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Ashraf Dehghani, the only woman in the Central Committee of the underground opposition, the Organization of Iranian People's Feda'i Guerrillas (OIPFG), was twenty-two years old in 1971, when she was arrested. Her memoirs recall her prison experience: “The thugs strapped me to a bed. … whipping the soles of my feet. … they gave me electric shocks using [a] truncheon-shaped electrode,” then they “strapped me to a bench, face down. The shameless vermin dropped his trousers and assaulted me… .” Resisting SAVAK and the state's vicious rapists and interrogators, Dehghani's defense was to maintain silence. Having so provoked and diminished her abusers, she was transferred to Tehran's infamous Evin Prison, where still more cruel “professional” torturers attempted to force a confession. There, she remembered, “they picked up a pair of tongs, gripping and twisting my flesh” and “they began compressing my fingers in a vice. They said they were going to pull out my nails… .” But she persisted in her resistance while wishing her own death under the state's torture. Iranian scholars and feminists alike have largely ignored Dehghani's tale. She had a unique life and experiences: she was a non-conformist, militant, and defiant political actor. In contrast, many other politically active women made their accommodations with the state, representing its class and political interests. One such woman was Mahnaz Afkhami, the Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran or WOI (1970–79) and Minister of State for Women's Affairs (1970–78). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“I don't underestimate [women], as shown by the fact that they have derived more advantages than anyone else from my White Revolution,” stated the Shah. Whether or not the monarch was sincere when he said so, he was taken at his word by the Ayatollah Khomeini who denounced the Shah's reforms and Family Protection Laws as “anti-Islamic.” They were “intended for the break-up of Muslim families,” maintained the Ayatollah. Those responsible for the laws are “condemned by Islam; women who utilize those laws and divorce are not legally divorced and if they remarry, they are adulterous and their children are illegitimate and disinherited. …” The White Revolution marked an intense state-clergy strife that temporarily led to the supremacy of the state over religion but also over its secular opponents. Although the clergy did not uniformly oppose the state, the Shah succeeded in winning over the religious opposition while himself appropriating more firmly the ideological imagery of “God, the Shah, and the nation.” Proclaiming that his reforms exemplified “justice and equality,” he claimed they were compatible with the “true religion of Islam.” Through women's suffrage and his gender policies, enacted despite the clergy's jurisdiction over family and gender relations and their opposition, the Shah promoted his modernizing posture, especially in the Western hemisphere. In his legal reforms, he was more triumphant than his father in shaking the power of the religious establishment by depriving it of a major source of strength over nearly thirteen centuries: the theoretical, and to a lesser extent, the actual privatization and control of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

He “was the very embodiment of a traditional masculine character.” So Ashraf Pahlavi remembered her father Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. “Although I feared my father, I shared some of his qualities: his stubbornness, his fierce pride, and his iron will,” wrote his powerful daughter, the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Shah, the second and the last Pahlavi ruler of Iran. Reza Shah left behind no autobiographies, but as Amin Banani notes, he “had to perfection the politician's talent for opportunism.” While still uncertain in his power, for example, “he knew how to play upon the religious emotions of the people.” He was “antagonistic toward the clergy,” although he was “basically apathetic to religion.” There was also “a definite ideological motivation” in his political actions. Dedicated to nationalism and statism, he sought a rapid adoption of “the material advances of the West [by] a breakdown of the traditional power of religion and a growing tendency toward secularism.” He built a modernizing, Westernizing, and centralizing state in Iran, a state that was based on a strong army and repression, not the consensus of the governed. Reza Shah introduced policies that altered the lives of Iranian women. For the first time, some women entered into the modern sectors of the economy, public and non-sex segregated schools were established, family laws were modified, and unveiling was enforced forcibly in 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]