Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (review)

One of the toughest nuts to crack for students of women and gender in the Middle East is whether or not to describe a modern policy or movement as "feminist." Could a state effort at improving women's literacy be inspired by genuine feminist commitment to sexual equality? Sure. Could it also be a half-measure, cynically designed to co-opt an equal-rights feminist agenda? Of course. In short, a confident assessment of continuity and change in cultural attitudes toward gender has been elusive—especially in the case of modern Iranian society. In 1995, Parvin Paidar asserted that there was no essential difference between the misogyny of leftists, nationalists, and Islamists. How can a society commit to both the forced unveiling of women (from 1936 to 1941) and forced veiling of women (since 1979) under the general rubric of women's progress?

Kashani-Sabet brings three important contributions to the problem. First, her analysis is carefully rooted in a superb review and synthesis of scholarly literature through 2010. Second, she incorporates two important cultural primary sources. Her analysis of late nineteenth-century treatises on public health illustrates how their concerns helped to set the framework for discussions of "the woman question"in the twentieth-century popular press and in policy circles. Her skillful selection of images from the press fully displays the cultural divide between Pahlavi Iran and Islamic Republican Iran, as well as the key continuities in their maternalist discourse. Indeed, Kashani-Sabet's transposition of "maternalism" from the Western to the Iranian context is her third contribution, providing explanatory coherence to the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of Iran's experience of feminism.

Maternalists, in Kashani-Sabet's analysis, "did not at all wish to establish gender equality or to combat patriarchy. . . . [Maternalist] priorities for Iranian policy makers mattered because they advanced the state's political ideology (5)." Framing the analysis this way occasionally causes Kashani-Sabet to elide the mix of feminist and maternalist ideas that a society or individual may have at any given historical moment. This drawback is apparent in her discussion of women's suffrage from the 1940s to the 1960s. But the sources themselves do not disclose the full extent of an individual's commitment to maternalism or feminism, partly because maternalism does not exist as a formal ideology separate from other intellectual and political commitments. One context that shows the viability of Kashani-Sabet's thesis about Iranian maternalism, however, is the constitution of the Islamic Republic—notably, Articles 20 and 21.¹ Though it is not the focus of her study, Kashani-Sabet's analysis of Iranian maternalism reveals these articles less as shallow window dressing than as an Islamist expression of maternalism.

The Islamist strand of maternalism that now forms part of the legitimacy of today's Islamic Republic was not in evidence before 1940. It has stretched over time to allow for some important women's rights (particularly, suffrage) without ever approaching a feminism of equal rights. Yet, as the epilogue of the book notes, the One Million Signatures Campaign of 2006 and the Green Movement of 2009 show that an Iranian Islamist equal-rights feminism has, in fact, emerged in opposition to a maternalist Islamic Republic. Thus, with this more complete picture, Kashani-Sabet's book is able to recount the historical changes in cultural attitudes about gender in modern Iran more definitively.