Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T23:44:33.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Hidden from History? Women Workers in Modern Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Valentine M. Moghadam*
Affiliation:
Illinois State University, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.

Extract

A generation ago, British feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham (1974) asked why women were “hidden from history“—and helped to found the field of women's history. Years later, Gayatri Spivak (1988) asked, “Can the subaltern speak?“—and added a new dimension to the field of subaltern studies. Throughout, Marxists have inquired into the relationship between the sexual division of labor and the mode of production, although Engels’ cogent commentary about the state, the family and reproduction (and the “world-historical defeat of the female sex“) was subsequently eclipsed by analyses that focused on capital and (the male working-) class. These questions are used to frame my paper, which examines the history and historiography of working-class women in Iran.

The field of Iranian historical studies is growing, but one is struck by the paucity of studies on working-class women, the dearth of data on women workers, and the absence of working women's voices in the major English-language studies of social, economic, and political history (e.g., works by Lambton, Issawi, Bharier, Keddie, Abrahamian, Ladjevardi, Bayat).

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Janet Afary and to Mohamad Tavakoli for comments on this article. The article is an extended version of a paper prepared for the workshop ‘Twentieth Century Iran: History from Below”, which took place at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 25-26 May 2001. Thanks are due to Touraj Atabaki for organizing the workshop and encouraging me to write the paper.

References

References Cited

Abrahamian, Ervand. 1982. Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Afary, Janet. 1994. “Social Democracy and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911,” in Foran, John, ed., A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2143.Google Scholar
Afary, Janet. 1996. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press).Google Scholar
Afshar, Haleh. 1985. “The Position of Women in an Iranian Village,” in Afshar, Haleh, ed., Women, Work and Ideology in the Third World. (London: Tavistock), 6682.Google Scholar
Bayat, Assef. 1987. Workers and Revolution in Iran (London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd).Google Scholar
Bayat-Philipp, Mangol. 1978. “Women and Revolution in Iran, 1905-1911,” in Beck, Lois and Keddie, Nikki, eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press), 295308.Google Scholar
Beck, Lois. 1978. “Women among Qashqai Nomadic Pastoralists in Iran,” in Beck, Lois and Keddie, Nikki, eds., Women in the Muslim World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 351–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bharier, Julian. 1971. Economic Development in Iran 1900-1970 (London: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Bradley, Harriet. 1996. “Changing Social Structures: Class and Gender,” in Hall, Stuart, Held, David, Hubert, Don, and Thompson, Kenneth, eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (London: Blackwell), 123–48.Google Scholar
Clancy-Smith, Julia. 1999. “A Woman Without Her Distaff: Gender, Work and Handicraft Production in Colonial North Africa,” in Meriwether, Margaret L. and Tucker, Judith E., eds., Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, The Social History of the Modern Middle East Series (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 2562.Google Scholar
Cuno, Kenneth M. 1995. “Joint Family Households and Rural Notables in nineteenth Century Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25: 485502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delrish, Bashari. 1357/1996. Woman in the Qajar Era (Tehran: Office of Studies and Research). (In Persian.)Google Scholar
Engels, Friedrich. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, foreword by Evelyn Reed (New York: Pathfinder Press).Google Scholar
Floor, Willem. 1984. Industrialization in Iran 1900-1941, University of Durham Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Occasional Papers Series No. 23.Google Scholar
Floor, Willem. 1985. Labour Unions, Law and Conditions in Iran (1900-1941), University of Durham Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Occasional Papers Series No. 26.Google Scholar
Friedl, Erika. 1991. “The Dynamics of Women's Spheres of Action in Rural Iran.” in Keddie, Nikkie R. and Baron, Beth, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History. (New Haven: Yale University Press), 195214.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Ellis Jay, ed. 1996. The Social History of Labor in the Middle East, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press).Google Scholar
Gulick, John and Gulick, Margaret E.. 1978. “The Domestic Social Environment of Women and Girls in Isfahan, Iran.” in Beck, Lois and Keddie, Nikki, eds., Women in the Muslim World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, Fred. 1979. Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Harmondworth, United Kingdom: Penguin).Google Scholar
Hambly, Gavin R. G., ed. 1998. Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage and Piety (New York: St. Martin's Press).Google Scholar
Islamic Republic of Iran. 1980. Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, trans. Algar, Hamid (Berkeley: Mizan Press).Google Scholar
Issawi, Charles, ed. 1971. The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1940 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).Google Scholar
Keddie, Nikki. 1980. Iran: Religion, Politics and Society: Collected Essays (London: Frank Cass).Google Scholar
Keddie, Nikki R. and Baron, Beth eds. 1991. Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Ladjevardi, Habib. 1985. Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press).Google Scholar
Lambton, Ann K.S. 1953. Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (London: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 1998 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press).Google Scholar
Meriwether, Margaret L. and Tucker, Judith E.. 1999. “Introduction” in Meriwether, Margaret L. and Tucker, Judith E., eds., Social History of Women and Gender in the Modern Middle East, The Social History of the Modern Middle East Series (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 124.Google Scholar
Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and Capitalist Accumulation on a World Scale. (London: Zed).Google Scholar
Mirani, Kaveh. 1983. “Social and Economic Change in the Role of Women, 1956-1978” in Neshat, Guity, ed., Women and Revolution in Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 6986.Google Scholar
Moaddel, Mansoor. 1994. “Shi'i Political Discourse and Class Mobilization in the Tobacco Movement of 1890-92.” in Foran, John, ed., A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 2: 143.Google Scholar
Moghadam, Valentine M. 1985. Accumulation Strategy and Class Formation: The Making of the Industrial Labor Force in Iran, 1962-1977 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International).Google Scholar
Moghadam, Valentine M. 1993. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press).Google Scholar
Moghadam, Valentine M. 1998. Women, Work and Economic Reform in the Middle East and North Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers).Google Scholar
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 1998. The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracus: Syracuse University Press).Google Scholar
Nashat, Guity ed. 1983. Women and Revolution in Iran (Boulder, CO: Westview Press).Google Scholar
Paidar, Parvin. 1995. Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Poya, Maryam. 1999. Women, Work and Islamism (London: Zed Books).Google Scholar
Quataert, Donald. 1996. “The Social History of Labor in the Ottoman Empire: 1800-1914,” in Jay Goldberg, Ellis, ed., The Social History of Labor in the Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 1936.Google Scholar
Reiter, Rayna R. (ed.) 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press).Google Scholar
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1974. Hidden From History: Rediscovering Women in History from the 17th Century to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books).Google Scholar
Razavi, Shahrashoub. 1993. “Women, Work and Power in the Rafsanjan Basin of Iran,” in Afshar, Haleh, ed., Women in the Middle East: Perceptions, Realities and Struggles for Liberation (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar
Seyf, Ahmad. 2001. “Iranian Textile Handicrafts in the Nineteenth Century: A Note,” Middle Eastern Studies, 37, no. 3 (July): 4958.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Ch. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 271313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sullivan, Zohreh. 2001. Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).Google Scholar
Tapper, Nancy. 1978. “The Women's Subsociety among the Shahsevan Nomads of Iran,” in Beck, Lois and Keddie, Nikki, eds., Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
Tucker, Judith. 1985. Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Max. 1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar
Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba. 1995. “Economic Activities of Safavid Women in the Shrine-City of Ardabil, Iranian Studies 31: 247–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar