Int. J. Middle East Stud. 33 (2001), 335361.

Printed in the United States of America

Camron Michael Amin

S E L L I N G A N D S AV I N G M O T H E R I R A N : G E N D E R AND THE I RANIAN PRESS I N THE 1940S

Ours is a history of chaos after despotism, and despotism after chaos and nothing more. Muhammad Mas ud, The Flowers That Grow in Hell (1942).1 It is really shameful how, at such a time and during this regrettable situation for our country with all these deficiencies in the countrys affairs, every day the columns of newspapers fill up with criticisms of women. It is so embarrassing to have a country whose men think of nothing but women. Farangis Mazadarani, letter to the editor, Iqdam (Endeavor) (1942).2

The sensational nature of the Iranian press in the 1940s has been largely understood in political terms. In September 1941, occupying Allied armies forced Reza Shah Pahlavi (18791944, r. 192541) into exile, ending his tyrannical twenty years and unleashing a variety of political forces which vied with each other for public support in the press.3 The presence of Allied censors notwithstanding, so the argument goes, the Iranian press was momentarily free from effective government censorship though not from the recurring cycle of censorship that has dominated scholarly interest in the Iranian press.4 But a closer look at the often violent and sexual political discourse in the Iranian press raises questions less about Irans political history than about its cultural and economic history. Why was the content of the press so graphic in the 1940s? What economic and cultural trends sustained such content once it had been provoked by political events? How much did the overt sexuality of political discourse confirm or modify notions of gender in Iranian culture? To illustrate the cultural and economic dimensions of political discourse, this study will focus on political cartoons from two independent weeklies: Muhammad Mas uds Mard-i Imruz (Todays Man) and Sayyid Mihdi Mir Ashrafis Atish (The Fire). The cartoons refer to two events: the failed American Financial Mission under A. C. Millspaugh and the Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946. Both of these events provided opportunities for the press to criticize the Allied occupation of Iran. And both raised questions about Irans sovereignty over its territory, its finances, and its minorities. Given the climate of national political crisis, it is not surprising that a heightened sense of national vulnerability found gendered expression in the press. As Afsaneh Najmabadi has

Camron Michael Amin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences, University of MichiganDearborn, Dearborn, Mich. 48128-1491; e-mail: camamin@umd.umich.edu. 2001 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/01 $9.50

336 Camron Michael Amin pointed out, this would follow decades of scripting the body of the Iranian nation as a womans body to love and be devoted to, to possess and protect, to kill and die for.5 Iranian men were enjoined to protect Mother Iran and her daughters from symbolic and actual harm at the hands of foreign imperialists and treasonous nationsellers.6 Representations of national vulnerability as feminine and tyranny as masculine were not new to Iranian culture (or anywhere else). But their specific expression in these cartoons from the 1940s tells us of a moment in Iranian history when political pressures coincided with a new cultural climateone in which the press in Iran had achieved a new economic importance to complement its political importance. They also tell of the lingering (and quite unintended) effects of a state feminism project known as the Womens Awakening of 193641. The Womens Awakening had synthesized decades of debate regarding the woman question and forced into being a new image of male guardianship. The male guardian was no longer simply a relative of the modern Iranian woman, but also her professor, her supervisor, her colleague, and her classmate. The ultimate male guardian in Womens Awakening propaganda was the Great FatherReza Shah Pahlavichaperoning an unveiled modern Iranian woman who was portrayed sometimes as capable (professionally, intellectually) and other times as dangerous (morally, sexually).7 Only in considering the confluence of these three factorsthe weighty political issues of the moment, the emerging commercial culture of the press, and the cultural aftermath of the Womens Awakening projectcan we understand the significance of these political cartoons. In political terms, they reworked the familiar nationalist objection to nation-selling using an updated image of Mother Iran that incorporated Euro-American standards of glamorous beauty. In commercial terms, they sold the story of Mother Irans rescue in a more graphic and sensational way than had ever been done beforea reflection of the new financial opportunities and pressures of the Iranian press. Finally, the cartoons built on the images and vocabulary of Womens Awakening propaganda (and other press content of the 1930s) and, in so doing, ratified many of the new ideas advanced by the Pahlavi state in the 1930s regarding Iranian womanhood and male guardianship.
T H E P O L I T I C A L C A RT O O N S : F E M I N I Z I N G N AT I O N A L V U L N E R A B I L I T Y

Arthur Chester Millspaugh was an American financial expert who headed up two Financial Missions to Iran: the first from 1922 to 1927 and the second from January 1943 to January 1945. Both times, the American Financial Missions were terminated earlythe first time due to the ambitions of Reza Shah Pahlavi and the second time due to the opposition of Parliament and the press. Millspaugh felt that the press attacks, in particular, turned the Iranian public against the American Financial Mission and made it impossible for any Iranian politician to support it.8 The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946 was precipitated by the failure of the Soviet Union to withdraw from Azerbaijan and Kurdistan on schedule after the end of the war and end its support of autonomous republics in those provinces. The crisis was one of the early skirmishes of the Cold War and served as the basis for the first complaint lodged in the United Nations. A key figure in resolving the crisis (or perhaps merely in surviving it) was Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam of Iran, and, as such, he was the frequent target of scorching

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 337 press criticism. His move to the political left, his offer of an oil concession to the Soviet Union, and his conciliatory stance toward the Autonomous Republics of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan during the first half of 1946 encouraged the Soviets to withdraw. This was followed by a confrontation with the left and a military reoccupation of Azerbaijan in December 1946. Qavam attempted to counter the political pressures upon him by forming his own Democratic Party as a political base. Forged from contradictory elements, the Democratic Party fell apart in late 1947, and in 1948 Qavam was in political exile.9 Muhammad Mas ud was a onetime darling of the Iranian literary scene and beneficiary of the Pahlavi regime. He was sent to Europe in 1935 to study journalism at government expense. However, he returned to Iran in 1938 to find his hopes of a career in journalism (and in government) denied.10 Mas ud aired his resentment toward Reza Shah in the introduction of his 1942 autobiography The Flowers that Grow in Hell and carried them into his journalistic career.11 For example, Mas ud attacked the American Financial Mission in 1944 by depicting Millspaugh as a towering Reza Shah-like figure, terrorizing tiny, top-hatted politicians (Figure 1).12 Though intended

FIGURE

1. Millspaugh as Reza Shah, a towering male tyrant and foreign dictator. From Todays Man, 7 April 1944.

338 Camron Michael Amin as a critique of Millspaugh, the cartoon was also a critique of Reza Shah, not merely for being a dictator but for relying on foreign support despite his nationalist pretensions. It was during this time that the accusations of British support for Reza Shahs 1921 coup and 1925 accession to the throne were in wide circulation, fueled by the publication of Husayn Makkis chronicle of Reza Shahs Twenty Years. Millspaughs tyranny was matched by his vice. This Mas ud conveyed by representing Millspaugh as a drunken womanizer wasting the Iranian publics money (Figure 2).13 In this cartoon, Irans vulnerability is both feminized and sexualized. Millspaugh not only cheats Iranians out of their tax dollars but also seduces Iranian women away from virtuous behavior. Political cartoons in Todays Man tended to feminize ideas such as freedom and constitutionalism as often as they did Iran itself and scripted Mas ud and Todays Man as their defender. In Golden Dreams, for example, the Russians dream of a communist Iran, reactionaries dream of veiled women, and politicians dream of riches and power, but Mas udpatriot, journalist, and male guardian places himself in the position of rescuing a beautiful young Mother Iran in the name of freedom (Figure 3).14 It is interesting that he labeled the image of himself in the cartoon Todays Man, blurring the distinction between the man and his newspaper while providing a masculine form to his journalistic function. There was also a nurturing side to this image of male guardianship. It was reflected in the athletic activities and competitions for boys sponsored (and publicized) by Todays Man and in a feature added during the spring of 1946 entitled Dard-i Dil-i Mardum (The Peoples Troubles) in which ordinary people were invited to complain about problems and injustices they were experiencing.15 But it was neither this cultivated empathy nor the cultivation of young manhood that brought fame to Mas ud and Todays Man. It was Mas uds wildly sensational attacks on politicians. Mas uds ultimate act of male guardianship came when he called for the death of Prime Minister Qavam in October 1947. He accused Qavam of treason for having offered the Soviets the oil concession.16 Mas ud wove legality, illegality, and a personal thirst for revenge into his call to violence, writing, I will award 1,000,000 riyals to the executioner (or his heirs) of Qavam al-Saltaneh. The money comes from the sale of my housethe house in which I have not slept for six nights in six years because of these traitors, the house that will not be worth one black coin if it is not protected by the shade of freedom, justice, and the law.17 Though it was not the first time that Mas ud had graphically suggested doing away with Irans nation-selling politicians, the 1947 call for Qavams death was his most specific (and notorious) appeal to violence.18 By February 1948, of course, Mas ud was dead by a communist assassins bullet, and Qavam was in exileslain in political terms, if nothing else.19 Mas uds sensationalism had earned him both enemies and readers. His paper was shut down frequently and for months at a time, but it was also sold and re-sold on the streets of Tehran.20 The New York Times reported that 40,000 people attended his funeral.21 More than any other journalist in Iranian history, he blurred the lines between the rhetoric of male guardianship and action. At the time of his death, observers could not figure out who his assassins might have been: the court; Abbas Mas udi, the publisher of Irans largest daily, Ittila at (Information); religious extremists; communists; or Ahmad Qavam? Muhammad Mas ud had run afoul of all these groups and individuals, leaving few reliable allies behind. At the time of his death, the only group

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 339

FIGURE

2. Millspaugh as playboy: The top title reads, Dr. Millspaughs gifts for the Iranian Nation. From Todays Man, 22 April 1944, 6. The arrow indicates the direction of the action and connects two parts of a sentence begun in the first frame and completed in the last. The sentence reads, He is regularly busy from when he gets up in the morning until the time he goes to bed. the intervening frames illustrate just how Millspaugh was keeping busy at the expense of the Iranian government. His alleged behavior epitomized Western vice.

to which he seemed to belong was the Iranian Press Association, of which he was a founding member in 1946. Sayyid Mihdi Mir Ashrafi, the publisher of The Fire, was also a member of the Iranian Press Association, and although he was less successful as an independent newspaperman, he was no less sensational in his criticism of the Qavam government. He held a degree in literature and had received some training as a military officer. The Fire was his second paper; his first was War ( Jang) in 1943. After his career as

340 Camron Michael Amin

FIGURE

3. From Todays Man, 10 April 1946, 10. The panel is entitled Golden Dreams. In the bottom right frame, Mas ud himself embodies Todays Man and dreams of freedom. The word freedom seems to describe the act of cutting the young, bare-shouldered woman loose from her bonds with a rather long pair of scissors (releasing her legs first). The woman may be Mother Iran, or perhaps the ideal of freedom. Mas uds manly act of liberation is contrasted with the dreams of Irans politicians (winning elections, being crowned, or returning to traditional/Islamic dress that re-veils Irans women), leftist radicals (a successful revolt with guns trained on both religious and civic institutions), and foreigners (the Sovietization of Iran or the re-imposition of the Pahlavi dictatorship). All the dreamers/schemers are men. Only Mas uds patriotic, masculine, journalistic integrity (he is his periodical) stands above the fray of malicious designs on Mother Iran.

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 341 an independent journalist and brief time as a member of the National Front, Mir Ashrafi became one of many co-opted journalist-politicians in the 1950s, receiving service medals and four terms in Parliament from the Pahlavi regime.22 In 1946, though, he was at the helm of a struggling independent weekly. The first cartoon from The Fire portrays Iran as a young, rather glamorous Mother Iran anxiously spying through a keyhole trying to uncover the schemes of her children: the untrustworthy Prime Minister Qavam and his manifestly treasonous sibling, Pishihvari, the leader of the Azeri Republic (Figure 4).23 She is their Mother Iran, but she is helpless to do anything but observe their actions. She is their Mother Iran, but she appears as a woman young enough to be either mans daughtera daughter who looks like a Hollywood starlet (Joan Fontaine perhaps?) with her flip hairdo, highheeled slippers, and evening gown that reveals her left leg to mid-thigh. Two weeks later, Mother Iran is drowning as Qavam and Pishihvari struggle over her while world leaders look on (Figure 5).24 Pishivaris hold on Mother Iran is a noose around her

FIGURE

4. From The Fire, 4 May 1946. The caption reads, Secret politics have put the nations mother to fright as she waits and watches the efforts of her child through a keyhole of hope.

342 Camron Michael Amin

FIGURE

5. From The Fire, 18 May 1946. The caption reads, The worlds eyes are fixed on your efforts to save this drowning [woman].

neck, in contrast to Qavams life preserver around her arm. The metaphor of feminine vulnerability was taken to a gruesome extreme as Iranian troops reclaimed Azerbaijan in late 1946 (Figure 6).25 Here, two communist commandos, standing among the ravaged and fallen women, plan to rape one last young woman before fleeing the advancing Iranian army. The victimized women represent Azerbaijan, not Mother Iran herself. Mother Iran is represented as freeing herself from bonds of nation-selling weary, perhaps, but not ravaged (Figure 7).26 But she is not alone in the frame. The Iranian flag in the background represents Iranian troops, a reminder of the male guardianship upon which Mother Iran still depends. In early summer 1947, Mir Ashrafi was arrested, and The Fire was shut down by Qavams government for acting against the interests of the country.27 These political cartoons in The Fire and Todays Man were not the first time that Iran had been portrayed in the press as a woman in need of rescue.28 For example, in 1928 the leftist newspaper Nahid (Venus) endorsed Reza Shahs abolition of the Capitulations by depicting him freeing a kneeling Mother Iran as a crowd of Iranian men look on (Figure 8).29 Unlike the Mother Iran of 1946, 1928s Mother Iran has

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 343

FIGURE

6. The Rape of Azerbaijan: Published when Iran was reclaiming Azerbaijan from the Soviet-sponsored separatist government there, this cartoon from The Fire, December 1946, is among the most graphic manifestations of feminizing national vulnerability in the press. The standing soldier says, Comrade, the Iranian troops have come. Lets cut our losses and head across the border. The other replies, No, Comrade! Lets do our bit for the democratic uprising one more time!

long, curly tresses (distinct from the prevailing Euro-American styles) and is more coveredevoking an image of womanly beauty more rooted in classical Persian poetry than in Hollywood press releases. The lack of a veil connects the two Mother Irans to a particular vision of modern Iranian womanhood (the first image anticipating the Womens Awakening of 1936 and the second produced in its cultural wake). Indeed, in the 1940s, images of veiled women connoted not respected traditions but backward traditions connected with reactionary politicians (see, for example, how Mas ud portrays the reactionary Sayyed Zia al-Din Tabataba i dreaming of veiled women and turbaned men in the third frame of Figure 3). But these two modern images of Mother Iran differ in at least one other way: the degree to which their

344 Camron Michael Amin

FIGURE

7. Iran Frees Herself: From The Fire, 4 November 1946. Mother Iran, unlike Azerbaijan, frees herself and is the victim of confinement, not rape. The Iranian flag in the background might symbolize the Iranian Army (as it does in the cartoon depicting the rescue of Azerbaijan)a background symbol of male guardianship restored.

bodies are exposed. Although the 1928 Mother Iran is young and unveiled, her dress is less revealing than that of the 1946 Mother Iran as she kneels in deference to her Iranian male guardian. So it was not the essential idea of a Mother Iran dependent on male protection that was new, but its expression. But why did the press image of Mother Iran change from that of a traditional Iranian beauty to an image that evoked the American entertainment industrys standards of glamorous beauty? Part of the answer lies in a gradual change in the cultural image the Iranian press constructed for itself, one that suited its increasing commercial potential.
F R O M M O R A L F O R U M T O M A R K E T P L A C E : T H E C H A N G I N G C U LT U R E A N D ECONOM ICS OF THE I RANIAN PRESS

The sensational and sexually explicit nature of political expression of the 1940s had its roots in Iranian press culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Prior to that, Iranian journal-

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 345

FIGURE

8. Iran Is Freed: This political cartoon from Nahid, 11 May 1928, celebrates Reza Shahs abrogation of foreign capitulations, which were long seen as an infringement on Irans national sovereignty. Iran is portrayed as an unveiled woman whose chains fall to the floor as she falls to her knees before Reza Shah. The nations men look on.

ists and editors defined the periodical press as a moral environment with a didactic purpose. It is not that the periodical presss financial promise and pitfalls were irrelevant to Irans journalistic pioneers, but they did not present the press as a business first and foremostor at all. Journalism was a calling. In the 19th century, the first state gazettes spoke of kingly concern for the education of loyal subjects; the expatriate Iranian press also claimed a mission to educate Iranians (especially about happenings in the wider world). The expatriate press and the domestic press (after the Constitutional Revolution of 19051906) claimed an additional mission to advocate for policies in the public interest. Mirza Malkam Khan (d. 1908), the publisher of the influential expatriate monthly Qanun (The Law) from 1890 to the turn of the century wore the financial risk of producing a newspaper for his countrymen like a badge of honor.30 The editors of Sur-i Israfil (The Seraphs Trumpet)the newspaper that Muhammad Mas ud claimed had inspired him to become a newspapermanproudly declared, In the writing of this newspaper we do not intend profit and personal benefit and we will not use this work as our means of livelihood or our profession.31 The journalistic endeavor was constructed as masculine, with both of these newspapers

346 Camron Michael Amin announcing their manly resolve ( azm-i marda na) or manly action ( junbish-i marda na) in serving their nation. These claims to the moral high ground were articulated in the introductory article of a new periodical and reinforced in front-page legends. By the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the common term for the introductory article was mara mna ma (platform or statement of principles). Scholars of the Iranian pressnotably, Sadr-Hashemihave made a point of quoting the mara mna ma (or the closest thing to it they could find) as a standard way to define a periodicals place in Iranian journalistic history. Certain conventions and tropes developed in the writing of introductory articleseschewing material gain, claiming special knowledge of the world (especially Europe), and concern for educating the public and raising its moral standards. Although Euro-American models for introducing periodicals were influential (and often acknowledged explicitly), Perso-Islamic traditions of writing introductions (d ba cha) in historical writing or didactic traditions in literature were also important in defining the periodical press as a moral forum.32 This conception of the press as a moral forum could be used to censor the press as well as to make it more accessible. For example, although they were denied political rights during the Constitutional Revolution, women could enter the public forum of the press as long as they stuck to moral discussions and disavowed open political partisanship or its appearance.33 There is also evidence that vulgar phrases were edited out of the texts of this printed public forum to allow for presence and participation of women.34 The press was the Internet of the 19th century, and participation in it was associated with being modern, with all the knowledge and prosperity that implied. In 1906, for example, the Cairo-based Iranian paper Chihrihnama equated newspapers with railroads and population growth as indicators of modern prosperity, ranking countries by the number of newspapers they produced.35 No matter how modern a newspaper might be, its moral implications were never far from consideration. In 1927, the politician journalistacademic Sayyid Hasan Taqizadeh reported his impressions of America (and its press) to the Iranian reading public in four issues of Ali Dashtis successful newspaper, Shafaq-i Surkh (The Red Aurora).36 Although he was quite impressed with the size, low cost, distribution, and technical quality of American newspapers (especially Sunday editions), he was dismayed by their sensationalism, their populist pandering, and their lack of journalistic accuracy.37 Ultimately, in Taqizadehs eyes, the moral character of the American press was undermined by the commercial values that made it strong. It was one thing for the press to symbolize or (better yet) contribute to the prosperity of a country, but quite another for it to be a mere vehicle for personal financial gain. But back home in Iran, this attitude was changing as Iranian newspapers filled with advertisements for everything from sewing machines to Ovaltine. Photographs became more common in the 1920s and were used to entice subscribers. For example, in 1927, Alam-i Nisvan (Womens World) promised readers it would publish a picture of a Japanese girl in an advertisement printed in the daily Sitara- i Iran (The Iranian Star).38 In the 1930s, essay contests and Hollywood gossip provided additional lures for the Iranian reading public. But even in this commercial environment, another civic role was assigned to the pressone that was a consequence of the control that the Pahlavi regime exercised over the press in the 1930s. The press emerged as an

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 347 international representative of Iran in the court of world opinion. The regimes embassies watched the foreign press carefully for insults to the regime, and the Iranian press was the venue of choice in which to respond.39 In the wake of the Allied Occupation and forced abdication of Reza Shah in 1941, more changed than the quasi-official status of the periodical press. As we have seen, the explosion of press freedom was accompanied by an explosion of sensational headlines and graphic pictures. This resulted in the toughening of existing press laws by the 13th Parliament in 1942 and in numerous (though irregular) newspaper shutdowns throughout the 1940s. The law required that publishers exhibit moral capital as well as the financial ability to produce their newspapers and magazines.40 The rhetoric of morality was still very much a part of the way new periodicals introduced themselves to the reading public, but it was accompanied by direct pandering to more prurient interests. Muhammad Mas uds mara mna ma for Todays Man in 1942 was a moralizing call to action, declaring, Our fundamental goal in newspaper writing, in the first degree, is one thing, and that is reform of the general economic situation of the country. . . . We believe that as long as one hungry person can be found throughout the country, the words national unity, cooperation and teamwork, and equality and brotherhood are vague sayings and a fantasy and empty of all truth and meaning.41 Although it was affiliated with no political party, Todays Man listed ten policy recommendations related to foreign and domestic policy. Four years later, Sayyid Mihdi Mir Ashrafis mara mna ma for The Fire expressed a certain weariness with lofty rhetoric even as it fulfilled the traditions of launching a newspaper. It announced, It seems that in this country because of all the worthless and cheapened words and expressions, even if we used a masterful word or expression it would be insufficient to enunciate a purpose, but what choice is there?42 In the end, as we shall see in the next section, neither paper stuck to its stated principles. American and European observers of the frenzied Iranian press scene in the 1940s looked upon it with disdain. In the employ of the British Embassy at the time, L. P. Elwell-Sutton felt the Iranian press was a petty and corrupt enterprise in all of its aspects:
It was left to the new papers to introduce the outspoken style that was to characterize the Iranian press of the next decade or more. Typical was one of the first, Iqdam (Endeavor). Florid in style, strongly nationalist, and hostile to Allies and Axis alike, it was distinguished like others of its class, by the expression of individual views, without much regard for consistency or constructiveness, and in many cases served as little more than a vehicle for the whims and prejudices of some wealthy backerwhen they did not fulfill some even less reputable purpose.43

in 1945, T. Culyer Young, was a bit more charitable, The American press attache arguing that the Iranian press did reflect the viewpoints of different constituencies in Iranian society. He recommended that a delegation of Iranian journalists on an official tour of the United States in 1945 reflect the diversity of Iranian public opinion but was ignored by both the American and Iranian governments. The tour was designed to improve Americas tarnished image in the wake of the failed Millspaugh mission.44 The four delegation spots went to Majid Movaqqar, Abbas Mas udi, Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, and Abd al-Qasem Amini. Young criticized the choices on political grounds all of the men had ties to the court.45 But three of them became the most successful

348 Camron Michael Amin newspapermen in Iranian history, and twoMovaqqar and Mas udihad been successful newspapermen for two decades prior to 1945. Muhammad Mas ud was one of many independent editors excluded from the delegation; his open letter of protest to the government reeked more of professional jealousy than of political partisanship.46 Perhaps there was more at stake economically than politically. We only have fragmentary information of the economic history of the periodical press, but what evidence we have points to a growing enterprise in which successful editorpublishers watched the bottom line. For example, in March 1931, newspaper editors colluded to shut down for two weeks a year following Nau Ruz to cut production costsincluding, of course, the wages of their employees.47 The only annual budget of a periodical that has come to light belongs to the Muhammad Hejazis 1939 government propaganda magazine Iran-i Imruz (Todays Iran). The budget for 193940 was calculated to be 327,600.015 rials ($5,460, or approximately $39,280.58 in real dollars).48 Hejazis magazine would represent the highend of production costs (roughly $3,273 per monthly issue) because of its extensive use of photographs and graphics. It was never able to sell enough issues or advertisements to maintain its monthly schedule.49 Hejazi lists his expenses for various services but does so in aggregate. Thus, we know how much was spent on copy editing, but not how many copy editors there were or what each was paid. We have a sense of what some newspaper employees could earn in the 1920s and 1930s from U.S. State Department records (typesetters, for example, earned more than unskilled construction workers but less than bus drivers), but we do not know how journalists themselves fared.50 Although the details are murky, there is no doubt about the big picture. There were approximately 40 Persian-language periodicals from 1890 to 1900approximately 330 periodicals were produced between 1906 and 1911, and 582 were produced from 1941 to 1948.51 If we look at the case of one successful newspaper, Ittila at, we can also see a process of expansion. Abbas Mas udi had imagined Ittila at as a key element in his broader effort to create a national Iranian press agency, but even with this grandiose vision he had only anticipated a daily circulation of 2,000 copies in 192652 as compared with average daily circulation between 11,000 and 13,000 in the mid-1940s.53 As the Iranian press hit its economic stride in the 1930s and tentatively embraced its own commercialism, an aggressive state feminism project known as the Womens Awakening opened cultural floodgates that, among other things, transformed Mother Iran into a Hollywood starlet.
G E N D E R , S TAT E P O L I C Y, A N D P R E S S C U LT U R E : FA C T O R I N G I N T H E W O M E N S AWA K E N I N G O F 1 9 3 6 4 1

The Womens Awakening project was the culmination of two processes. From a longer perspective, it was the culmination of woman question discussions that began for Iran in the 19th century. The late-19th-century intellectual impulse of renewalism (tajaddud-parvar ) argued for the moral and material rebirth of Iranan Iran freed from monarchy, religious tradition (often rendered as superstition), and non-Iranian cultural taints. The originators of this concept, Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadih (d. 1878) and Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1897), were quite clear that the Iranian nations

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 349 progress depended on improved status for women. In their view, this meant an end to polygynous marriage and seclusion for women (linked directly to the idea of veiling women). The end to womens seclusion would be signaled by their access to education and freer social intercourse with men. Most renewalist intellectuals (men and women) elaborated on Akhundzadih and Kirmanis framework for womens progress by reconciling their ideas with Islam (Akhundzadih was an atheist and Kirmani a Babi) and advocated wider and wider definitions of womens education and social intercourse (including, for example, professional careers). Indeed, despite the hostility he felt toward Islam, Kirmani worked with Pan-Islamic figures such as Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897) while in Istanbul54 and corresponded with expatriate Iranian reformists such as Mirza Malkam Khan (d. 1908). As a consequence, ideas regarding womens progress found more Islamic expression in Mirza Malkam Khans London-based newspaper Qanun (The Law) and were attributed to Al-Afghani (referred to in The Law merely as The Sayyid).55 As in other Middle Eastern countries, the unveiling of women in Iran had always been an element of the woman question, as it came to be known in Iranian popular culture, but it was not made a central element until it became state policy during the Womens Awakening.56 It was the culmination of renewalist expectations in that the regime delivered an image of an educated and professional Iranian woman who had a genuine civic presence. But as had been the case in virtually all public woman question discussions from the 19th century to the end of the Womens Awakening, the modern Iranian woman was not imagined to be independent of male protection and supervision. Indeed, from a shorter perspective the Womens Awakening was the culmination of Pahlavi state efforts to engage and control the woman question in the 1930s. The effort began with a supportive gesture, the passage and implementation of the Marriage Reform Law of 1931. It then moved to an awkward effort at co-optation when the government sought to control the agenda of the Second Conference of Eastern Women in late 1932 and the activities of the main independent womens organization, the Patriotic Womens League. In spring 1935, the regime established the Womens Society (a number of whose members were former members of the Patriotic Womens League) and began a program of encouraging unveiling in state institutions (notably, in schools). This effort backfired disastrously in July, when protesters against unveiling and a new European hat law for men in Mashhad defied government orders to disperse. A special unit of imperial troops massacred protestors in Mashhads main shrine, Gowharshad.57 In the aftermath of Gowharshad, the government returned to its efforts to encourage unveiling but met with little success. Finally, on 7 January 1936, Reza Shah appeared with his unveiled wife and daughters at a graduation ceremony at the Danishsara in Tehran, launching a policy of forced unveiling for all Iranian women that was to last until the Allied invasion in 1941. Despite the fact that forced unveiling was the most infamous element of the Womens Awakening project, it was not the goal. Rather, it was the means. The regime opened new opportunities in education and employment for some women. Unveiling was the means to pressure women (and men) into accepting a broader definition of modern Iranian womanhoodone that saw women as capable of higher education and entering certain modern professions (e.g., medicine, academia, and the lower

350 Camron Michael Amin echelons of the state bureaucracy). Though Womens Awakening propaganda flirted with the ideas of full citizenship and emancipation for women, it mainly reinforced an image of the modern Iranian woman that was still dependent on male guardianship. For this and for the brutality of forced unveiling, the Womens Awakening has been rightly criticized by both feminist historians and historians working in the Islamic Republic.58 However, these criticisms miss the historical effect of the Womens Awakening. It linked state legitimacy to womens progress (however controlled). Furthermore, aside from opening a limited number of new opportunities in education and employment for women, its propaganda depicted Iranian women (rather than European and American ones) as capable intellectually, socially, and physically and saturated the Iranian press with such images.59 But along with these intended consequences came a decidedly unintended one: more press images of glamorous Euro-American beauty. Although Womens Awakening propaganda endeavored to distinguish between modern, moral clothing and expensive, immodest Western fashions, the distinction was often lost in the pages of the press in the 1930s. Health and beauty were quickly conflated in the pages of youth magazines such as Majid Movaqqars Mihrigan.60 And the standards of beauty were obviously Westerneither of the wholesome variety cultivated in European beauty contests61 or of the seductive sort advanced in Hollywood images. It is no accident that European and Hollywood imagery was becoming more common in the press. It was a consequence of Iranian societys exposure to foreign films and attempts to capitalize on public interest in film. For example, in the late 1920s, the Alumnae Association of the American Bethel Girls School used film exhibitions to raise money for the publication of Womens World.62 Iranians were active importers of Euro-American culture. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association complained to American Legation officials about unauthorized exhibitions of American films in Iran from 1932 on.63 From 1937 to 1947, Iranians produced no feature films, but they did exhibit 250 foreign films annually.64 To be clear, the Womens Awakening did not seek to create an interest in EuroAmerican images of beauty. Indeed, the Pahlavi regime and its ideological supporters were as concerned about corruption (fisa d ) in Iranian society as any of their critics. But the effort to fashion a single, unveiled vision of modern Iranian womanhood resulted in a mixed message for Iranian society. For instance, in 1938 Abbas Mas udis Ittila at could protest that women were not just pretty faces or placed on Earth for the pleasure of men.65 But in that same time, Ittila at had eliminated its morning edition in May66 and in December put its resources into an expanded arts section filled with articles about Hollywood starlets and movies.67 This expanded coverage did not pay off in the short run, and Ittila at was back to a six-page format for the duration of World War II. Nevertheless, Mas udi could not have even experimented in such a fashion if the Womens Awakening of 1936 had not made it permissible to show women in bathing suits. The 1940s were a time not just of freedom of expression but of new journalistic entrepreneurship. The right to publish was not the same as a guarantee to flourish. To compete with well-established papers such as Ittila at that enjoyed large circulation and a comfortable relationship with the government, independent weeklies such as

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 351 Todays Man and The Fire used more sensational and graphic content to attract readers. To some degree, the sensationalism seems to have worked. In 1945, a periodical named Hollywood (hu l vu d ) could outsell one called A in-i Islam (The Mirror of Islam) two to one.68 Even serious-minded womens magazines, such as Alam-i Zanan (Womens World; not to be confused with Alam-i Nesvan, which ceased publication in 1933), would present readers with glamorous make-over tips alongside features on notable women such as Fatemeh Sayyah, a professor at Tehran University and co69 w izb-i Zana founder of the Womens Party (H n). The same Mir Ashrafi who lamented the fate of Mother Iran in 1946 also called his readers attention to The Fires pictures of Japanese cabaret dancers and cinematic reviews on its entertainment page.70 Muhammad Mas uds Todays Man published articles that mocked Euro-American fashions (while showing them), printed leering captions under photos of graduating high-school girls, and ran cartoons that criticized female Iranian office workers as sexual provocateurs.71 It also featured articles discussing the miseries of prostitutes while, at the same time, running editorials in favor of legal, state-regulated brothels.72 Alongside this sexual content, the political cartoons about Millspaugh and Qavam were not just gendered political discourse but part of a sex-and-violence tabloid style that defined independent newspapers. They were commercials for the excitement Mas ud and Ashrafi wished to harness to sell their papers. The glamorous Euro-American images of femininity that were adapted and introduced into Iranian culture during the Womens Awakening became fodder for sensational and graphic political expressions in the 1940s. Both were forms of gender advertisementto borrow a phrase from Erving Goffmans study of gender ideology in American advertisingand it stands to reason that one would influence the other, especially in the same medium.73 Carefully staged photographs and deliberately drawn cartoons both can serve as a guide to gender relationships precisely because they standardize, exaggerate, simplify everyday life even more dramatically than everyday rituals.74 But, of course, to focus on the essential gender relationships in these political cartoons (that women are weaker, that men should protect them, that women are passive, and that men are active) is to ignore the dynamism of Iranian societys cultural scheme, the subtle changes in gendered difference in public discourse over time, and womens agency in bargaining with patriarchy.75 In the 1940s, women and men both were debating the extent of male guardianship (and reasons for invoking it) with respect to new issues (e.g., womens suffrage) and raising new questions with respect to old issues, such as womens education (e.g., should women be admitted to law school?) By way of illustration, let us consider (briefly) the two issues: womens employment and veiling. As Farangis Mazandarani asserted in her letter to Endeavor, the press was filled with criticism of women who worked in offices and women who wore trendy Euro-American styles. The Pahlavi regime had not initiated womens entry into clerical positions, but it actively encouraged and celebrated such change. A supporter of many aspects of the Womens Awakening, the anti-Islamic intellectual Ahmad Kasravi (d. 1946) sounded the moral alarm on this issue:
One of the caprices that has turned up among Iranian women is that they have taken to going to the offices and doing mens work. They also learned this from the Europeans. There is a group of men that like to drag women into offices and shops. They see it as in their interest.76

352 Camron Michael Amin In learning this from Europeans, female office workers become the importers of Western vice (and thus a threat to Irans cultural sovereignty) as much as Millspaugh had been portrayed as a threat to Irans administrative and financial sovereignty. Indeed, the women in Mas uds Millspaugh-as-playboy cartoon could be seen as collaborators with foreign imperialism rather than its victims. But focused as it was on women in office, the 1940s male backlash signaled its acceptance of women in other professions. It was now female office workers who were the potential moral weak links in society, not nurses, as had been the case in discussions of womens entry into modern medical practice earlier in the century.77 Even some critics of women in the office admitted that it was a fait accompli that Iranian society had to regulate rather than abandon.78 The issue of unveiling revealed an even more complicated relationship between male guardianship and modern Iranian womanhood in the wake of the Womens Awakening. When religious extremists attacked a group of unveiled women in Tehran in 1943, women called upon Iranian men to defend them in an open letter to the Qavam government sent to ten newspapers:
O King [Muhammad Reza Shah], the successor of Cyrus and Anushiravan! O Prime Minister [Ahmad Qavam], the successor of Bozorjmehr! O guardians of the state! O leaders of the nation! Oh, freedom-lovers of the country! Now that the rabble-rousers, game-players, and deceivers of the public have run out of political slogans in this country, they want to play with the honor and chastity (na mu s va iffat ) of you and this ancient nation. They want to make our chastity a trump-card in their game in the name of the veil. They want to dishonor us. Will you, our men, sit quietly? Will you not show the bravery and zeal in the defense of honor (shaha mat va ghayrat ) which is proper to the men of Iran?79

In assertively pursuing their right to dress as they chose, these women nevertheless put their trust in male guardianship for protection, offering themselves as living Mother Irans. Responding in the press, men accepted with zeal their national and manly responsibility to protect Iranian womenalthough some blamed women themselves for focusing on the details of Western fashion rather than their duties as patriotic Iranian women.80 Unveiled women, especially those were who slaves to the latest Western fashions, were agents of corruption infecting Irans cultural sovereignty.81 That Iranian women themselves were perceived as being the agents of cultural corruption in the 1940s was a change (in emphasis, at least) from earlier conceptions of the mechanism of cultural imperialism. In the 1920s, for example, press debates on miscegenation blamed Iranian men for marrying seductive (and second-class) European women and thus diluting Irans racial stock and putting Iranian culture at risk.82 In the 1940s, it was Iranian womens vulnerability to attack and cultural contamination that was nationalized. It was a process that complemented the feminization of national vulnerability. In both processesand with similar intensitythe principle of male guardianship was upheld against a challenge from internal traitors and foreign imperialists. At first glance, the 1943 assault on unveiled women would suggest that there was no common ground between Iranian Islamic revivalism and the Womens Awakening. This is not entirely correct. When Ahmad Qavam began to move to the political left in 1946, he shut down the Islamic revivalist newspaper Parcham-i Islam (The Banner of Islam) for allegedly provoking the same kind of violence against unveiled women that had occurred on

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 353 his watch back in 1943.83 The newspaper was the organ of the Fida iyan-i Islam (Devotees of Islam), a radical revivalist group associated with the activist cleric Ayatollah Kashani (d. 1962) and responsible for the assassination of Ahmad Kasravi in 1946. The Banner of Islam, for its part, did regularly criticize Iranian women for abandoning the veil but expressed its opposition in nationalist as well as religious terms.84 But like the other journalistic male guardians of the 1940s, The Banner of Islam did not merely heap scorn on women for placing themselves (and thus the nation) in moral peril. In language that was remarkably similar to Womens Awakening propaganda of the 1930s, The Banner of Islam underscored Islams fundamental respect for women and its traditional feminism in protecting womens virtue and property rights while exempting them (rather than forbidding them) from gainful employment.85 But in embracing a cult of domesticity and womens education to make them better housewives, The Banner of Islam had taken a modest step toward the regime of Reza Shah which accepted the scientific housewife as an important foundation in its construction of modern Iranian womanhood.86 So although the Womens Awakening was roundly criticized in the press in the 1940s, many of its policies were ratified (in whole or in part) by different constituencies. This happened perhaps because the regimes image of a modern Iranian woman who was ultimately subordinate to male guardianship was more palatable than the alternative being offered by some feminists in the wake of the Womens Awakening. The 1940s in Iran saw the first campaign for womens suffrage (194446), the first political party organized by women (Saffiyeh Firuz and Fatimih Sayyahs Womens Party in 1944), and regular calls in the press for true gender equality.87 It was not just male stewardship of the feminized nation that was being challenged by traitors and foreign imperialists, but the very notion of male guardianship itself. This new stance can be seen in the titles of new womens periodicals. Badr al-Moluk Bamdad began Zan-i Imruz (Todays Woman) in 1944, providing a counterpart if not a rebuke to Mas uds newspaper. Also in 1944, the Tudeh-affiliated Womens Committee published Bidari-i Ma (Our Awakening) as if to reclaim the idea of awakening from the state and to emphasize that women themselves were the source of change. The magazine, in fact, criticized Reza Shahs heavy-handed approach to unveiling in 1930s.88 Some feminists went so far as to distinguish their interests from those of the nation, refusing to subordinate their aims to the male-dominated national agenda and suggesting, in the pages of The Fire, that Iranian women take their complaints to a higher authority: the United Nations.89 The suggestion was made in the context of a running debate on womens suffragea debate that Mir Ashrafi chose to place on the entertainment page.
C O N C L U S I O N : T O WA R D A N E W PA R A D I G M F O R T H E H I S T O R Y O F T H E I RANIAN PRESS

[Diachrony] and synchrony coexist in an indissoluable synthesis. Symbolic action is a duplex compound made up of an inescapable past and an irreducible present. An inescapable past because the concepts by which experience is organized and communicated proceed from the received cultural scheme. An irreducible present because of the world-uniqueness of any action: the Heraclitean difference between the unique experience of the river and its name. Marshall Sahlins90

354 Camron Michael Amin The press, in many ways, is an ideal window on a societys cultural scheme: its very purpose is to organize and communicate new experiences on a continual basis for a public that both expects certain formats and themes when it receives new information and, at the same time, expectsand even demandsvariations and innovations in the way information is presented. Journalists, state elites, and society in general were all heirs to the same inescapable past that in the 1940s, included the Allied invasion of 1941, the Womens Awakening project of 193641, Reza Shahs Twenty Years, and the development of conventions connected with the practice of journalism itself. The irreducible presentin this case, the demise of the Millspaugh mission in 194445 and the Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946was captured in political cartoons. But captured along with those events (and preserved for us) were traces of recent changes to Irans cultural scheme at that time. These traces suggest that, despite the highly politicized environment of Iran in the 1940s, the most dramatic forces of change in this period were not, strictly speaking, political but economic and social: the meaning and value of the press had changed andmore fundamentally, perhapsthe meaning and value of male guardianship (and Iranian womanhood) had changed. Indeed, from the perspective of political history, it is highly ironic that these should be the more durable historical changes in Iranian society. Despite the most rigorous press censorship in Iranian history up to that point, the press seems to have become more robust as an economic and cultural institution in the 1930s, so much so that even its restoration as a political forum in the 1940s could not mask its increasingly commercial character. Furthermore, though the Womens Awakening project was roundly criticized for its methods, objectives, or both (and had lost effective state support during the 1940s), its lingering cultural impact was very noticeableperhaps especially in political discourse in the press. Muhammad Mas ud and Sayyid Mihdi Mir Ashrafi could save Mother Iran in political terms by opposing would-be tyrants and nation-sellers such as Qavam, but they could also sell a new and more alluring image of her in an effort to boost their circulation. The content of the press in the 1940s was so much more graphic and sensational because the political pressures of the time coincided with increased competition for readers. The relaxing of government censorship in the 1940s certainly intensified the competition for readers, but a longer trend of commercialism was also developing in the Iranian press. Indeed, it was during the reign of Reza Shah (and despite the vigorous censorship of the 1930s) that the press acknowledged its own commercialism before the reading publicreflecting a change (real or perceived) in its economic potential. In emphasizing the commercial character of these political cartoons, we can change our conception of the press in Iranian history. Once we explore this economic and cultural common ground between the repressive reign of Reza Shah and more liberal periods in Iranian history, we are liberated from a monolithic paradigm that reduces the history of the Iranian press to a cyclical war between state censorship and freedom of expression. In dispensing with Mas uds cycle of despotism and chaos, we are free to consider the press as a medium of exchange between society and the state and as a dynamic cultural institution with a history that is distinct, if not independent, from political history. The influence of Womens Awakening propaganda on political cartoons in the

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 355 1940s is a case in point. While the rhetoric and policies of the awakening could not be challenged effectively by political means (public protest, strikes, or even counterpropaganda) in the 1930s, they were subverted by publishers efforts to spice-up their newspapers. The glamorous Mother Iran sold in Irans newspapers in the 1940s emerged as a continuation of this process of adapting Hollywoods standards of feminine beauty. In reference to ordinary Iranian woman, however, glamorous beauty was associated with vice and with the corruption of Iranian society as journalistic male guardians rebuked women not just for their appearance but also for their pretensions of doing mens work (particularly in offices) and lobbying for womens suffrage. At the same time, there was a willingness (even zeal) for male guardians to protect unveiled women from assault in 1943 and 1946, and, significantly, none of the opportunities offered women in education and employment in the 1930s were withdrawn during the 1940s. Women could be more than educated mothers and wives. They could be colleagues, co-workers, and classmates. Whatever misgivings womens modern male guardians had about these changes, Iranian culture moved toward accepting them. Along with the image of Mother Iran, the Womens Awakening had also changed the definitions of modern Iranian womanhood and male guardianship, and thus provided a vital cultural backdrop for gendered political discourse in the 1940s.
NOTES

Authors note: This article would not have been possible without the help of the following individuals and institutions: Bruce Craig, Marlis Saleh, Mark Stein, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Robert B. Harrell, Amelia Amin, Greg Field, Linda Adler-Kassner, Wayne Woodward, Maureen Linker, Betty Greco, Pat Smith, the Foundation for Iranian Studies, and the Rackham Foundation at the University of Michigan. Special thanks to Juan R. I. Cole, Nikki Keddie, and the anonymous reviewers for their challenging comments and suggestions. I dedicate this article to the first journalisteditor in the Amin family, my sister Melanie, whose brave (and successful) struggle against Hodgkins disease this past year has touched and inspired me every day. All errors are my own. 1 Muhammad Mas ud, Gulha i kih dar jahanam miruyad (Tehran: Ali Akbar Elmi Publishers, 1337 [195859]), 29. 2 Farangis Mazandarani, Zan va Zindigani, Iqdam, 23 Urdibihisht 1321/12 May 1942. More of this letter is translated in Camron Michael Amin, Propaganda and Remembrance: Gender, Education and the Womens Awakening of 1936, Iranian Studies 32 (1999 [2000]): 38485. 3 See Husayn Makki, Tarikh-i Bist Salah-i Iran, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Nashr-i Nashir, 1363 [198485]). Appearing first as a serial in the newspaper Mihr-i Iran in the 1940s, Makkis canonization of the accusation that Reza Shah was merely a British lackey is still the focus of scholarly discussion: see Michael P. Zirinsky, Imperial Power and Dictatorship: Britain and the Rise of Reza Shah, 19211926, International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 63963. For a typical criticism of the regimes modernizing efforts, see Amin Banani, The Modernization of Iran: 19211941 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961). The early 1990s were a time for researchers in Iran and the United States to revisit the regime of Riza Shah with an eye toward seeing it in a broader context. Scholarly research was accompanied by a literary and cultural fascination with the figure of Reza Shah. For examples of both trends, see Reza Shah: Khatirati Sulayman Bihbudi, Shams Pahlavi, Ali Izadi, ed. Gholam Husayn Mirza Saleh (Tehran: T w arh w -i Naw, 1372 [199394]), Mostafa Eslamiyeh, Riza Khan Maksim (Tehran: Agah, 1372 [199394]); Khosrow Mo tazed, Fawziyya: Hikayat-i Talkhkami, Qissa-i Judayi, 2 vols. (Tehran: Alburz, 1372 [199394]); Ne matollah Qazi Shakib, Illal-i Suqut-i Riza Shah, (n.p.: Asar, 1372 [199394]); and Kaveh Bayat and Mansoureh Ettehadieh, The Riza Shah Period: Document Collections Recently Published in Iran, Iranian Studies 26 (1993): 219428. For more positive assessments of Reza Shah, see Donald N. Wilber, Reza Shah Pahlavi: The Resurrection and Reconstruction of Iran, 18791944 (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1975), and, more recently, Stephanie Cronin, The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 19101926

356 Camron Michael Amin

(London, New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997), and Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Riza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 37694. 4 Muhammad Sadr-Hashemi, Tarikh-i Jara id va Majalla t-i Iran, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (Isfahan: Kamal, 1363 [198485]); L. P. Elwell-Sutton, The Iranian Press, 19411947, Iran 4 (1968): 65105; Go el Kohen, Tarikh-i Sansur Dar Matbu at-i Iran, 2 vols. (Tehran: Agah, 1360 [198182] and 1363 [198485]); Asnad-i Matbu at (12861320 HS), ed. Kaveh Bayat and Mas ud Kuhestani Nezhad (Tehran: Intisharat-i Asnad-i Milli-yi Iran, 1372 [199394]); Asnad-i Matbu at-i Iran, 13201332, vol.1 (Tehran: Intisharat-i Sazman-i Asnad-i Milli-yi Iran, 1374 [199596]); and Camron Michael Amin, The Attentions of the Great Father: Riza Shah, The Woman Question, and the Iranian Press, 19101946 (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996), 4064. See also Nassereddin Parvin, The Sources of Historiography of the Iranian Press, Iran Nameh 26 (1998): 191210; E. G. Browne, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914); and Husayn Abu Torabiyan, Matbu at-i Irani (Tehran: Intisharat-i Ittila at, 1366 [198788]). 5 Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Erotic Vatw an [Homeland] as Beloved and Mother: To Love, to Possess, and to Protect, Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (1997): 445. 6 For a detailed analysis of this process in the context of Irans Constitutional Revolution of 19051906, see Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 7 For more on how this dualism affected the expansion of womens education and the women who lived through the Womens Awakening, see Amin, Propaganda and Remembrance. 8 See A. C. Millspaugh, Americans in Persia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1946), illustration opposite page i and 69, 13637, 141. 9 Ervand Abrahamian, Iran: Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 22350. Other studies of this period include Fakhreddin Azimi, Iran: The Crisis of Social Democracy 194153 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989); Musaddiq, Iranian Nationalism, and Oil, ed. James A. Bill and Wm. Roger Louis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988); Louise LEstrange Fawcett, Iran and the Cold War: The Azerbaijan Crisis of 1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Britain and Iranian Oil, 19501954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power and Principle: Irans Oil Nationalization and Its tat Aftermath (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992); Mark Gasiorowski, The 1953 Coup de in Iran, International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987); Mostafa Fateh, Panjah Sal Naft-i Iran (Tehran: Paya m, 1358 [197980]); Hosayn Makki, Kitab-i Siyah, 3rd ed. (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1363 [1984 85]); and L. P. Elwell-Sutton, Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1955). Perhaps the last word on the Mosaddeq period is the latest: James Risen, How a Plot Convulsed Iran in 53 (and in 79), New York Times, 16 April 2000, 1, 1415. 10 This description does not do justice to the complexities and significance of Muhammad Mas uds life, but to elaborate would be beyond the scope of this effort. The most comprehensive biography is Nasr Allah Shiftih, Zindigi-nama va Mubarrazat-i Siyasi-e Mohammad Mas ud, Mudir-i Ruznama-i Mard-i Imruz (Tehran: Aftab-i Haqiqat, 1363 [1984]), and for an assessment of Mas uds literary career, see Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 6668. 11 Mas ud, Gulha i kah dar jahanam miruyad, 343. 12 Mard-i Imruz, 7 April 1944, 1. 13 Ibid., 22 April 1944, 6. 14 Ibid., 10 April 1946, 10. 15 The dard-i dil feature began running with the 52nd issue: see ibid., 26 April 1946, 5. 16 Muhammad Mas ud, Todays Man, 16 October 1947, 1. 17 Mard-i Imruz, 16 October 1947, 1. 18 Ibid., 16 April 1943, 1; ibid., 7 April 1944, 5. 19 Shiftih draws his proof of communist culpability in Mas uds slaying from confessions exacted from Tudeh captives by the Pahlavi regime in the 1950s and by the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. Personally, I find Fereydun Keshavarzs admission of communist culpability the most persuasive because it was not offered under the duress of incarceration and possibly torture. See Fereydun Keshavarz, Man Muttahamm Mikunam (Tehran: Intisharat-i Rivaq, 1358 [197980]). Keshavarz implicated a rogue faction of the Tudeh Party (the communist Party of the Masses) under the leadership of Khosrow Ruzbeh, and Ruzbeh admitted that the hit squad was mobilized as his military organization was being disbanded by the Tudeh.

Selling and Saving Mother Iran 357

The distinction would matter little to Mas ud, of course. See, Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 20. 20 In its nearly seven years of existence, the weekly Todays Man was able to publish only 138 issues, or a little more than two-and-a-half years worth. 21 40,000 Attend Masood Funeral, New York Times, 15 February 1948, 17:2. 22 Chihrih-yi Matbu at-i Mu asir, 42. 23 Atish, 4 May 1946, 1. The caption under the cartoon speaks only of a child. Pishihvari had left the nations family. 24 Atish, 18 May 1946, 1. 25 Ibid., 14 December 1946, 4. 26 Ibid., 6 November 1946, 1. 27 Document 1/212, Military Command to Prime Minister (4 Murdad 1346 [194142]), in Asnad-i Matbu at (132032 [195354]), vol. 1, 107. 28 For examples of the very physical descriptions of Mother Iran dating to the press of the early constitutional period, see Najmabadi, The Erotic Vatw an. These earlier descriptions and images clearly seem to come from traditional tropes of feminine beauty received from mystical poetryalthough they are clearly appropriated for a different (modernist/renewalist) discourse. 29 Nahid, 11 May 1928, 4, 5. 30 Mirza Malkam Khan, Qanun, 21 February 1890, 1, in Ruznama- i Qanun, ed. Homa Nateq (Tehran: Amir Kabir Publishers, 2535 [1976]). 31 Sur-i Israfil 1 (30 May 1907): 1. 32 h Abba s I (Ph.D. diss., University of See Sholeh Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Sha Chicago, 1993), 3375. Some of her observations about the conventions of introductions in historical writing seem to hold true for other forms of Persian literature, as well: see Dibacha-Nigar dar Dah Qarn: Az Qarn-i Chaharum ta Qarn-i Chahardahum (Hijri Qamari), ed. Sayyid Ziya al-Din Sajjadi (Tehran: Zuvvar, 1372 [1993]), 513. It is important to note that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the periodical press in Iran was in its formative period, there was a special interest on the part of Iranian intellectuals in the moral content of literature. For additional examples of moralizing introductory articles (Qajar official gazettes, expatriate periodicals, and periodicals of the constitutional period), see Vaqayi i Ittifaqiyya, 7 February 1851, 1; Da vat al-Islam 1 (October 1906): 1; Muhammad Taqi Malik al-Sho ara Bahar, Maram-i Ma, Danishkada 1 (21 April 1918): 17; Husayn Kazimzadih, Iranshahr, Iranshahr 1 (26 June 1922): 12; and Chira Majalla-i Sharq Payda Shud? Sharq 1 (Safar 1343 H.G. [1924]): 1. It is interesting to note that the earliest known newspaper in IranMirza Salih Shirazis Kaghaz-i Akhbar in 1837was preceded by an official pamphlet declaring the papers purpose to be the education of the residents of the protected domains (mama w ru lik-i mah sa) [of Iran]; it also listed and described the duties of the subjects of the Qajar Empire to their king: see Kohen, Tarikh-i, 1:1324. This suggests another influence on early periodical writing in Iran: imperial farma ns (command decrees). 33 For examples of newspapers that openly disavowed political partisanship, see Danish 1 (15 September 1910), 1, and the introductory article of Alam-i Nisvan cited in Shaykh al-Eslami, Zanan-i Ruznama-Nigar va Andishmand-i Iran (Tehran: Zarrin, 1351 [197273]), 1235. Shaykh al-Eslami was unable to provide an exact date for the first issue of Alam-i Nisvan, but the sixth (and it was a bimonthly magazine) was dated Tir 1300 (JuneJuly 1921). That would place the first issue as coming out in the summer of 1920. Of course, in practice, Iranian newspaperwomen found ways to engage overtly political issues and sometimes drew a response from state authorities who would warn them not to violate the terms of their publishing licensesas in the case of Muzayyen Al-Saltanehs Shukufa (Blossom) in 1913or shut them down, as was the case with Sadiqeh Dowlatabadis first run of Zaban-i Zanan (Womens Voice) in 1920. See Amin, The Attentions of the Great Father, 5558, 70. 34 Najmabadi, Introduction, Ma ayib al-Rijal, 1523. 35 Addad-i Ruznamajat-e Alam, Rahha-yi Ahan-i Duvvul-i Burzurg, and Izdiyad va Inkisar-i Nufusi Duvvul-i Burzurg, in Chihrihnama 2 (1 August 1906), 34, 11, 14. Significantly, perhaps, Chihrahnama lamented the lack of good census data in Eastern countries as much as any concern about the population of modern countries (Japan being included in that number, along with European countries and the United States). Frances smaller population with respect to other modern counties was attributed to its moral laxness. 36 Sayyid Hasan Taqizadih, Amrika, reprinted in Maqalat-i Taqizada, ed. Iraj Afshar (Tehran: Shukufan, 1353 [197475]), 4:6667.

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Ibid., 689. Sitara- i Iran 12 (4 February 1927), 4. 39 In response to unflattering American press coverage of the misadventures of an Iranian diplomat who combined drinking and driving in 1936, the Pahlavi regime closed its embassy in Washington, D.C., until 1939. The American Legation in Tehran kept track of Iranian press responses (monitoring, most typically, Iran, Kushish, and Ittila at) for perceived slights in the American (and international) press throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even took steps to try to head off offensive coverage of the Pahlavi regime by American magazines such as Time. See, for example, U.S. State Department Files 891.91/1-90. The old tension between authoritatively leading public opinion and truthfully representing public opinion was never resolved in the minds of individual journalists and historians of Iranian journalism or by the broader culture. Indeed, the official organs of the Pahlavi regime tried to lay claim to both impulses throughout the 1930s. See, for example, Muhammad Hijazi, Vazifa-i Ma, Iran-i Imruz 1 (1939), 45. Iran-i Imruz was the official publication of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, Reza Shahs main propaganda arm of government. 40 The debate on the Press Law of 1942 hinged on whether the press was to be a moral forum by design (and enforced by government regulation), with journalists retaining their role of public teachers, or if the presss role as an independent forum for public opinion accorded it a moral quality that could be diminished only by government regulation: see Muzakarat-i Majlis: Dawra-r S zdahum-i Qanun-Guzari, 187391, 18941914, and 191542. 41 Muhammad Mas ud, Maram-i Ma, Mard-i Imruz, 9 August, 1942, 1, in Shiftih, Zindigi-nama, 45. 42 Sayyid Mihdi Mir Ashrafi, Atish Rowshan Mishavad, Atish, 17 April 1946, 1. 43 Elwell-Sutton, The Iranian Press, 65. Sadr-Hashemi noted that Iqdams publisher, Abbas Khalili (d. 1972), had always been a firebrand journalist, even from Iqdams inception in 1921. Like Mas ud, he was a writer of fiction (and a translator): see Sadr-Hashemi, Tarikh-i Jara id, 1:22629. For more details on Khalili, see Chihrih-yi Matbu at-i Mu asir, 1718. 44 T. Cuyler Young to Secretary of State, Subject: The Iranian Press Mission, in Confidential U.S. State Department Central Files. Iran, 19451949 (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1985), microfilm, 19 April 1945, 1. 45 Indeed, Mesbahzadehs Keyhan was established with the personal financial backing of Muhammad Reza Shah (d. 1979). See Musahibih: Mustafa Misbahzada, in Iran Nameh, 26:23, 33161. 46 Young to Secretary of State, Iranian Press Mission. The translation of Mas uds letter is contained in the press summary that follows Youngs report. 47 U.S. State Department File 891.911/47 (24 March 1931). 48 Asnad-i Matbu at (12861320), 1:199208, 22043. We have the monthly costs of running a newspaper from the perspective of one other government: Iran during the late Qajar period (191920). 49 It failed very shortly after the Allied occupation for lack of government support (100,000 rials of its 1318 [193940] income was a loan from the National Bank). 50 U.S. State Department File 891.5051/13 (29 September 1931, 6 May 1934, and 8 October 1936). 51 Based on the lists of periodicals in Browne, The Press Poetry of Modern Persia, and Abu Torabiyan, Matbu at-I Irani. Another factor that is likely to have broadened the market for the press (especially in urban areas) in the 1940s was the Ministry of Educations effort to improve literacy among adults throughout the 1930s, with 173,907 adults in evening literacy classes by 1941: Abrahamian, Iran, 145. More research into the curriculum and reading habits of newly literate adults would clarify the impact of state education efforts on the financial viability of the periodical press. See also David Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 52 Asnad-i Matbu at (12861320), 1:12526 (doc. 3, 2 Tir 1305 [23 June 1926]). He announced his vision of an Iranian press agency in his mara mna ma (introductory article): Abbas Mas udi, Markaz-i Ittila at va Nazariyat-i An, Ittila at 1 (10 July 1926), 1. 53 Though I cannot corroborate his assertion, Sadr-Hashemi suggested that Ittila ats circulation numbers in the 1940s had declined from an unspecified peak during the reign of Reza Shah: Sadr-Hashemi, Tarikhi Jara id, 1:208. 54 Nikkie R. Keddie, Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism, in Iran: Religion, Politics and Society: Collected Essays (London: Frank Cass, 1980), 1352. Al-Afghani had expressed support for womens education in Egypt in 1879: see Juan R. I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of
38 37

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the Baha i Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 179. 55 The best introduction to the process by which womens progress is linked to notions of national progress modeled on the progress of Europe is Muhammad Tavakoli-Targhis Imagining Western Women: Occidentalism and Euro-eroticism, Radical America 24 (1990 [1993]): 7287. See also Mirza Fath Ali Akhudzadeh, Maktubat-i Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzada, ed. M. Sobhdam (n.p.: Mard-i Imruz, 1364 [1985]); Encyclopeadia ku Iranica, s.v. A da (Hamid Algar); Sho leh Abadi, Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzada va Mas ala-i Zanan, ndza Nimah-i Digar 17 (1371 [199293]), 2937); Fereydun Adamiyat, Seh Maktub-i Mirza Fath Ali/Sah Maktub va Sad Khitaba-i Mirza Aqa Khan, Yaghma 19 (1345 [1966]): 36267, 42328; Fereydun Adamiyat, Andishah-ha-yi Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (Tehran: Payam, 1357 [197879]); Arshiv: Bakhshha i az Sad Khitaba-yi Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, Nimah-i Digar 9 (1989): 99112; and Bibi Khanom Astarabadi, Ma ayib al-Rijal, ed. Afsaneh Najmabadi (Chicago: Midland Press, 1992). See also Amin, Attentions of the Great Father, 187264. 56 For more on unveiling and its cultural implications in the late 19th century and early 20th century outside the Iranian context, see Beth Baron, Unveiling in Early Twentieth Century Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations, Middle Eastern Studies 31 (1989): 37086; and Elizabeth B. Frierson, Unimagined Communities: Women and Education in the Late-Ottoman Empire, 18761909, Critical Matrix 9 (1995): 5590. 57 Houchang Chehabi, Staging the Emperors New Clothes: Dress Codes and Nation Building Under Reza Shah, Iranian Studies 26 (1993): 20933. 58 For examples of both types of scholarship; see Eliz Sanasarian, The Womens Rights Movement in Iran (New York: Praeger, 1982); Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth Century Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Haideh Moghissi, Populism and Feminism in Iran (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994); Fatemeh Ostad-Malek, Hijab va Kashf-i Hijab dar Iran (Tehran: Mo assaseh-e Matbu i-ye Ate i, 1367 [198889]), and Vaqi a-i Kashf-i Hijab: Asnad-i Muntashir Nashuda (Tehran: Sazman-e Madarek-e Farhang va Mo assaseh- e Pazhuhesh va Motala at-e Farhangi, 1371 [199293]). 59 For more on this, see Amin Propaganda and Remembrance, and idem, Attentions of the Great Father. 60 The tension between wholesome images and seductive images is most apparent in sports coverage and best exemplified by articles such as Mayl Darid Ziba va Dilruba Bashid, Mihragan 73 (16 September 1937), 1213. By pairing images of grim-looking German athletes and smiling Hollywood starlets, this article obscured (and crossed) the boundary between depicting healthful activity and glamorous beauty. For a discussion of similar tension in the modern European context, see George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 61 Malika-e Vijahat-i Dunya, Mihrigan 19 (21 December 1936), 9; Mis Finland: Malika-e Vijahat-i Urupa-yi 1938, ibid., 75: 5. 62 The Reminiscences of Jane Doolittle, Oral History of Iran Collection, Foundation for Iranian Studies, 1983, 9, 11. 63 U.S. State Department Files 891.544 Motion pictures/19 (15 November 193225 January 1935). 64 Peter Chelkowski, Popular Entertainment, Media and Social Change in Twentieth Century Iran, in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly, and Charles Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 7:795. 65 Zan, Ittila at 3676 (29 November 1938), 5. 66 U.S. State Department File 891.911/70 (2 May 1938). 67 Rulan Miklivi, Zhinjir Rawjirs [Ginger Rogers]: Sitara-i Amrika iTa rikhcha-i Zindigani va Avamili Pishraft-i Vay dar Jahan-i Sinama, Ittila at 3688 (11 December 1938), 8. 68 From Interior Ministry reports to the prime minister published in Asnad-e Matbu at, 13201332, doc. 87, 89. Sales of both periodicals were a mere fraction of Ittila ats daily circulation of 11,00012,000. 69 Musahiba ba Banu Duktur Fatima Rizazada Sayyah, Ustad-i Danishgah, Alam-i Zanan (June/July 1944): 13. Contrast this with the back cover of Alam-i Zanan (August/September 1944). 70 Atish (17 April 1946), 4. Ironically, a discussion of womens suffrage was placed with the titillating entertainment coverage. 71 Mard-i Imruz, 10 June 1944, 6; ibid., 28 October 1942, 7; Sih Rukn-i Zindigi-yi Khanumha: Varzish,

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Tabbakhi, Mud, ibid., 20 July 1942, 9; Mudha-yi Muzhik, ibid., 26 August 1942, 6; and Jins-i Khub Kharidan Kar-i Asan Nist, ibid., 2 September 1942, 9. Mas ud soon dropped his fashion and cooking features in Todays Man altogether. Dar Dabiristan Nurbakhsh, ibid., 10 May 1945, 3. The caption under the photograph expressed the desire to open the ruby lips of the high-school graduates. 72 M., Dar Manjelab-e Fahsha, ibid., 10 August 1945, 5, 7; Mohandes Hasan Sa ebi, Shahr-i Favahish, ibid., 10 December 1945, 10 April 1946, 6; and M. Nezhad, Luzum-i Favahish dar Ijtima , ibid., 3 November 1944, 3. 73 Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (London: Macmillian, 1979), 84. For more on studies of the press in the United States and the Middle East, see idem, Frame Analysis, 2nd ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986); Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978); Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); George Roper, Fa ris al-Shidya q and the Transition from Scribal to Print Culture, in The Book in the Islamic World, ed. George N. Atiyeh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Allen Douglas and Fedawa Malti-Douglas, Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Amin, Attentions of the Great Father, 139. 74 Goffman, Gender Advertisements, 84. 75 For a full discussion of cultural scheme as intended here, see Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See also Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), and Deniz Kandiyoti, Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective, in Women in Middle Eastern History, ed. Nikkie Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 2342. 76 Ahmad Kasravi, Khwaharan va Dukhtaran-i Ma, 4th ed. (Tehran: n.p., 1354 [197374]), 32. The first edition was printed in 1323 [194445], but the chapters had also appeared earlier in Kasravis magazine Parcham. See also Carol Regans English summary of this work in Women and Revolution in Iran, ed. Guity Nashat (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983), 6078. 77 See, for example, Parastar-i Khub Pishnahad-i Sihhat Ast, Shukufa, 4, 810 (16 and 23 April, 13 May 1916): 12 (in the first two issues), 23 (in the following issue). 78 See, for example, M., Khanumha va Khadamat-i Idari, Kushish, 16 November 1941, 1, 2. 79 Khushunat va Farhang: Asnad-e Mahramana-e Kashf-e Hejab, 13131322 (Tehran: Entesharat-e Sazman-e Asnad-e Melli-ye Iran, 1372 [199394]), doc. 138. Regarding the subsequent investigation of the incident, which led to arrests of several men by 16 October 1943, see doc. 13941. 80 Tiligraf-i Shahri, Kushish, 30 August 1943, 2; Muhammad Amanpur, Payam bih Banuvan-i Iran, Mardan-i Kar 165 (30 August 1943), 1; Ay Kash Muttafeqin Nabudand va Shuma Ma ra Riz Riz Mikardid: Aya Shuma In Chadur va Chakhchur-bazi ra Hijab-i Islami Minamid? Iran-i Ma, 24 August 1943, 1; Shuma Shaqalan kah dar Kamal-i Pasti bi-Zanha-yi Musalman va Najib Tawhin Mikunid bi-Dast Ma Shadidan Mujazat Khwahid Shod, ibid., 29 August 1943, 1; Siyamak, Maqam-i Zan Dar Jami ah, Mihri Iran, 29 August 1943, 1; Majid Movaqqar, Ghawgha-yi Hijab! Ya Atish-i Nifaq-i Dakhili, ibid., 9 August 1943, 1; and S. Khatimi Saravi, Hijab-i Haqiqi Iffat va Ismat Ast, ibid., 2 September 1943, 4. 81 For a study of the expression of anxiety about socio-political change by representing women as a contagion, see Palmira Brummett, Dogs, Women, Cholera and other Menaces in the Streets: Cartoon Satire in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 190811, International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, no. 4 (November 1995): 40531. 82 Amin, Attentions of the Great Father, 187263. 83 Abrahamian, Iran. For more on the rise of political Islamic revivalism in Iran from 1941 to 1953, see Houchang Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 10339; and Fakhreddin Azimi, The Fada iyan-e Islam: Fanaticism, Politics and Terror, in From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam, ed. Said Amir Arjomand (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984). 84 Mud-Parasti, Parcham-i Islam, 5 June 1946, 1. 85 Sayyid Kamal al-Din Nurbakhsh, Nikah, ibid., 19 October 1946, 4, and F. Shakibi, Ta limat-i Qur an

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Mutabiq ba Fitrat-i Bashar Ast, ibid., 20 November 1946, 3. For an example of progressive Islam in Womens Awakening propaganda, see Dr. Zanjani, Zan dar Islam va Sharayi -i Qadim, Ittila at 27213 (2426 February 1936), 2. Unfortunately, part 1 was not available. Zanjani may have addressed the issue of unveiling specifically here, but he did not in the remaining parts. 86 The revivalists came to this view some fifty years after it was introduced in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East: see Afsaneh Najmabadi, Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran, and Omnia Shakry, Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in 20th Century Egypt, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 91170. 87 Saffiyeh Firuz, the founder of the Womens Party, remembers an unspecified they lobbying her to change the name from The Womens Party to the The Womens Council precisely to remove the implication that the group sought political power. She changed the name in 1946: The Reminiscences of Saffiyeh Firuz, audiotape, Oral History of Iran Collection, Foundation for Iranian Studies (1984), clicks 12559. 88 Moghissi, Populism and Feminism, 94. 89 Maryam Mir Hadi, Agar Zan Vak l-i Millat Shavad: Mova fiq, Atish, 27 April 1946, 4. See also Afsar Sadqadar, Agar Zan Vakil-i Millat Shavad: Movafiq, ibid., 4 May 1946, 4. 90 Sahlins, Islands of History, clicks 15152.