The Invisible Decade: Feminist Conversations, Contestations, and Coalition Building in 1940s Iran

During the 1940s, Iran began to experience the age of transnationality and globalization, decades before the term emerged as an analytical category in the 1960s, or was popularized by Joseph Levitt (in the context of the globalization of the market) in the 1980s. The occupation of the country by the Allied Forces, and the subsequent establishment of a government still in transition, offered Iranian social reformers and activists a unique opportunity to establish nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), political parties, free publications, and professional, charity, and religious associations, and to forge public debates and form national and international conversations about visions for change, the future direction of the country, and its place within the international, global community.
Iranian women were at the forefront of this wave. After Reza Shah’s abdication from the throne in 1941, women’s publications and organizations began to emerge, and feminist national and international networks began to flourish. On the national level, for the first (and maybe one of the only) time, Iranian feminists and their respective organizations built intricate networks, forged conversations, and built coalitions across class, ideology, and political lines. On the international level, representatives of women’s organizations attended various international conferences to connect, converse, and create alliances with women activists, feminists and female social reformers around the world. It is obvious that some of the most skillful women activists, negotiators, lobbyists, and advocates in Iranian history were trained during this decade and through these processes.
This paper presents findings on two questions pertaining to women’s activism during this incredibly complex decade. What sort of labour (i.e.: lobbying, coalition building, networking, advocacy), and with whom, went into the unsuccessful, yet groundbreaking first suffrage campaign of 1943-46? And how did women navigate between the masculinized nationalist cause on the one hand and their international feminist commitments on the other?