The Reign of Terror, Women’s Issues, and Feminist Politics
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and strategy of the imperialists be? They intend to create domestic conflicts, conflicts between brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, and comrades against comrades.46
Islam Kazemieh, a leading secular figure in the Writers’ Association and one of the main organizers of the famous poetry nights at the Goethe Institute in 1977, added his voice in a scathing critique of those who prioritized hejaˉ b and women’s issues. He dismissed the idea of the primacy of women’s issues as “an intellectual exercise far from the needs and traditions of common Iranian women.” Furthermore, he repeated others’ denunciation of Pahlavi reforms as a phony (qolaˉ bi) charade (namaˉ yeshi) that led to nothing but turning women into “Western dolls.”47 In her book on the women’s rights movement in Iran, Eliz Sanasarian, who witnessed and interviewed women during the same period, reported that during the months before and after the revolution, even the members and employees of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), the main office of women’s affairs under the Shah, joined the revolutionary movement. These women did not view Khomeini, Sanasarian writes, “as contradictory and vague figure, but as a savior, a solution to the Iranian dictatorship.” A WOI official confided to her that “it was a real movement and we couldn’t help but to think the best of him, all the groups were trying to give him the best of credits.”48 In her encounters with educated women, Sanasarian discovered that they viewed with skepticism the rumors that Khomeini and other religious leaders were anti– women’s rights. “They thought such rumors were a plot to null women’s support of the revolution.” She further noted that all of the female university students she interviewed “supported the revolution and Khomeini’s leadership.”49 And these were not only daughters of the underprivileged who attended public universities. This was a political attitude also shared by elite Westernized women. “I still recall,” Sanasarian continues, “the comments of an upper-class woman who told me, two months before the Shah’s overthrow, that she would sacrifice herself at Khomeini’s feet. Indeed, an outlandish comment from a woman whose wardrobe consisted of the latest European fashions!”50 On March 10, 1979, at the conclusion of a rally of more than fifteen thousand people at the Ministry of Justice in downtown Tehran, the provisional government issued its official new policy on hejaˉ b. Its