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Mandana (pseud.)
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Mandana When Pari and I interviewed Mandana (pseud.) in her home in 1992, she was working in a theater in a large Western city. Born in Tehran in 1963, she talked in Persian for two hours in a ostensibly seamless narrative about growing up, about rebellion against gender roles, and about the effect of the revolution and diaspora on Iranian marriage. The moments I select below illuminate with poignancy how her story—like the stories of Pari, Tahereh, and Mohamad Tavakoli—illustrates the ways family dynamics duplicate the dynamic of the repressive state apparatus. In Iran at the age of fourteen, in 1976, I was introduced to political and social issues. I am now twenty-seven years old. We were a family of nine children and I was the favorite daughter in the family. I was never satisfied with the ordinary, which included the usual housewifely roles for girls in our society. Although my father was moderate, open-minded, and democratic, my brothers were not. My father was a landlord with orchards and estates; he was also a Haji [one who makes the pilgrimage to Mecca]. But he never made us wear the chador. One of my brothers, however, was very conservative and held traditional values—not, of course, for himself but for his sisters. The law in our house was that a brother’s word was higher than that of the father. Since the age of fourteen, I worked and I read. But my brother disapproved of my reading books that he had not read. He would say, “If you have to read, read novels. Why are you reading philosophy?” When I was sixteen I was involved in high school speech and theater activities and was very successful. I was also very interested in anything that had to do with electricity, but my family said that electrical engineering was not a suitable profession for a woman. But I was good in performance: in speech, I won first place in school and in the provinces. I played small parts on the radio and television in their children’s programs. But my brother said that women who go into radio and TV were corrupt. I worked in different communities, especially with women. I worked for three years in factories with about two hundred lower-middle- to lower-class 88 there: remembering home women. I worked, during summers, mostly in pharmaceutical factories to find out the problems of working women. My brother was opposed to this and said, “What are they going to pay you? I’ll double the money; stay home.” But this motivated me even more. Later, when I was about to get married, I told my husband that I wanted to work, no matter how much money he earned. I was eventually fired from the factory where I’d studied the syndicate’s books to see what rights women had in order to try to familiarize them with their rights. But my main accomplishment in the factory was to get a supervisor who harassed women fired. I was fired then also, but he was permanently removed from his position and the women were overjoyed when this happened. They knew the kind of man he was and were familiar with the propositions he had made to me. They even held a demonstration when I left. Women are progressing, changing, evolving. Not all changes are progress, but the changes are good. One of the problems among Iranians in the United States is the increasing divorce rate. Why, people ask, do Iranian women ask for a divorce as soon as they leave Iran? The explanations are those produced by patriarchal thinking—that women in the United States have freedom and only want to have fun, so they forget their vows. That’s not how I see things. An important change takes place in women when they come to the United States. In Iran women suffer so much from ignorant repressions—women of all classes—that when they arrive at a place that offers any opportunity, they break away from all restrictions. Also, however, Iranian women who have come into this society have proven themselves superior in meeting new challenges. But in contrast, men stay the same. They have had their opportunities and there is no more water for them to swim in. In 90 percent of the Iranian families who have come to the United States after the revolution, women have more responsibility than men. Women are the ones who run...