Where Are the Women of Our Nation?

In an interesting article in Zanestan, Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani writes about the times when she “didn’t go to school, and was not able to read the timeless writings of Mehrangiz Kar in defense of women’s rights, which promised a brighter future for Iranian women.” Celebrating a generation of activists, who have had a role in the cultural and social awakening of a nation, Khorasani continues, “The current generation of independent Iranian feminists has built itself on the shoulders of Mehrangiz Kar’s generation. We know very well that we stand on their shoulders, and it is in virtue of this background that we have ascended higher and are able to look far ahead into our dreams.”

If Mehrangiz Kar’s generation gave us this “shoulder” on which to stand, one must say that it did carry out its job well.

But Ms. Ahmadi Khorasani’s article was encouraging from another angle as well. In a country where it is close to impossible to influence, experience, be influenced or persist – particularly in the public realm – this persistence has much meaning. In other words, in a country where “experience” has no meaning, and there are gaps in the historical memory of the nation, a group of intellectuals succeed in overcoming a specific socio-political situation and defeat a historical reality: the lack of a historical memory and gaps in intellectual development.

If Noushin recalls that Shirin Ebadi, Nayere Touhidi, Shahla Lahiji, Mahnaz Afkhami, Goli Emami, Farzaneh Taheri, Homa Nategh, Simin Behbahani, Roshanak Dariush and many others have taught her and people like her “the love for humanity and repressed women,” have “pumped courage and bravado in their veins,” have given them “confidence and a feeling of security,” and have “made life colorful and hopeful, despite its obstacles and difficulties” – it means that, far from being barren, that generation has raised children each of which is a bridge to the future.

Children who, perhaps for the first time, not as a slogan, but through thought and experience, have reached the conclusion that, “We could not have gone forward today without our predecessors’ achievements.”

Reaching this golden point is amazing in and itself. The only thing that remains is to ask, for what charge have these women, who love their nation, been pushed away from it? Are they not guilty for standing in front of a historical reality, and making possible the culmination of intellectual experience? Is it not the case that our opponents always accuse us of being barren and lacking historical memory?