How do industrialists in developing countries respond to globalization and trade liberalization? It is almost a truism that businesspeople are motivated by profits. Thus, it seems logical that exporters would support trade liberalization, which increases access to opportunities and inputs on global markets, and domestically oriented producers would resist efforts to dismantle protectionism, to which many manufacturers in the developing world owe their very existence. What, then, explains different patterns of business collective action in different countries?

This book has developed a model of business responses to global economic integration and tested it through a comparative analysis of business politics in Tunisia and Morocco, where investors in the same industrial sectors reacted very differently to economic opening. Tunisia and Morocco had parallel episodes of economic liberalization, are both highly dependent on trade with the EU, and have comparable linkages to the global economy and production profiles. In response to trade liberalization and global economic changes in the 1990s, Tunisian industrialists avoided collective lobbying efforts, focusing instead on firm-based upgrading or exit strategies, while a handful of larger industrialists conveyed policy preferences to state officials through informal channels. Moroccan producers, however, organized vigorous collective lobbying campaigns through producer associations and increasingly relied on public channels such as the media to convey policy interests.

On the surface, distinct Tunisian and Moroccan business responses defy a materialist logic.

“Since American military and other aid has brought my country such important direct and indirect benefits,” declared Mohammad Reza Shah in an autobiography written a few years after the CIA returned him to the throne, “I hope I shall not sound ungrateful if I state my conviction that we have been receiving glaringly inadequate amounts of it.” In fact, the Cold War brought American military and economic aid to Iran by the late 1950s, helping the Shah consolidate his power against communism and the secular and religious opposition. He expressed his own preeminence in a 1973 interview with Oriana Fallaci: “Where there's no monarchy, there is anarchy, or an oligarchy or a dictatorship.”

Iran's integration into the world market and the ensuing economic growth based on rising oil revenues bolstered the state's power. Unleashing the unpredictable forces of change and expediently defending the throne with either co-optation or repression, the state launched several projects that changed the structure of the economy, the labor force, and the gender division of labor. Urban communities expanded with migration from rural areas, and the enlarging industrial and service sectors absorbed even more workers. More women, unveiled and educated, followed Western fashions and joined the growing labor market. Many began working in gender mixed occupations, while experienced the “double day,” working both inside and outside the home.

Ashraf Dehghani, the only woman in the Central Committee of the underground opposition, the Organization of Iranian People's Feda'i Guerrillas (OIPFG), was twenty-two years old in 1971, when she was arrested. Her memoirs recall her prison experience: “The thugs strapped me to a bed. … whipping the soles of my feet. … they gave me electric shocks using [a] truncheon-shaped electrode,” then they “strapped me to a bench, face down. The shameless vermin dropped his trousers and assaulted me… .” Resisting SAVAK and the state's vicious rapists and interrogators, Dehghani's defense was to maintain silence. Having so provoked and diminished her abusers, she was transferred to Tehran's infamous Evin Prison, where still more cruel “professional” torturers attempted to force a confession. There, she remembered, “they picked up a pair of tongs, gripping and twisting my flesh” and “they began compressing my fingers in a vice. They said they were going to pull out my nails… .” But she persisted in her resistance while wishing her own death under the state's torture. Iranian scholars and feminists alike have largely ignored Dehghani's tale. She had a unique life and experiences: she was a non-conformist, militant, and defiant political actor.

In contrast, many other politically active women made their accommodations with the state, representing its class and political interests. One such woman was Mahnaz Afkhami, the Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran or WOI (1970–79) and Minister of State for Women's Affairs (1970–78).

“I don't underestimate [women], as shown by the fact that they have derived more advantages than anyone else from my White Revolution,” stated the Shah. Whether or not the monarch was sincere when he said so, he was taken at his word by the Ayatollah Khomeini who denounced the Shah's reforms and Family Protection Laws as “anti-Islamic.” They were “intended for the break-up of Muslim families,” maintained the Ayatollah. Those responsible for the laws are “condemned by Islam; women who utilize those laws and divorce are not legally divorced and if they remarry, they are adulterous and their children are illegitimate and disinherited. …”

The White Revolution marked an intense state-clergy strife that temporarily led to the supremacy of the state over religion but also over its secular opponents. Although the clergy did not uniformly oppose the state, the Shah succeeded in winning over the religious opposition while himself appropriating more firmly the ideological imagery of “God, the Shah, and the nation.” Proclaiming that his reforms exemplified “justice and equality,” he claimed they were compatible with the “true religion of Islam.” Through women's suffrage and his gender policies, enacted despite the clergy's jurisdiction over family and gender relations and their opposition, the Shah promoted his modernizing posture, especially in the Western hemisphere. In his legal reforms, he was more triumphant than his father in shaking the power of the religious establishment by depriving it of a major source of strength over nearly thirteen centuries: the theoretical, and to a lesser extent, the actual privatization and control of women.

He “was the very embodiment of a traditional masculine character.” So Ashraf Pahlavi remembered her father Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. “Although I feared my father, I shared some of his qualities: his stubbornness, his fierce pride, and his iron will,” wrote his powerful daughter, the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Shah, the second and the last Pahlavi ruler of Iran.

Reza Shah left behind no autobiographies, but as Amin Banani notes, he “had to perfection the politician's talent for opportunism.” While still uncertain in his power, for example, “he knew how to play upon the religious emotions of the people.” He was “antagonistic toward the clergy,” although he was “basically apathetic to religion.” There was also “a definite ideological motivation” in his political actions. Dedicated to nationalism and statism, he sought a rapid adoption of “the material advances of the West [by] a breakdown of the traditional power of religion and a growing tendency toward secularism.” He built a modernizing, Westernizing, and centralizing state in Iran, a state that was based on a strong army and repression, not the consensus of the governed.

Reza Shah introduced policies that altered the lives of Iranian women. For the first time, some women entered into the modern sectors of the economy, public and non-sex segregated schools were established, family laws were modified, and unveiling was enforced forcibly in 1936.

Born at the turn of the twentieth-century in Tehran and confined to the private world of the family, my veiled grandmother took lessons in her native Persian language from a tutor at her parents' home. More mobile, my mother welcomed the opportunity to attend school, to and from which she was always escorted. In 1936 when she was almost nine years old, she later recalled, a local gendarme stopped her, admonishing her to abandon the chador in favor of complete unveiling. My own experiences have been vastly different but in some ways similar. I received a superior education, but until the last two years of high school, I was always accompanied. I wore a knee-length school uniform with my hair uncovered, except in mosques or in neighborhoods with major Shi'i shrines, where I had to wear the chador. Hardly changing my appearance when I left my American university for Iran during the 1979 Revolution, I carried a shawl in my bag to ward off unpleasant encounters. Home after twelve years of exile, I was wearing a black, loose and long tunic to conduct interviews at the University of Tehran when I was approached by a contentious Islamic revolutionary guard who had determined that I was improperly veiled: “Sister, pull your scarf over your forehead to hide your hair completely,” he commanded. Hearing similar remarks in 1997 and 2002 but to a lesser degree in 2005, I concluded: history repeats itself, though with twists and not always following the same scripts.

“Behind the closed doors at home, prohibited from everything in life, education, training and social life, women are regarded as mindless, like infants; they are confined to the burdens of household work and childbearing and are considered the slaves and servants of their husbands,” wrote Bibi Khanum Astarabadi (1852–1920), an outspoken and prominent Qajar woman. This was not a tradition in Europe, she noted: “This is our Islamic custom.” Similarly, in describing women's absence in public, Seyyed Jamalzadeh, a noted novelist commented: “No women can be seen in this country of men, but strangely, half of the walking population in the streets is wrapped in black bags from head to the toe without even an opening to breathe.” A British orientalist, Clara Rice, observed that “most trades are in the hands of men, such as pottery-making, calico printing, felt-hat making and confectionery. All shops are kept by men. … there is no profession open to women. Art, music and literature may be said to be closed to them. All occupations followed by them [women] call for manual work rather than brainwork.”

Yet, these invisible women were capable of action, as in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 when many women gathered in the streets of Tehran took off their veils and shouted: “Long live freedom. … We must … live the way we want!” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, Iran was economically backward, politically chaotic, predominantly Shi'i Islam, and a patriarchal society.

The Islamic regime views “women's work in the public sphere as incompatible with household responsibilities,” wrote Jaleh Shadi-Talab, a Tehran University sociologist. Its policies, Shahla Jelodarzadeh, the Sixth Majles deputy noted, “give preference to men's employment” and “family management to women.” Consistently criticized, Mitra Bagherian, a Plan and Budget economist indicated, “women are faulted for lack of compliance with the strict rules concerning head cover or overdress clothes, or even having a trace of cosmetics” and sometimes, are threatened with dismissal. This reflects governmental expectations on “the kind and the extent of the hejab at work which leave women contemptuous and cynical, if not rebellious.”

Despite earlier restrictions and harsh discriminatory policies that discouraged women's work outside the home, the post-war reconstruction policies and the introduction of economic liberalization induced more women to join the labor market. The number of women in private and public occupations grew, but the share of women in the labor force declined in comparison with the statistics of the late 1970s. Women also entered the educational system in large numbers, and by 2002, they constituted about 71 percent of university enrollments. Alarmed by this upward trend, some officials initiated in 2004, though unsuccessfully, a debate on a quota system to dissuade women from pursuing higher education. Although the Islamic regime preferred to keep women in the household, and initially, underreported their labor force participation in the census statistics, with their presence in the economy and the educational system, women have begun to pose indirect challenges to those political and social taboos that uphold motherhood and wifehood as women's primary and only responsibility.

Holding their black chadors tightly under their chins with right hands and beating their chests with their left fists, hundreds of Muslim women organized and led by men marched in Tehran's streets to express support for their messianic revolutionary leader. They chanted: “Beloved Khomeini, Order Me to Shed Blood for You” (Khomeini-ye Azizam Begu Barat Khoon Berizam). While glorifying Islam and reviling the West, many revolutionary participants warned unveiled women: “Wear a Head Scarf or Get Your Head Knocked” (Ya Rusari Ya Toosari). They then threatened the uncloaked women with: “Death to Unveiling” (Marg bar bi-Hejabi). Other slogans linked unveiling to male impotence. One motto stressed, “Unveiling Stems From Men's Emasculation” (Bi-Hejabi-ye Zan az bi-Qeyrati-ye Mard ast) while another emphasized, “Death to the Unveiled Woman and her Cowardly Husband” (Marg bar Zan-e bi-Hejab va Shohar-e bi-Qeyrat-e ou). So powerful were messages that the hejab (cover or modesty) and reveiling became one of the most pervasive symbols of the revolution, standing for Islamism, anti-imperialism and anti-Westernism. The Islamic revolution was thus turning into a sexual counter-revolution, a struggle over women's sexuality.

Secular women, intensely politicized, participated with a plethora of ideologies. Critical of cultural and economic trends in the subordination of women, they spoke against the recurring attempts at forced reveiling, although none linked it to the control of women's sexuality. Homa Nateq, a prominent and progressive historian, hailed Iranian women's heroic revolutionary activities, as she spoke to a large crowd at the University of Tehran in early 1979.

Shirin Ebadi, the 2003 Nobel Laureate in Peace disclosed that “it is not easy to be a woman in Iran,” because some laws “make it tough for women to be active.” The civil rights advocate contends that the revolution made her “a fighter” like a “cacti in the desert” who stayed “strong to survive.” Claiming that Islam is compatible with democracy, she asserts that the religion is misused by “male-dominated Muslim states” which justify gender inequality “when in fact this practice has its roots in patriarchal cultures prevailing in these societies.” In her legal practice, she defends the rights of women, children, political prisoners and dissidents, although she spent twenty-five days in solitary confinement for having presented a witness in a political murder case. “Our lady of peace,” chanted thousands of enthusiastic supporters at Tehran's airport as she returned home with her trophy. “This is not my award, it belongs to the people of Iran,”she declared, with tears in her eyes. “This prize means freedom, development of peace and democracy.” Today's Iranian women are “steel magnolias, not shrinking violets.” They work, participate in politics, articulate their demands, and significantly, they seek entitlement to their rights, as women, and as equal members of the state and society. Rich or poor, secular or religious, young or old, women in the Islamic state find ways around or resist obstacles.

Women in the Islamic Republic are not passive. They are active and engage in the politics of resistance.