by Chiara Leone
In the following paragraphs, I articulate why gender and class, rather than religion, were the most significant uniting forces in the Iranian Revolution. The “hidden history” of the Revolution’s aftermath and its impact on Iranian women challenges Orientalist images that misrepresent women’s resistance. I argue that an image captured by American photojournalist David Burnett in 1979 during anti-Shah protests speaks to this, as the photo challenges Orientalist stereotypes by evoking the history of women’s resistance in Iran that western media elides.
Captioned “Crowds from all walks of life attend an anti-Shah rally” the photograph captures five women, veiled and unveiled, linking arms and hands. The women are at the front of a demonstration, marching ahead of several men who make up the photo’s background. They are the face of the protest, united as they lead the crowd through the streets of Tehran. The image presents covered and uncovered women in possession of the same public mobility and autonomy, destabilizing the notion of a male-dominated revolution and a home-bound, oppressed, acquiescent Muslim woman. Burnett complicates Orientalist tropes of Iranian women, which depict them as inherently oppressed and passive, and resituates Iranian women as revolutionary actors.
In an interview with the CBC, Minoo Jalali argues that the collective participation of women in the Iranian Revolution has become the revolution’s “hidden history” (“The Stolen Revolution”). Western media portrays the Shah as having implemented radical gender reforms. However, these reforms only benefitted middle-class, urban women. And while women obtained the right to vote under the Shah, there was no free elections for women to participate in. Women had the right to education, but many lower- and working-class women did not have the financial means to attend university. The Shah’s reforms primarily benefitted middle-class, urban women. However, because the Pahlavi regime’s ban on the hijab impacted middle-class and poor women, urban and rural women, it became a symbol of both gender and class resistance during anti-Shah protests (“Uses and Abuses of Fashion”).
Maya Mikdashi argues that gender and class are not things the body can be outside of, that there is no such thing as an unclassed, ungendered body (2020). When women lead and joined the protests against the Shah, they did so as working-class women, urban women, Muslim women, Christian women, poor women, rural women. Religious oppression and gender oppression and class oppression motivated women’s resistance. The portrayal of religious oppression as the central motivating force of the revolution is both reductive and removes Iranian women from their gendered, classed positions.
In Burnett’s image, the five women appear to be middle-class—they wear jeans, heeled boots, and most of them don trench coats of various lengths. Their attire is not the miniskirts and skin-revealing dress that “Western” media has made into a trope of what Iranian women wore “all the time” before the Revolution. The diversity in their head coverings presents women of different religious backgrounds and suggests that they are joining the revolution for multiple reasons (foregrounding Islam paradoxically removes its significance as a uniting factor because it exists as a difference). Their linked hands are a representation of solidarity. Minoo explains that visions for the future were diverse and ubiquitous among those protesting the Shah; potential outcomes were not yet apparent at this moment of the revolution (“The Stolen Revolution”). In this vein, Burnett displays these women as holding desires and visions for the future. The photograph redraws them as classed, gendered subjects, pulling them out of Orientalist, monolithic frameworks. It prompts onlookers to consider these women in ways Mikdashi encourages—as multifaceted, intersectional subjects (2020).
Burnett’s photo allows viewers to witness the solidarity of the women who joined the Iranian Revolution while showing that they were not passive victims of patriarchal, political, class, or religious oppression. The photo captures women as revolutionary actors. The “hidden history” of the Iranian Revolution is thus on view; the women who led it standing together, hand-in-hand.
Chiara Leone is a third-year student at the University of Toronto majoring in Women & Gender Studies and English, with a minor in Creative Writing. She focuses on domestic labour and how it affects relationships, families, and communities in her research.
WGS340 WOMEN & REVOLUTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST 