Nineteenth-Century Qajar Women in the Public Sphere: An Alternative Historical and Historiographical Reading of the Roots of Iranian Women's Activism

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, women's studies and, more recently, alongside and interlaced with it, gender studies have developed into a full-fledged and broad-based subdiscipline of Middle Eastern studies. Suffering generally, however, from a lack of historical record, the field has tended to focus on the contemporary period, and, accordingly, many of the main contributions have been made by anthropologists, insight sociologists, and political scientists. Historical studies of women and gender in the Middle East have been slower to emerge. In general, relatively little work was done before the mid-1990s;¹ research on Iran and Egypt, however, has been somewhat exceptional in this regard, and the echoes of the rise of women's public voice and action at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, when a public discourse on women began to take shape in the Middle East, have received relatively considerable treatment.²

In the case of Iran, many of the historical studies on women point to the turn of the twentieth century and, more specifically, the 1905–11 constitutional revolution period as the beginning of Persian women's "awakening."³ This awakening is commonly viewed as the roots of what is often defined as "the women's movement" and/or characterized as "feminism." In these narratives, women's (and, most notably, Nasir al-Din Shah's harem's) participation in the 1891 tobacco revolt, washerwomen's donations of their meager savings and rich women's contributions of their jewelry to sponsor a national bank, and the "storming" of the Majlis building by a group of armed women in 1911 are key scenes recalled almost without exception to portray women's "unprecedented" societal-convention-bending actions, political awareness, and personal resolve at the turn of the century. Precedents as such for women's public action, if mentioned, are severely limited and generally restricted to one, mid-nineteenth-century public deveiling (by the Babi Fatima Bigum Baraghani, better known as Qurratu'l-‘Ayn), and the power and influence of one royal woman (Anis al-Dawla, the third wife of Nasir al-Din Shah [r. 1848–96]). The condition of women for most of the nineteenth century is not infrequently portrayed in the historiography rather one-dimensionally, and often emotionally, in harsh and bleak terms, referring, for example, to women as "prisoners" and implying—rightly or wrongly but certainly without sound, groundable historical basis—a general and conscious resentment by women of their gender-based inferiority. Needless to say, sources that can shed light on the lives and thought of Qajar women in the nineteenth century are too few to permit the (re)construction of even a semicomprehensive historical picture. Nonetheless, the historiography of the women's movement in Iran has tended to reflect a narrow, limited, and, one can argue, Orientalist view of pre-revolutionary Qajar women, and what is historically recoverable remains uncomprehensively explored.⁴ A critical assessment of the historiography shows that a dichotomous historiographical narrative of pre- and post-constitutional revolutionary eras is common in Iranian women's studies. According to this narrative, there was almost no "women's history" before the constitutional revolution.

Badr ol-Moluk Bamdad's classic works, for example, published in Persian in two volumes, in 1968 and 1969, and translated into English two years before the Islamic revolution, refer to Persian history before the 1890 tobacco concession and subsequent domestic boycott ("revolt") of tobacco as "the centuries of darkness" when women were "poor creatures," "powerless dolls," secluded from society and concealed "under thick coverings," "dependent like parasites," "prisoners, confined in the home or under the veil and the cloak," who could "look forward to nothing except...