From Marxist Organizations to Feminism

Iranian women were extremely active during the revolution of 1979. They were or became active within various political organizations and fought for democracy and freedom. The focus of this paper is on the activities of a group of Iranian women leftists within Marxist organizations in Iran and their experiences in exile. These political activists had to leave Iran when it became a crime to be a Marxist. During their activities in Iran, their Marxist convictions limited the ways in which they dealt with issues such as gender, sexuality, and women’s rights. However the fact that they became so active made them potentially aware of their rights as women. It was later when this potential knowledge became manifest. These women who initially underestimated women’s questions and suppressed their womanhood in the framework of Marxist ideology, became strong advocates of women’s rights and serious contributors in the women’s movement when they were in exile. As a 13 year-old girl growing up in a secular family in Iran in 1975, I never thought of becoming either a Marxist or a Feminist. About three years later, some months before the revolution of 1979, I became a passionate follower of a Marxist-Leninist organization and was ready to sacrifice my life for the Marxist ideology. In that period, the feminist movement appeared to me as a waste of time. I believed that women’s problems would be solved as soon as a classless society was established. So why waste time changing the condition of women when one could invest in changing the whole society? It took years of suppression as a woman by the Iranian Islamic regime and some years of life in exile in the Netherlands for me to realize that the fight for improvements in the condition of women could not be postponed for any reason at all. It was then that I realized that the women’s movement needed to be taken seriously in its own right. I was not alone in this change of idea. Many women activists of the Iranian revolution have similar experiences of the past and the present. This became a part of my research later on. My past experiences have been essential in the choice of my study in anthropology and later in my choice of research on the experiences of Iranian women leftist political activists first in Iran and later in exile. This paper is based on part of the research I completed between 1995 and 2000. For this research I listened to the life stories of these women exiles in the Netherlands and the United States –in California, mainly in Los Angeles. The Iranian women I interviewed were active participants in the Iranian revolution of 1979 and had to leave Iran when the years of suppression started in 1981. In each country I interviewed twenty women and asked them about their past experiences as leftist activists and their present life as exiles. One of the points of the focus of the research was on the impact of the political ideas on gender identity and the ways that this impact changed over time. This is the part I will present in this piece. When politics became everything