Veiled Employment: Islamism and the Political Economy of Women’s Employment in Iran

2. Modernization, Revolution, and Islamism: Political Economy of Women’s Employment

53 Modernization, Revolution, and Islamism Political Economy of Women’s Employment Roksana Bahramitash and Hadi Salehi Esfahani Background to the Modernization Era Iran is a country of geographical and cultural diversity. More than a third of the country is covered by deserts and mountains that separate regions characterized by a variety of climatic and agricultural conditions. The people who settled in these regions have unique dialects and traditions that add to the variety of socioeconomic conditions in the country. This diversity resulted in a variety of production processes and different ways in which women were incorporated into the production process. Women played an important role at different stages of production throughout the country. In agriculture, they were always present in planting, weeding, picking, harvesting (tea leaves and cotton), and working in rice paddies. Other types of production activities in which women’s roles were prominent included raising livestock and poultry, bee-keeping, and silkworm cultivation. In industry, they were involved in handicraft and in carpet weaving. In fact, it is still a woman’s job to spin, dye, and weave yarn. Cloth and carpets were and still are handed over mainly to male members of the family for trade (Beck and Keddi 1978, 358–60). Historically, some 70 percent of all cloth weaving was done by women in Iran. In rural areas, where more than 70 percent of carpet weaving was done, about 90 percent of the tasks were carried out by women (Halliday 54 • Veiled Employment 1979, 191–93). There is evidence that Iran’s textile industry was dominated by home-based production, and wool and spinning and cotton were produced in cottage industries by women who were at the heart of cotton and silk production in many parts of Iran such as Gilan, Mazandran, Kashan, Yazd, and Isfahan (Seyf 2001). Moreover , nomadic and pastoralist societies relied on the work of women in significant ways; activities such as milk processing, preparation of animal derivatives, caring for animals, fuel gathering, baking bread, weaving, spinning, and dyeing yarn have traditionally been women’s jobs (Poya 1999, 45–47). Traditional production processes typically did not separate work from the home. This meant that women’s engagement in the economy was part of community life, similar to other subsistence economies where the household is the basic unit both of production and of consumption. Parvin Paidar argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iran experienced a shift away from family subsistence production to cash crops for export. This shift led to a transition from small private landownership and state-owned lands to large-scale private holdings whose landlords lived in cities. The transition had a major impact on the family as a unit of production, as part of the trend toward commercialization of agriculture. Such a transition is typically associated with a deterioration in women’s economic position as it cuts them off from the means of production. Along with the shift toward commercialized agriculture, there was a shift from cottage production of carpet weaving to more commercial workshops. As the demand for export of Persian carpets increased, cottage industry shifted to factory production with notorious conditions for women (Foran 1989, 40; Paidar 1995, 49). As discussed in the introduction, transition from a nonindustrial to an industrial (modern) economy is not necessarily positive for all women. In fact, contrary to the commonly held view that modernization liberates women, the great bulk of gender and development literature indicates an inverse relationship between development process and women’s economic status, at least in the early stage of the transition process. This relationship was first documented in the Modernization, Revolution, and Islamism • 55 work of Ester Boserup in 1970 (here we use modernization, industrialization , and development interchangeably, a point discussed in the introductory chapter). Beginning with Boserup, there has been a vast and growing literature on how early stages of development deprived women of means and resources of production (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 1988; Shiva 1991; Kabeer 1991; Benería 2003). One of the ways that women’s economic status is undermined in the early development stages lies in a declining level of access to resources when compared to the situations in preindustrial and subsistence economies. With the process of modernization/industrialization , access to means of production is consolidated in the hands of men, thereby alienating women from both the production process and the allocation of economic resources. Furthermore, according to the...