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So last week they were meeting to safeguard their stake in the revolution—not in the streets but just about everywhere else: hospitals, oil company offices, government ministries, courts, factories. The theme of each meeting was, as a woman pharmacist put it, "the unfinished revolution for both men and women." The refrain was the emerging pattern of exclusion of women: religious opinions implying that women are too weak to be judges, objections to coeducation, the absence of any women in the new government. "We would prefer to support Islam," said Mrs. Jaleh Shambayati, a lawyer, "if the government supports us. But I don't think, even if they need women, that they want to work with us."
To be a woman in Iran is to be better off than a woman in most other Middle Eastern countries. But Iran is still a deeply patriarchal society, in which a woman is seen as needing protection and separation from predatory males, her greatest purpose in life to provide her husband with a son. Under Islam, women are equal, in theory. In practice they are not. They are often literally excluded from men's society.
"The principles of Islam are very advanced," says Mrs. Shambayati. In the 7th century, Islamic practice established that women should not be chattel and gave them the rights to reject marriage proposals and to own property—radical ideas at the time. Yet, says Mrs. Shambayati, "although Islam gave women life 1,400 years ago,the right only to breath is not enough today."
It was a radical idea in 1967 as well, when the Shah, over great religious opposition, passed the Family Protection Law. On paper, the law was a great advance for Iranian women; in fact it proved very difficult to enforce. In 1975, a second version of the law was enacted to work out some of these difficulties. In the case of divorce, fathers or grandfathers have custody of children over the age of two (boys) and seven (girls). Marriage before 18 for women is forbidden, but allowed at 15 in special circumstances. To take a second wife, a man may plead nine special circumstances, including "consent of the first wife" and "wife's insubordination to husband." The most radical changes: women were permitted to divorce their husbands under a greater variety of circumstances, and men had to show cause when shedding wives. So it should have come as no surprise that when Khomeini advised suspension of the Family Protection Law, women were outraged, including those who eagerly cover their heads. The Ayatullah backed down.
In Iran's villages, where 53% of the country's 33.6 million people live, the old customs survive. Fifty-three percent of Iranian women remain illiterate, and for them the only means of survival is marriage, their only protection the family. A girl is frequently married by her late teens. On the wedding night, her parents expect to be able to show proof of her virginity. The girl often goes to work and lives in her mother-in-law's house.