Traditions are constantly being redefined and recreated to suit the current situation. Today's notions of public and private space in Iran are recreations of older traditions, and as recreations or new definitions of older practices emerge, they can create more definitive boundaries than previously existed. From the beginning of the Islamic era in Iran, traditional, patriarchal concepts of public and private meant that men generally controlled the public sphere while women exercised their power within the private space. There were also separate gendered power structures, in which women gained respect based on age, the gender of their children, and various other factors. Women, especially in the countryside and tribal areas, exercised considerable power, and were not highly circumscribed by Islamic laws regarding veiling. As much of the Iranian population lived in rural settings until the mid-1900s, most Iranian women were not required to follow strict hejâb, or veiling, and their lives were not as strictly regulated as they are today. Between 1925 and 1979, societal attitudes towards women's place within Iranian society underwent further changes, because the Pahlavi regime forcibly revised the public/private space dichotomy. Women increasingly gained power in the public sphere, becoming judges, doctors, architects, etc. However, this forced modernization was too rapid, and the Shah's project ultimately failed. More conservative portions of society such as the olamâ and bâzâris regained control. They enforced Khomeini's Islamization project, creating a neotraditional definition of public and private space that required stricter gender boundaries in society than had previously existed, as evidenced in Tahmineh Milani's The Hidden Half.

The neotraditional definition of public and private space further limits Iranian women's agency. Whereas in the past, urban women were relegated to the private sphere but could exercise power within this subordinate structure, now this space too has become public, as evidenced in the film The Hidden Half. Neither the public nor the private sphere fully permits Iranian women a place to be themselves without fear of societal reprisal, and women's fears are emerging in both literature and cinema. Utilizing neohistoricist criticism, I argue that the title, The Hidden Half, refers to the private feelings or true identities of Iranian women, which are not even allowed to be fully revealed in the private, family sphere, so that women remain unknown even within a space that was historically reserved for them.