahnaz Afkhami  07:49

After the one million signatures, which was altogether a very successful learning experience and political experience for women in Iran, the Green Movement came. The movement was against the political system and the false election of the president. So what happened was that the movement couldn’t succeed with the cruelty and violence that was imposed on women, but it did spread to the Arab Spring. It also laid the possibilities for the present movement. Additionally, the present movement has some ideas, which I think are important for us to think about. One is the global nature of the reception that it has had. It is the first revolution by women in the world, and the first that has been supported from grassroots people around the world to the highest levels of government. I think that the reason that it’s so important goes back to what we learned and implemented in Iran prior to the revolution, one of them being that the structure of the leadership has to change so that we can have the kind of democratic and collaborative leadership that we need. Also we, as women, have to include men in this process, and the very slogan, “women, life, liberty,” shows what they’re talking about. This is a kind of thing that applies to everybody and appeals to everybody. So to my thinking, this is an exceptional opportunity, at an exceptional time, to be able to help Iranians so that we can have the global movement of women that we really desperately need.

Ellen Chesler  09:59

For our audience to understand what you’re saying. A couple of top lines to take from what you’re saying is that, while there was political repression and civil repression under the Shah, there was actually quite substantial progress with respect to the social, economic and educational status of women. Women were well educated in Iran, they had high rates of labor force participation, they had good health care. The beginnings of changes in family law and other laws that were changing all over the world. But actually, Iran was part of a global movement in the 1970s, which began legal reforms and opened up doors for women. Women thought they would be even better off under the Islamic Republic. Quite the opposite happened in terms of the government’s policies, the repression. I ask Kelly to comment on all of this as a historian. Is it a fair analysis to assume that the government crackdown, in terms of allowing any kind of political representation or social equality for women, has caused a disjuncture between their actual status in the society? They were in schools, in colleges and universities, they were in the workforce, but they had no rights and they were made to fail. Kelly, is that a fair summary?  

Kelly Shannon  11:55

Yes, I think, in general. So there’s been a long history of women’s rights activism in Iran. There’s early feminists dating back to the middle of the 19th century. And the movement where women started to organize on behalf of their own rights actually dates back to Iran’s first revolution, the Constitutional Revolution in 1905 to 1911. And eventually, women’s rights became central to the modernization program of the Pahlavi government, from the 1920s forward. So, as you’ve both pointed out, women by the 70s in Iran had made significant progress in a lot of areas. So as you mentioned, Ellen, they had access to higher education, to careers in various fields. There were equal pay laws, there was health care, and Iran had some fairly liberal reproductive rights laws by the 1970s. For the time, there was freedom of dress and movement, the right to vote and hold office. And of course, the Pahlavi government wasn’t completely democratic, but women did have political participation within that system.

Ellen Chesler  13:07

As you mentioned, being the right example, having a Minister of Women’s Affairs before we had any kind of women’s representation of that major, even here in the United States, right?

Kelly Shannon  13:18

Yes. So two cabinet level ministers were women. The first was Farrokhroo Parsa, the Minister of Education, and the second was Mahnaz. And, you know, her position was only the second ever cabinet level position in the world dedicated to women’s rights. As you mentioned, the family law was the most progressive in the Islamic world, and that covered inheritance, marriage, divorce, and child custody. It also involved the government trying to eliminate polygamy and child marriage. And so women did not all benefit equally from these policies. Obviously, poor and rural women had less access to some of these things than women who were wealthier and in urban areas, but I would say Iranian women were on the forefront of women’s equality in the 70s. And as Mahnaz mentioned, the international community was looking to Iran, and Iran was the center of a lot of this activity, as it was supposed to host the 1980s Second World Conference on Human Rights held by the United Nations. And of course, that had to get moved to Copenhagen at the last minute because of the Iranian Revolution.

Kelly Shannon  14:21

So when Iranian people rose up against the Shah’s regime, there were a lot of different groups with a lot of different ideologies and political agendas. Khomeini became this symbolic figurehead of the revolution. And what he said before he came back to Iran was very different from what he did when he got there. So he made nods towards women’s rights before he came back. Once he returned to the country in February of 1979, rolling back women’s progress and eliminating the rights they had was at the top of his agenda. And this is the same as it is for any radical conservative or fundamentalist in any of the world’s religions. Controlling women is central to their agenda for controlling society. As you mentioned, women were forced to wear the veil. So compulsory veiling was one of the first things that Khomeini tried to do. As Mahnaz has mentioned, tens of thousands of Iranian women took to the streets to protest in March of 1979, but the men were not with them. It was mostly women in the streets; women’s protests failed. And so since the 80s, women have dealt with being banned from certain jobs like being judges, universities have been segregated by sex and women have not been allowed to study certain fields, especially in science and technology at various points.

Ellen Chesler  15:39

Are they 60% of the university students like in the United States, for example?

Kelly Shannon  15:43

Yes, I was gonna get to that. So they haven’t been allowed to major in certain subjects. Women are not allowed to sing in public. Women cannot attend sporting events and are segregated in other areas of public life. The government almost immediately repealed the Shah’s family law, so it granted most of the rights in marriage, divorce, and child custody to men once again, lowering the age of marriage first to 13 and then to nine for girls. Eventually it raised it to 13 again for girls in 2002, but has reinstituted child marriage. Women do not have freedom of movement, so they need their husband or their father’s permission to leave the country. They need their father’s permission to marry, so they’re legally second class citizens within their own country. And of course, we know from the Mahsa Amini case that they’ve also been harassed by the morality police on a regular basis for what they’re wearing. They faced violence that’s been state sanctioned, imprisonment for being activists or speaking out. While imprisoned, they’ve faced torture and execution. And perhaps in one of the more horrific state policies: before a woman is executed, if she is a ‘virgin,’ she is sexually assaulted before she is put to death. Because the belief is that a virgin shouldn’t be executed. And this dates back to the 1980s, and Iran is one of the leading countries in executing its own citizens but especially in executing women in the world.

Kelly Shannon  17:11

But as Mahnaz mentioned, women had been fighting back. Collectively they started to resist the hijab restrictions starting in the 1990s, they started showing hair in the front of their veils and wearing makeup. The idea was that the government couldn’t arrest all of them. Then they started to push for greater rights of divorce. There was the 2006 peaceful protests for women’s rights that led to the one million signatures campaign that Mahnaz mentioned, which then helped to inform the 2009 Green Movement that arose in protest to the very shady re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. And since then, there’s been a really concerted feminist effort to protest the hijab laws in particular. They are a problem because they take away women’s freedom of choice, but they also symbolize that broader system where women are oppressed and targeted by the state. But as you mentioned, Ellen, women in Iran, they could drive, they can go to college, they are the majority of college students, they are the majority of people earning degrees in even the science fields at this point, which the government has been making noise about trying to change that.

Ellen Chesler  18:15

They are an important part of the labor force and therefore of the economy.

Kelly Shannon  18:18

Yeah, they work. They’re educated, they’re articulate, they know what they want, and what they want is the end of this government and the end of the restriction of their human rights.

Ellen Chesler  18:27

So the government, ostensibly, enforces these laws on religious grounds, saying that they are part of Sharia law, but I’m reminded I’m old enough to remember Beijing in 1995, where Mahnaz also was an important actor. I remember that Hillary Clinton’s speech gets the most attention. Benazir Bhutto, then serving as Prime Minister of Pakistan, spoke after Hillary and quoting from the Quran the characterized respect for women’s rights as principles inherent to Islamic scripture and lived experience. She dismissed contrary interpretations from fundamentalists as quote “social taboos spawned by the traditions of a patriarchal society.” Later the victim of an assassination, she may well have sacrificed her life for these views. A few days ago, I heard the current foreign minister of Pakistan, a woman, make exactly this point, calling on Muslim countries to speak up and condemn the Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guard. Mahnaz, can you speak a little bit about the degree to which you have worked, not only to bring along secular women but also religious women? Part of your book that is most interesting is that aspect of it. Have you worked with women’s groups in Iran, but many of them are religious women who have been open to the idea that within their own scripture, they can find sources for women’s rights. Not only within international law, which they should also look to, I’m not putting that idea of universal laws down. But I think it is important because you’ve stressed more to bring people along from where they are.

Mahnaz Afkhami  20:09

Yes, I think that you’re absolutely right, Ellen. And I love the historical review that Kelly gave us, much more precisely than I did. And there’s actually, one thing we have to think about is that the Khomeini government or the Islamic Republic, is probably – and Kelly may help with this – is the only theocracy of its kind in the world ever. You have religious heads of state who are also heads of churches or mosques or whatever, we still have those today. But we never have a bunch of religious actors who are running things like agriculture, budgeting, and the ordinary matters of life. I always go back to Jesus Christ, who said, “leave Caesar’s business to Caesar, and God’s business to God.” And this is secularism in its most enlightened form. Actually, one of the bad things that has happened after the revolution – there’s so many horrible things — but one thing that has been really bad is that it has made Islam identified as either the Taliban or the Khomeini government, or one of these radical entities that have nothing to do with religion. Actually, all of the three monotheistic religions come from the same place in the Middle East and they are so similar. I’ve made it my business to read all of them carefully. And some of it is repeating exactly the same names, the same stories and so forth. But then about all of them, we have to decide that, even though we live at the same time, we are not contemporaries. So we are living at a time when things have changed a lot in the world, especially recently. But our lifestyles have a pattern of developing that is not simultaneous. So people are right now, for instance, blaming people who were the founders of the United States and expect of them the kind of thinking that comes in the 21st century. Things have to adjust to the times and evolve with the times.

Ellen Chesler  23:02

Isn’t it true, though, that in the text of the Quran, one can find references to equal rights for women. The discourse in the Old Testament, as in the New Testament, there’s competing discourses, but there is an element that doesn’t in any way support fundamentalists interpretations of these texts.

Mahnaz Afkhami  23:26

Absolutely. In all three religions, they’re the same. They’re wonderful ideas of equality, of love thy neighbor working together. And then there are some things that are not exactly either doable or even possible at this time. And I think that demonization of Islam was one of the outcomes of this particular government, and also making these radical Islamists who have destroyed basically, with the help of some Western countries, one can say, the entire Middle East actually. If you look back at the time, for instance, I worked in Iran, Mohammad Shah was the head of Afghanistan, Bhutto was in Pakistan. Even Saddam Hussein is not even comparable to what we have had in these countries since. So it’s been a very devastating thing. And then one thing I want to really emphasize is what women in Iran have become, and are actually asserting now, is not a product of living under a monstrous government. If they’re educated it is because people worked, as Ellen mentioned, since the constitutional revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. They wanted education, they wanted jobs, they wanted decision making, and they learned how to do it.

Mahnaz Afkhami  24:58

And I have to take some differences with the thinking about the government of Iran during my own time to be there. I was in a cabinet of 20 men, almost all of them had been educated through the help of the government outside the country and gotten PhDs, one in nuclear physics, one in transportation, one in economics. They were well educated people with a lot of commitment and energy and real love for their country and its progress. And they did amazing stuff. The Shah was not what they are saying he was, he had his faults, but he certainly was not autocratic. When I worked there for 10 years, whether as a civil servant, or in the government, I never had any conversation with the Shah, or any message from the Shah or any order from the Shah. He had other interests, mostly in foreign affairs, and people did what they thought was right for their own line of work. And the women who are doing what they’re doing, were a product of the time when we all worked together, we had one million people coming to the 400 branches of the women’s organization, to learn from literacy all the way to the different skills on the job.

Ellen Chesler  26:34

Right, you’re pointing out just for our audience that before you became head of the women’s ministry, you ran something called the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), which essentially created local engagement with women into education, health care, teaching rights, something very advanced for its day in the world, since this was the 1970s. A time when, as I pointed out earlier, we didn’t have any women in the United States Senate, we had a handful of women in government here. It was the beginning of what has been a 50 year revolution in women’s rights in the West. But just the beginning. Let me just bring Kelly in here. Can you say anything about the different sources of authority for women’s rights, universal human rights law, codified at the United Nations. With the participation of Iran, Mahnaz was writing, helping to write CEDAW, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, versus local traditions that also actually facilitate women’s rights and perhaps caused some of the tension that is now bursting out in the protests today?

Kelly Shannon  27:59

Certainly, I mean, I think what the Islamic regime has done in the last 40 years has brought something historically new to the country in the version of Islam that it’s tried to impose on everyone else. And so in that way, it’s very modern; fundamentalism in religions is a very modern phenomenon. Various different schools of Islamic thought interpret the Quran differently. The Quran itself is a very poetic piece of writing, it’s not straightforward. And so it could be used to justify various types of interpretations on women’s rights. But if you actually read it, it doesn’t say that women should be treated the way that the Islamic Republic is treating them. And even if you read the passage on dress, it basically says that women and men should dress modestly, it doesn’t say they need to cover their face or their hair or so it’s interpreted by different Islamic schools of thought in different ways. It’s been informed by local cultures where Islam has been adopted. And in Iran, it has historically been a majority Muslim country over the last several 100 years, but it also was a multi religious, multi ethnic, multi linguistic state through the 20th century. And the imposition of this very radical interpretation of Islam that I think stems largely from patriarchy and the desire for control over society, alienated and has caused the oppression of multiple ethnic minorities and multiple religious minorities in the country. The interpretation of Islam to the detriment of women is different from what came before. Obviously, women faced restrictions and they had formed a movement to push back against that, but different communities in Iran had different treatment and different status for women historically. So this uniform imposition from the top down has been the problem. And for women and for what I’m hearing coming from Iranians today from inside of Iran, is that for the people who’ve grown up in the 40 years since the revolution there, they don’t like religion, period. Islam has been forced down their throat, the version of Islam they think is not the Islam of their parents and their grandparents. They see religion as oppression. And what they’re calling for is a secular democracy. And they’re calling for human rights that goes back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948, on which Iran was a signatory back then.

Ellen Chesler  30:23

And certainly the argument that these ideas of women’s rights as human rights are a Western import imposed on innocence in their country brings hollow to these women, and we see that for sure in their actions on the street. Then the enormous courage it takes to stand up to this very repressive regime, a courage which the men are all awaiting them with. But the men are not leading. This is, as Menhaz said earlier, possibly the first major woman-led revolution, and maybe certainly the first one. It’s successful. We’re running out of time. So I want to get to what you think can be done here or what will happen here, obviously. Kelly, you are a historian. Mahnaz, you are a women’s rights activist. We can’t predict the future, but what should we be doing? The UN member states, I noticed, recently voted to oust Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which, ironically Mahnaz, working with the Pahlavi regime helped to establish and was a major actor. A big part of her book – I will suggest to our listeners well worth reading – is that story. Again, these were not institutions that the UN set up by Westerners and imposed on innocents elsewhere. They had enormous input from women all over the world, including Iran at the time. But the UN Commission on the Status of Women is important to us. I think it isn’t really understood, and it seems like a hollow gesture. What else should we be doing? What should the Iranian diaspora be doing? What should Americans, what could we be doing? Obviously a lot is happening in the world, with Ukraine and Afghanistan, elsewhere, it’s hard to keep attention on Iran. But what should we be doing? Mahnaz? Maybe you want to start? And also, should we be arguing for regime change? I’m a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where it was recently said that Europe and the West need to encourage regime change. That’s not something our government is doing, should we be doing that, Mahnaz?

Mahnaz Afkhami  32:46

But I would probably be even more sort of radical than that. Because I think that the example of what’s happening in Iran, just as the theocratic creation, calls so much radicalization of these crazy groups all over, which I don’t call them Muslims. They’re just ‘crazies’ who happen to use Islam. Just as that happened, I think the positive side can also be broader, and more important. Look, let’s face it, this is a century in which we are facing almost the demise of the human race, from pandemics to climate, to war to everything else. We really are losing even in this country in the United States, you know, we are losing our democracy. And of course, the women are losing, they’re not going forward. Individually, they’re going forward, but collectively, they have no presence, you know. So what I’m hoping is that for supporting the Iranian women and their broad demand, which is “women, life, freedom,” be something that we around the world can support. And if we help them change this situation in Iran, and create something decent, that would be the incentive for creating a global movement, which it already has done. I have never in my life seen this kind of support. So maybe we should see it not as an Iranian thing, saving Iranian women, but as a way of bringing men in working with women to change the systems. So working for democracy and human rights.

 Ellen Chesler  34:44

Well, certainly Iran is an example of the dictum of the women’s human rights movements that you can tell how well a society is doing by how it treats its women. Iran’s economy is tanking. Obviously, Western sanctions aren’t helping there, but without dignifying rights to women, you don’t have a stable and secure society or democracy. “Women peace and freedom” is a rallying cry because it has some truth to it, that countries that treat women well tend to be more secure and peaceful countries. Kelly, do you want to add something to this?

Kelly Shannon  35:29

Yes, I certainly think that the entire world should throw its support behind the revolution that’s happening in Iran. And I will say at this point, it is a full blown revolutionary movement.

Ellen Chesler  35:40

There’s no Iranian possibility of reform from within, are we agreed on that?

Kelly Shannon  35:44

Yeah, there is not. And the government has completely lost all credibility with its own people. The protesters have made it clear that they are united and determined to see this through to the end, regardless of the violence that they face at the end of the state. So I think that, from the United States’ perspective, a lot more could be done. The Biden Administration has said that democracy versus autocracy is the great struggle of our time, and that the United States wants to support democracy. So I think he should put his money where his mouth is because Iran is at the forefront of the fight for democracy right now.

Ellen Chesler  36:16

What are our tools for doing that? Elon Musk has been saying we should send Starlinks to protesters.

Kelly Shannon  36:44

I don’t want to comment on Elon Musk, I think.

Ellen Chesler  36:48

[Laughing.] How about the Voice of America, or other radio?

Kelly Shannon  36:32

Yeah. Making sure that Iranians have access to accurate information is certainly important. One of the tools of repression of the Iranian government is to shut down the internet and access to communications apps. So I think that the countries surrounding Iran, as well as the West and the United States, can certainly do more to provide internet access and VPNs to Iranians, which allow them access to the internet, and they can mask their online signature. But this needs to be a conversation that all of the governments of the world, including the United States, need to have every day. They need to have it front and center. The Biden Administration took too long to come out to make a statement supporting the protesters, and they have been very tepid since then. And I think that

Kelly Shannon  37:11

They argued, in their defense, that the worst thing they could do for the protesters was to look like they were -you know- puppets of the American government. But they -you know- were reacting to what had happened in the Obama years. I just feel like I don’t want to defend them.

Kelly Shannon  37:29

But the Iranian government was going to accuse the protesters of being a foreign plot anyway. And the Iranian protesters have made it very clear that this is a homegrown movement, any foreign imposed government will not work, because that’s in the history of Iran has been the problem. But I think, listening to what the Iranian protesters are saying they need, I think they certainly need resources, they need money, they need the ability to develop organizational leadership, because most of the major feminist leaders are in prison right now. And this needs to be united with international pressure.

Ellen Chesler  38:00

I heard a very interesting argument, though, at the Council on Foreign Relations, which said the following – and I think this is so fascinating – that what they don’t need is this ideology and what they don’t have is a certain ideology. And ideology, in a way, is what ruins the movement against the Shah. You know, another part of Mahnaz’ book that is just extraordinary is the story of her own sister who had been educated at Berkeley in the United States and was a Marxist, Socialist youth thinker, really into and went to Iran with the best of ideas. Even though her own sister had worked in the Pahlavi regime, she felt that there could be more equality, more opportunity, particularly for the poor in Iran; her own husband lost his life in that struggle. Today, the protesters don’t have ideological divisions like that, there aren’t Marxist, Leninists

Kelly Shannon  38:57

Yeah. Its ideology is secular democracy. There was a document that was circulated late last year and was written by a group of protesters who have claimed that their intellectual thought leaders – and obviously they had to remain anonymous – have laid out a plan for what they wanted a post regime government to look like. And it was a secular democracy with a respect for human rights. And so I think they are united in this, as you pointed out, there are not 15 different factions. The problem is they don’t have a leader. I don’t think you need one leader. I actually think that social movements work better with many leaders, but the capacity for that leadership has been stifled. And I think this is where the diaspora has come in. And they’ve been very active in providing a lot of those ideas of leadership and trying to keep this issue in the public eye by having protests around the world. But I think that the governments of the world need to take this much more seriously. And the United States needs to take this much more seriously and be much more proactive in supporting the revolutionaries than they have been.

Ellen Chesler  39:58

I hope we can see more conversation around Iran and women at the Commission on the Status of Women meetings at the United Nations in March. We’re running out of time, any final thoughts from either of you before we have to sign off here? Mahnaz?

Mahnaz Afkhami  40:16

Well, I certainly am very positive and optimistic about the movement that we have seen. And I really think that what we, as women, should do is to focus on how to create our own influencing groups of our own civil society groups all over the world around this. Maybe this is our excuse too, and that’s what we WFP is doing now, connecting to other women’s organizations and trying to get them to unite in support. Also in influencing their governments and their artists and their other economic leaders and so forth to help this movement. But through that, also, to help shape a global movement that we desperately need, and use that platform doing our own work as well.

Ellen Chesler  41:14

To have Iran be the focus for the revival of a global women’s rights movement, which has stalled in the face of pandemics and so much conflict regionally and so many other unforeseen circumstances. When women met together in Beijing, almost 30 years ago, we didn’t quite envision the world we have now seen. Kelly, final thoughts?

Kelly Shannon  41:42

Yes, I too, am optimistic for the prospects for success of the Iranian people. They have a history of successful revolutions. And I think that if we want to be on the right side of history, we need to stand with them. So I’ll just end by saying “Zen, Zendegi Azadi”

Ellen Chesler  41:58

And what does it mean?

Kelly Shannon  42:00

Woman, Life, Freedom 

Ellen Chesler  42:02

Wonderful. Well, again, it’s been such a pleasure to have this conversation. I wish it could go on and on. Thank you Mahnaz Afkhami. Please, those of you listening in the audience, look at her new beautiful memoir. Thank you, Kelly Shannon, what an inspiring young scholar you are. We are both fellow sister graduates of Vassar College. I went when it was all women, Kelly when it was a coed institution. And that’s how we met so I’m particularly grateful and I’ll shout out to Vassar. Remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance and to Duncan Mackay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as the theme music for this show. My name is Ellen Chesler, and I’m thanking all of you and our audience for joining us and look forward to having you for future episodes of international Horizons.