The changing lives of women in Iran to be speaker's focus

Skidmore's Office of the First Year Experience and Women's Studies Program will host Monmouth College Professor Nahid Aslanbeigui, who will discuss "The Changing Lives of Women Under the Islamic Republic of Iran" Thursday, Nov. 13. Free and open to the public, the talk begins at 7:30 in Davis Auditorium.

According to Aslanbeigui, women played a significant role in the rise of the Islamic government to power in 1979. In return, their rights were significantly curtailed. They could no longer choose to dress the way the wanted, divorce their husbands, or keep their children after divorce. They could not exercise birth control, choose to terminate pregnancies, or serve as judges. They lost the right to equal inheritance and their evidence was worth half as much as that of men. The life of a woman had half the monetary value of a man's.

In addition, women and men walking together had to be ready to provide evidence of being closely related or married. Adultery had severe penalty: death by stoning.

Said Aslanbeigui, "In this lecture, I plan to show how things have changed for Iranian women after three decades. The parliament is debating gender inequality in inheritance rights after passing a bill that makes the monetary value of women's and men's lives equal. A sexual revolution has been in the making for many years. And the female share of university students is far above 50 percent.

She continued, "The parliament is also debating a bill that would give the men freedom to marry more than one woman without informing their first (or other) wives. Reasons are complex: feminist movements (Islamic and otherwise), the globalization of mass culture, the defiance of the youth, and the power struggle among different factions within the Islamic government."

She will provide a brief history of Iranian women from the 1920s to 1979, when they gained many rights without achieving complete gender equality. The Islamic constitution that followed the 1979 revolution?to which they contributed significantly?stripped women of many of these rights. According to the new constitution, the primary role for women is motherhood.

However, the economic reality that ensued an eight-year war, international sanctions, fluctuating oil revenues, population growth, unemployment and poverty have made it impossible for the government to keep women within the household. Today, more than
50 percent of the university graduates are female and their labor force participation rate has increased. An Islamic feminist movement has regained some of the rights that were lost in the beginning of the revolution. And cultural globalization has led to a subtle but significant sexual revolution.

Aslanbeigui is professor of economics and chair of the Department of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University. She teaches principles of economics, economic development and globalization. Her primary research areas are globalization, gender in development, and history of economics. She has published articles on these and other topics in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, History of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Southern Economic Journal, and World Development. She is co-editor of Women in the Age of Economic Transformation (Routledge, 1994) and Rethinking Economic Principles (Irwin, 1996) and is co-author of The Beautiful Mrs. R. Joan Robinson and Academic Career Production at Cambridge 1930-1938 (book manuscript) .