Victims or Victors? : Women in Iran Make Gains but Must Endure Restraints Some Find Intolerable

TEHRAN, Iran —  During the time of the shah she had worked for the Royal Family, enjoying the usual privileges: lovely clothes, expensive cars, diplomatic dinner party invitations. After the shah was thrown out, the revolution wanted to know why.

Wasn’t this a picture of her, naked and acting like a whore, at one of those parties? A bearded policeman thrust his finger at an old photograph of her, smilingly clad in spaghetti straps between two tiresome dinner partners.

“But I’m not naked, I’m wearing a dinner dress,” she protested.

“You call that a dress?” he replied.

Officially charged with being “a pillar of the corrupt (shah’s) dynasty,” she spent months in a Tehran prison, watching as fellow prisoners were beaten and tortured, and learning to pray.

Today, 13 years after the Islamic revolution, she is still in Tehran. She tried living in Paris for a few years and staying with friends in other European capitals. But eventually, she came home to family, friends and the snow-capped mountains that grace the Tehran skyline.

“The greatest poets of Iran have not sung love songs like I have sung to those mountains,” she says. “I had many friends in Europe. But I was very lost. . . . I felt they did not understand me.”

Iranian women, whose lives were irreversibly altered by the Islamic earthquake that struck with the revolution, sometimes have trouble understanding themselves: Is their long black chador a symbol of womanly pride or oppression? Is it a sign of feminine dignity to submit to the will of her husband, brother and father or is it an outrage? Is she to feel religious ecstasy at the sacrifice of her sons in Iran’s holy war against Iraq, or is she supposed to give way to the ache in the pit of her stomach?

As President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s moves to moderate the fervor of the revolution gain momentum, women in Iran are also stepping into new territory--surprising ground, in some cases, for outsiders who have seen them as the revolution’s biggest victims.

A total of 56 women were among the candidates who ran in last month’s parliamentary elections, and as many as 10 could be seated after the second round of polling this month. The four women who sat in the last Parliament exceeded the number in the U.S. Senate. Moreover, there is now a presidential adviser for women’s affairs, and many insiders predict there will be a woman in Rafsanjani’s new cabinet.

Nor has progress been confined to government: Women now outnumber men in Iranian universities and, in a society that often frowns on women and men working side by side, they make up more than 35% of the work force.

“You could really say the women’s movement is beginning now in Iran, rather than during the shah’s time,” says a professor at Tehran University. “During the shah, we were handed everything. We were given the vote; we had women in parliament; we got better divorce laws. But it’s only now that we’re starting to work for it.”

Yet it seems there are few places on Earth where it has been harder to be a woman this past decade.

In the early years of the revolution, women were compelled to wear the chador, a custom that has given way to long overcoats and scarves, which still maintain the code of Islamic dress for women known as the hijab. Under Islamic law, women cannot hold a job or leave the country without their husband’s permission; they do not inherit as much as their brothers, and if they are found in a car with a man to whom they are not married, they are apt to be arrested and have a document inserted into their police file labeling them a prostitute.

Parties in which women dress freely and drink alcohol were frequently raided in the past, and the women were sometimes given virginity tests. It happens less often now, but women are still occasionally scolded when too much hair is displayed by their scarves.

“At the beginning, it was hard,” recalls a woman who works in a university administration office. “You’re in your office working, and suddenly some little nobody comes from the back kitchen and says, ‘No, you have to wear this!’ You feel humiliated.”

“You go to a government office,” says another woman, who, like most interviewed, did not want to be identified, “and you are absolutely sure you know your case, and you know how to present it, and the guy says suddenly, ‘Make your hijab correct (meaning, ‘Pull down your scarf’). And all of a sudden, you are shaking. You forget everything you were going to say.”

In a well-furnished living room in north Tehran, the owner of a chic bookshop had several of her friends to tea recently to talk about women’s issues--a replica, she says, of the “group therapy” sessions they have held since the revolution to keep everyone’s spirits up.

The women arrived in long dark coats and scarves that were quickly jettisoned and piled in an inglorious heap. Underneath, they wore jeans and sweaters or tailored skirts and blouses.

Women’s fundamental problems begin at home, they agree, where men are acknowledged masters.

“Women are allowed to decide the small issues, like what the family is going to eat. And yet, you know, never, ever have I ever considered what I might like to eat. It’s always what the men of the family would like to eat. All of a sudden, years later, you realize, ‘My God, I always liked that food--why didn’t I ever get to eat it?’ ” says Mahin Sanati, whose aunt, Dowla Tabadi, became the first woman in Iran to publicly throw off her veil in 1932.

“As long as we support these little dictators at home, we are supporting the larger dictators outside,” Sanati says.

In the workplace, it can be equally trying. The hostess recounts in detail the story of a friend who worked in the ministry of rehabilitation. One day six months ago, she says, the woman had used the men’s room when the women’s toilet was occupied. She was suspended from her job, fined and has fought unsuccessfully since to have the complaint removed from her job file, appealing as high as religious leader Ali Khamenei.

Meanwhile, Mahin says she was staying with her family at the Caspian Sea recently and was getting ready to drive back to Tehran when she found out she would be riding alone with her male cousin.

“When he realized it was going to be just the two of us, he said, ‘I don’t want to have any problem. You take the bus.’ ” She shakes her head. “This was not years ago. This was last weekend. And I’m an old woman!”

Although secretive dating is beginning, and telephone romances between young unmarried men and women are common, Mahin says some women are turning to prostitution out of economic necessity--and boredom.

“It’s desperation for money, desperation for not having the freedom to talk to the opposite sex. You don’t have movies, you don’t have nice music, you don’t have anything to let go,” she says.

At the same time, many Iranian women say Westerners put too much emphasis on Islamic dress, which many women find liberating because it frees them from having to worry about their hair, makeup and clothes.

Surprisingly, family planning is no longer a difficult issue. With the end of the war and a difficult population boom, the government has moved from encouraging women to produce new soldiers to encouraging them to limit the size of their families, and birth control clinics dispense contraceptives and provide counseling. Although abortion is officially illegal, several women say it is not difficult to obtain.

In the upcoming Parliament scheduled to be seated at the end of this month, Deputy Mariam Behrouzi says she and other women deputies will raise three issues of importance: social insurance to take care of widows or older women who have not married, scholarships for women to study abroad and a new branch of the judicial system to handle family law cases on behalf of women.

In many ways, Behrouzi says, the women of Iran are confronted with the same issues as women all over the world--and many Iranians feel they have solved them better.

“Recently, I was in Germany,” she recalls. “In the women’s party there, they were asking, ‘How can we fulfill our active political role and not lose our family role at the same time?’ For us, we are in contradiction with the West, where during the pregnancy period of the woman and immediately after, she is considered unemployed--whereas we consider it the most important job of the woman, raising a human being properly.”

On a recent Friday in downtown Tehran, thousands of women in chadors and the traditional white capes of the countryside gather for public prayers, joining hands and raising them skyward as the mullah --addressing the men on the other side of a makeshift fence separating the sexes--leads the soothing chanting.

“We pray that the corruption will go forever out of this country, things like the ladies showing their hair,” one woman says afterward, drawing her chador carefully around her chin. “It’s already spread throughout the country, but we don’t want to see such people anymore.”

Several other women gather around curiously. “Life is good for me,” says one old woman. “I have given three martyrs to the war . . . and I am very happy, because I have given them to Islam.”

A younger woman chimes in: “My first husband was a martyr, and two of my brothers. . . . We are glad to have made such a holy sacrifice.”

Another woman who was translating their remarks turns and shakes her head. “I think if you have lost all of your children and the agony is too much, the only way out of it is to pray,” she says. “But did you see? There was no sadness in their eyes, not anywhere.”