Iranian Women: We Feel Cheated, Frustrated, And Betrayed

June 17, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Sarahpalin

Mousavi is popular with many female voters, but his wife Zahra Rahnavard might have even more fans. Iran's top-ranking female professor is a crowd-pleaser at political at events, where she is anything but invisible and not afraid to speak her mind. For example, when Ahmadinejad accused Rahnavard of skirting government rules to earn her advanced degrees -- a masters in art, and a masters and a doctorate in political science -- she publicly reprimanded him. The Los Angeles Times reported Rahnavard's won't-back-down rebuttal:

Either [Ahmadinejad] cannot tolerate highly educated women, or he's discouraging women from playing an active role in society.

Thousands have heeded Rahnavard's call to take to their rooftops and chant "Allahu Akbar" -- a rallying cry of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In this unforgettable late night video, the woman speaking during the chanting is saying, "Take our phones, our internet...all our communication away, but we are showing that by saying alloho akbar we can find each other."

For these wives, mothers, sisters and daughters, the drive to oust Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has everything to do with their demand for equal rights. These women had invested their hopes in presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who pledged to reform laws that treat women unfairly. Currently, an Iranian woman's testimony in court carries only half the weight of a man's, and women do not have equal divorce, child custody, or inheritance rights either.

Look closely at the images of mass demonstrations taking place in Iran this week and you will see them: thousands of brave Iranian women taking to the streets to protest an election they feel was stolen. "We feel cheated, frustrated and betrayed," said an Iranian woman in a message widely circulated on Facebook.

< The current regime feels threatened by peaceful female activism. They have branded as illegal the One Million Signatures Campaign initiated by women's rights activists in Iran to demand changes to discriminatory laws against women in that country. Dozens of women involved in the campaign have been harassed and jailed by the government.

One of Iran's leading women's rights activists Sussan Tahmasebi told NPR that this election marks the first time that reform of women's rights has been addressed in such detail. "Candidates have moved beyond vague slogans that emphasize the high cultural and religious value placed on women, to addressing specifically the demands voiced by women's right activists. This shift demonstrates the importance and vitality of the Iranian women's movement and in particular the achievements of the One Million Signatures Campaign."

Before the current government blackout, Iranian women were a force in the country's blogosphere -- the largest in the Middle East. This photo posted as a TwitPic on Twitter received more than 82,788 views on just one of the many sites it is on:

The courage of these women to confront Iran's patriarchal theocracy -- in which morality police still roam the streets looking for women wearing make-up -- may have been a "big reason why the regime rigged the vote count -- and why supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was forced to make a show of ordering a probe of the fraud," said the editorial board of the Christian Science Monitor in an op/ed posted on Monday.