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Educating Young Women: Culture, Conflict, and New Identities in an Iranian Village

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mary Elaine Hegland
Mary Elaine Hegland*
Affiliation:
Santa Clara University, California
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Abstract

Anthropological participant observation during two different periods (1978–79 and 2003–08) documents dramatic change in gender identity and expectations in an Iranian village. While patriarchal definitions of females and their places and on-the-ground social conditions restricted female agency and kept women and girls under the authority of male supervisors 30 years ago, recent years have witnessed growing opportunities for females. Now most girls complete high school before marriage, and may even travel to other cities for higher education. In “Aliabad,” however, for the great majority, more education for females has not led to participation in the labor market. Ethnographic research focuses on how young females negotiate between the more traditional expectations and cultural constraints and the new opportunities to serve their own interests as best as possible. Although work outside of the home presents too many difficulties for the great majority of Aliabad females, who must marry in order to obtain financial support, females have used their education and the increased self-confidence, experience, status, and literacy to develop more influential positions within the marriage relationship, among kin and in-laws, and in the community. Young village women have been involved in constructing their evolving identities in an environment of social change and modernization.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 1: Special Issue On Gender and Sexuality , February 2009 , pp. 45 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2009

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Footnotes

This article draws on my paper, “Young Iranian Village Women: Culture, Conflict, and New Identities,” for the panel, “Imagining Ourselves: Culture, Conflict, and Young Women's Identities: Finding Common Ground,” sponsored by the Anthropology Department, the Anthropology Student Club, and other SCU bodies, and by the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women's Imagining Ourselves program, at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA on 2 May 2006. With permission from Paula Goldman, I have borrowed the title from this 2006 IMW program. Paula Goldman of the International Museum of Women developed the Imagining Ourselves program as a way for young women to share their experiences and their aspirations with other young women internationally. I thank SCU and the International Museum of Women for this sponsorship and support. My thanks also go to the workshop participants who introduced other papers about young women imagining themselves, Farah Bayan, Alma Garcia, Paula Goldman, and Ashraf Zahedi, and to Helen DeMarco of the International Museum of Women who facilitated planning, organizing, and coordinating with great dedication. For their funding and support of my December 2005 to March 2006 anthropological field research in the village of “Aliabad,” Iran, on which this paper is largely based, I am grateful to Santa Clara University and to the American Institute for Iranian Studies. Most of all, I thank the girls and young women of Aliabad and Shiraz who shared their lives and thoughts with me.

In the May 2006 Imagining Ourselves program at SCU, other speakers included Alma Garcia, from SCU's Sociology Department who has written a book about her Mexican-American students' experiences as the first university generation in their families (see Alma M. Garcia, Narratives of Mexican American Women: Emergent Identities of the Second Generation (Walnut Creek, CA, 2004)); SCU student Farah Bayan, an Afghan American who comes from Freemont, often called “Little Kabul” because of all of the Afghan Americans living there, to her classes at SCU; and Ashraf Zahedi, a sociologist originally from Iran, who came to the US for university, and thus has herself experienced cultural conflict while developing her identity as a young women. She interrupted her work at the International Museum of Women and her book writing to tell us about the cultural negotiations of Filipino women who live in Iran. See Ashraf Zahedi, “Negotiating Public and Private Rituals: Filipina Converts' Perceptions about Shiite Rituals,” Paper presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, Montreal, Canada, 2007.

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4 The valorization of women as mothers, producers of fighters and supporters for the Palestinian cause has been even more extreme than Iranian women’s valorization as Mothers of Martyrs and producers of revolutionary-spirited, lion-hearted sons during the Iranian Revolution, the 8 year war with Iraq, and the Islamic regime periods. For her insightful analysis of Palestinian women’s roles as Mothers of the Nation See Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh’s Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley, CA, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 Also see Gustav Thaiss' 1978 article about sexual metaphors of national identity, “The Conceptualization of Social Change through Metaphors,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 13, no. 1 (1978): 1–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See Nobel Peace Prize winner, lawyer Shirin Ebadi's book, Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, with Azadeh Moaveni (New York, 2006); Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad (New York, 2005), and Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran (New York, 2009); and Shahla Haeri's documentary, Mrs. President: Women and Political Leadership in Iran (2002).

7 Anthropologists Erika Friedl and Reinhold Loeffler, for example, have noted many similar developments in their own Fars Province research site (personal communication).

8 For more information about changes in Aliabad between 1978/79 and 2003/04/05/06, see Mary Elaine Hegland, “Aliabad of Shiraz: Transformation from Village to Suburb,” forthcoming.

9 For more about the conditions and challenges of my recent, temporally constrained fieldwork, see Hegland, Mary Elaine, “Zip In and Zip Out Fieldwork,” Journal of Iranian Studies, 37 (2004): 575–583CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and about ethnographic research conditions in Iran in general, see Friedl, Erika and Hegland, Mary Elaine co-guest editors, Journal of Iranian Studies: Special Issue on Ethnography in Iran, 37 (2004)Google Scholar, and Hegland, Mary Elaine and Friedl, Erika, “Methods Applied: Political Transformation and Recent Ethnographic Fieldwork in Iran,” Anthropology in the Middle East, 1 (2007): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 In Iran in general, at that time, girls, especially those from lower socioeconomic levels were taken out of school during the primary years. See Mojab, Shahrzad, “State Control and Women's Resistance in Iranian Universities,” Nimey Digar: Iranian Women's Feminist Journal, 14 (1991): 35–76Google Scholar.

11 Also see Aghajanian, Akbar et al., “Attitudes of Iranian Female Adolescents Toward Education and Nonfamilial Roles: A study of a Postrevolutionary Cohort,” Marriage & Family Review 42, no. 1 (2007): 49–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Extremely few females have remained unmarried. One woman went into nursing and works in Shiraz while living with her parents. Her mother refused all suitors, others told me. It is probably a good thing, she herself says, that she did not marry. Now she is available to care for her parents who both suffer from serious disabilities. A very few other females live with their widowed mothers. One mother stated in front of me that she was going to keep her daughter (already over the young age expected of Aliabad brides) at home with her. Others pity these single women.

13 Although practically unheard of in the past, now the phenomenon of young unmarried females living by themselves has begun to emerge, at least in Tehran. Certainly, no young Aliabad women, even among those who now live in Shiraz, have joined this movement.

14 See Erika Friedl's description of a little girl's work day in a Lurish village in southwestern Iran, “Moonrose Watched through a Sunny Day,” Natural History, 8 (1992): 34–45Google Scholar. Also see Friedl, Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village; and Friedl, Children of Deh Koh: Young Life in an Iranian Village.

15 Their responsibilities in the home setting had been even greater four and five decades ago, because of lack of natural gas, necessitating cooking with smoking fires, no spigots of running water coming into any courtyards, and even more work preserving and preparing food.

16 For more discussion of many Iranian women's devotion to appearance, especially among the young, see Moaveni, Lipstick Jihad; and Christine Spolar, “In Iran, a Surge in Plastic Surgery,” Chicago Tribune Sunday, 22 October 2006. For some similar trends among more middle class Palestinian women living not in the poverty-stricken Gaza Strip and West Bank, but in a town in Galilee, see Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar

In reaction to state requirements for women's appearance, females have continuously fought for more personal freedom in Iran. Because of women's pressure and civil disobedience in regard to dress and makeup, enforcement of covering has become more lax (although now somewhat more strict again, under the Ahmadinejad government). Lipstick Jehad shows how Iranian women have even used fashion and makeup to resist the religious leaders' strict control over them. For his analysis of other “weapons of the weak” and “the arts of resistance,” see Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985)Google Scholar and Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT 1990)Google Scholar.

17 Aladeini, Pooya and Razavi, Mohamad Reza, “Women's Participation and Employment in Iran: A Critical Examination,” Critique: Journal of Critical Studies of Iran and the Middle East 14, no. 1 (2005): 57–73Google Scholar.

18 See Center for Women's Studies 2004, as cited in Shavarini, Mitra, “Admitted to College,Restricted from Work: A Conflict for Young Iranian Women,” Teachers College Record, 108 (2006): 1960–1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Alaedini and Razavi 2005: 58.

20 Bahramitash, Roksana, “Iranian Women during the Reform Era (1994–2004), a Focus on Employment,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 3, no. 2 (2007): 86–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Alaedini and Razavi 2005: 60, 61.

22 See Mahmoudian, Hossein, “Socio-Demographic Factors Affecting Women's Labor Force Participation in Iran,” Critique: Journal of Critical Studies of Iran and the Middle East, 15 (2006): 233–248Google Scholar.

23 For discussion of the difficulties faced by a professor of English literature at Tehran University, who refused to wear the covering required by the Islamic Republic of Iran government after the Revolution, see Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran, a Memoir in Books (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

24 As I think about educational and work changes over three generations in Aliabad, I am prompted to think about the women in my own family. Among my mother and aunts, nine women in the generation above me, only three on my father's side worked part time after marriage, his two sisters as nurses and a brother's wife as a librarian, and then my mother for a necessary several years later in her life. My mother did work very hard as an unpaid and unpositioned minister's wife most of her life, as my father was a Lutheran pastor. In spite of their college educations, my mother and her two sisters stayed at home after marriage. Yet for me it is important to apply one's education in a way that brings benefits to the larger society, not only to family and the domestic arena. None of my female cousins is without a career, and I can think of no one among my friends either who does not have a career. Generally, for economic reasons, we need to work. For the women in my family, and for a large proportion of other American women, life changed within one generation, and even more so within two generations.

On my father's side, my grandmother had just a few years of schooling in Sweden before she emigrated to the US. As a homesteader's wife in Montana, she worked hard in the home setting. Poverty eventually forced her to take in boarders and sell baked goods in a small town in eastern Montana. My mother's mother went to elementary school, high school, and then a period at a women's “seminary” where she learned about cooking. As her father did not want her to work after that, she took some music classes at the University of Wisconsin. She never worked outside of a “domestic” setting, but her music training came in very handy. Like my own mother, she contributed extensively to the church work of her pastor husband, through music, teaching, and organizational activities.

Among the granddaughters of these two women can be found three social workers—one of whom has just become a minister; an artist; a nurse; an interior designer; a musician; a computer software designer; a university professor; a teacher; two French language teachers; a Norwegian folklorist and teacher; a horse trainer; and a creative writing teacher, poet, and novelist. In the space of two generations, the women in my family—and in many other American families—have gone from less schooling and not working after marriage except in dire necessity, through education and working before marriage and stopping paid employment outside of the home after marriage, except for two nurses and a librarian, to, finally, women in a great variety of careers, all of whom work, even after marriage and children.

In Aliabad, the changing position of women, education, and work has been from illiterate grandmothers who did not work outside of the family setting, although they labored long hours there, to largely illiterate women or functionally illiterate women who worked relatively long and hard hours in the domestic setting, to, recently, females who now often earn at least a high school diploma, and some who go on to further education, and a few who have jobs or careers. These more educated young women's domestic work has dramatically declined, but most still do not work outside of the home, especially after marriage.

Of course, with high inflation, and rampant materialism, this may change if more jobs become available. Then women will be faced with the stress of job and career responsibilities as well as home-making and child-rearing work. Like American women now, they will face the “double shift” (Hochschild, Arlie, The Second Shift (New York, 1990)).Google Scholar Although many Iranians, including people in Aliabad, tend to believe life in the US is “heaven,” I told my villages friends how hard we women work. How fortunate they are, I said, to live without the stress of employment, and to have time for family, relatives, friends, and relaxation. (Of course, I would not be willing to give up my career.)

25 The conflict between wish for education and some level of self-determination versus early arranged marriage and submission to gender and generational hierarchies has been going on in the Middle East for some time. See Ali Ghalem's A Wife for My Son (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar, for example, a novel, set in Algeria which lays out the dynamics of struggle by husband and mother-in-law for control over a young woman's veiling, lifestyle, and goals versus her own education and self-determination. In Iran, such struggles are now going on even at lower socioeconomic levels of society and in rural areas closer to cities. Now, more often, the young women are winning, at least in the struggle for power and influence between bride and daughter-in-law. One of my older friends said, “When we were brides, it was the rule of the mother-in-law. Now that we are mothers-in-law, it is the rule of the brides.”

26 For further discussion of the marginalization of elderly women from the younger generations' nuclear families, and the ascendancy of brides and young women over mothers-in-law, see Mary Elaine Hegland, “Grossmutter lebt allein in ihrem Häuschen: Alte Frauen in einem iranischen Dorf” (Grandmother Lives Alone in Her Little House: Elderly Women in an Iranian Village), Journal-Ethnologie, no. 1 (2007), http://journal-ethnologie.de/Artikel180005295.html; Mary Elaine Hegland, “Independent Grandmothers in an Iranian Village,” Middle-East Journal of Age & Aging, 4 (2007); Mary Elaine Hegland, “Elderly Iranians and a Transforming World: Modernization, Individualization, and Aging in the Islamic Republic,” no. 1, http://www.me-jaa.com/me-jaa11June07/independentgrandmothers.htm; Mary Elaine Hegland, “Elderly Iranians and a Transforming World: Modernization, Individualization, and Aging in the Islamic Republic,” DANESH Newsletter 12 (2007): 3–4; and Mary Elaine Hegland (with Zahra Sarraf, MD—Shiraz University School of Medical Sciences and Mohammad Shahbazi—Jackson State University School of Public Health), “Modernization and Social Change: Impact on Iranian Elderly Social Networks and Care Systems,” Anthropology of the Middle East, 2 (2008): 55–74.

27 For discussion of the far more violent, difficult, and lengthy struggles of young women with their in-laws over the husband's time, resources, allegiance, and intimacy twenty-eight and twenty-nine years ago, see Hegland, Mary Elaine, “Wife Abuse and the Political System: A Middle Eastern Case Study,” in To Have and to Hit: Cultural Perspective on Wife Beating, ed. Counts, Dorothy, Brown, Judith and Campbell, Jacqueline (Urbana, IL, 1999), 234–251Google Scholar.

28 For discussion about the very early and very confining modesty training and expectations and how little girls, as young as two or three were taught and molded their behavior and covering accordingly, see Friedl, Erika, Children of Deh Koh: Young Life in an Iranian Village (Syracuse, NY, 1997)Google Scholar

29 See also Howard, Inside Iran: Women's Lives; and Shavarini, “Admitted to College, Restricted from Work.”

30 A research project using 417 questionnaires gathering data from young women in institutions of higher education conducted in 2002 and 2003 found four main reasons why these females wanted higher education: to gain respect, to avoid early marriage and obtain a temporary haven of autonomy, to gain useful information about males, and to accrue more social capital as a potential marriage partner (see Shavarini, “Admitted to College, Restricted from Work: A Conflict for Young Iranian Women”). Education is sex segregated in Iran, except at the post-high school level, where even relatively minimal contact with males can help young women gain confidence in dealing with the opposite sex.

The young women, Shavarini points out, did not include gaining knowledge or skills among the important reasons they wished to have higher education. Perhaps they sense that women's knowledge and intellectual development are not necessarily highly valued, although sometimes the status of a higher degree will make a woman more attractive to a prospective groom and his family. When talking with girls and young women about their education, I found that they did not discuss the ideas or materials from their classwork, with one exception. It seems that they kept their educational activities compartmentalized from the rest of their lives. One young woman, devoted to her work with computer graphics, did talk about her work and her goals in the field, but did not want to repeat what she said to me for her mother and aunt.

31 Many upper and upper middle class Tehran young people do not need to use such subterfuges to spend time together, but rather go out together, have parties in homes, and may even include alcohol and drugs as part of their entertainment. See Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad for descriptions of such unfettered lifestyles.

32 Literacy, more knowledge about the wider world, and computer access at home or in one of the many internet cafes, can give young women entrance to the Iranian and the world wide web and internet. “Weblogestan” provides Iranian young women, mainly in Tehran, with the space, a cyberspace “room of one's own,” to learn about alternative concepts, interrogate hierarchies and imposed attitudes, develop and express transmuting identities and life-goals, and enter into freer dialogue. (So far, I have not found out about any Aliabad girls who travel to Weblogestan.) Through their blogs and on-line journals, young Iranian women put their critiques and yearnings out in the public arena. Since 2001, blogs in Iran have been increasing at a dramatic rate and may number some 100,000 by now. Persian trails after only English, French, and Portuguese as the fourth most used language on the internet. The government has started intimidation initiatives against the on-line journalists, even arresting some bloggers. See Nouraie-Simone, Fereshteh, “Wings of Freedom: Iranian Women, Identity, and Cyberspace,” On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era, ed. by Nouraie-Simone, Fereshteh (New York, 2005), 61–79Google Scholar.

33 See Friedl, Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village, and “Sources of Female Power in Iran”; and Hegland, Mary Elaine, “Political Roles of Aliabad Women: The Public/Private Dichotomy Transcended,” Shifting Boundaries: Gender Roles in the Middle East, Past and Present, ed. by Keddie, Nikki and Baron, Beth (New Haven, CT, 1991), 215–230Google Scholar; Hegland, Mary Elaine, “Women and the Iranian Revolution: A Village Case Study,” Women and Revolution: Global Expressions, ed. by Diamond, M. J. (Netherlands, 1998), 211–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mary Elaine Hegland, “Wife Abuse and the Political System: A Middle Eastern Case Study”; Hegland, Mary Elaine, “Talking Politics: A Village Widow in Iran,” Personal Encounters: A Reader in Cultural Anthropology, ed. by Walbridge, Linda S. and Sievert, April K. (Boston, MA, 2003), 53–59Google Scholar.

34 See Mary Elaine Hegland, “Women's Moharram Practices: Expanding Opportunities in an Iranian Village,” Outside-Inside Learning From the Field, Workshop on Women, Rituals and Ceremonies in Contemporary Shiite Communities and the Islamic World, Society for Iranian Anthropology (SIRA), Forum for Anthropology and Gender Studies. Centro Incontri Umani, Monte Verta, in Ascona, Switzerland, 8–10 June 2007.

35 For discussion of Iranian women's struggle against the current regime's repression through makeup, fashion, and body-modification in Tehran, see Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad.

36 See Friedl, Erika, Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

37 Elderly women, however, are now often living alone, and left on their own, even regarding material and financial support. See Hegland, “Modernization and Social Change: Impact on Iranian Elderly Social Networks and Care Systems.”