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As agricultural mechanization and new industries sent people flooding into the cities, the old ways began to disintegrate. The first women urban migrants sat alone and frightened in jerry-built shacks in the urban slums. But those women, who once would not have dared to be so bold as to look a man directly in the eyes, had daughters who went to school, developed a taste for clothes and took jobs. "When they needed us to work," says Masoumeh, a secretary whose mother still covers her lower face with a chador, "they decided that a scarf would be sufficient covering." Yet families still expect to choose a woman's spouse and to restrict her behavior away from work.
This kind of conflict is still very painful for Iranian women, and it helps explain their misapprehension of "Western" feminism. Their view is colored, first of all, by the fear that "feminism" means abandoning responsibility toward the family. Last week, when members of the recently formed International Committee for Women's Rights arrived in Tehran as a gesture of support (just about the time Feminist Author Kate Millett was expelled by Khomeini's supporters as a troublemaker), they were greeted with skepticism. A female journalist in Iran, age 34, demanded: "Where were you when we were being tortured? Why have you come now to 'protect' us? We don't need to be told how to get our rights."
Indeed, they have known for a long time. Women carried guns in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. In 1922 members of a women's organization campaigning for literacy were harassed. In 1941 women textile workers began organizing. Poor women were the first to march into gunfire during last year's protests, and chadori hid the wounded. Women fought in the revolutionary guerrilla groups.
"We did not fight because we had been 'modernized' too fast," said a secretary. "We fought because the Shah's regime was greedy and wicked. We hoped this would be a revolution for all the people. We did not expect to be harassed because we were without a veil or scarf."
To Western women, the chador must seem the least convenient garment ever devised. No buttons, no hooks, nothing to do but clutch and, when desperate, hold it in the teeth. But to Iranian women, 60% of whom wear a chador at some time, it is simply a garment, not restrictive once one gets used to it. These days it is many other things as well: a continuing protest against the Shah (whose father summarily snatched away veils in 1936, an act then the equivalent of cultural rape), a statement of support for Khomeini, something worn to fulfill the religious duty of hejab (veiling or modest dress). Today, for both zealots and some liberals, it is a reaffirmation of a woman's own, specifically Iranian identity, a way of saying "Iranian is beautiful," something like the statement that wearing an Afro or a dashiki makes.