oppression of women An article from the Iranian Women's LVSC. 68. Chalton St. London NW1). IN all societies where private | required to hand over their wage ownership of land, labour, and materials exists and where a minority owns the majority of resources, women are oppress- ed as workers and as women. They are oppressed as workers because most of them sell their labour cheaply. more very often than ever, child care pro- visions are minimal, they do very long shifts and work in very poor conditions. They are deprived of good maternity care and suffer from poor medical services, if any. Women are oppressed as women because men are considered to be and are dominant in society and House work, cooking, household. children and looking after are women's duties at home, even when they work outside the home. When they are wage earners, they are often Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986p15
Association (c/o Migrants Services Unit. packets to men who are, ultimately, heads of households. Even in some homes where domestic affairs are shared and women have a say in decision making, men's help in housework is considered to be doing women a favour".
In Iran, like in many backward capitalist countries, women's oppression in both spheres takes a very brutal form. Women from birth till death, are considered to be men's property. As young giris they are disciplined and heavily protected by their parents. They must remain a virgin so sex before marriage is forbidden and discouraged. If there is a situation where a girl is suspected of not being a virgin, she could become a public disgrace if she is of a lower class family: among the upper classes there are always ways of evading the issue!
The common desire of parents is to bring up their girls "pure" and "inno-
cent" and ready to take up their roles as wives and mothers. Women are taught to obey men and to serve them and their children. Even when they are fortunate enough to receive education and, particularly higher education, the aim is to broaden their Busbands. On the other hand, they could marry at the age of 9, which is 'the legal minimum age of marnage for giris.
Social rules have always reinforced women's inferiority in society with or without State intervention.
Shah's reign when the lega minimum age of marriage tor a girl was 16, there were a lot of girls who married at the age of 9. The father (or a male guardian, in his absence) has
Ta woman's regardless of her age. Selection spouses for women is, purely, the
fathers or guardians.
Women who do not conform to the dominant institutions severely published by their parents, the community and now by the State. The Islamic republic's dominant ideology is that a woman's place is at home with her children. The State only praises women who are childbearers.
Tis considered to be a religious duty of all Muslims. The Law of Retribution has a brutal punishment for those women who do not respect the "sanctity" of marriage. "Adulterous" women and prostitutes are stoned to death; lesbians are executed. The State, however, is in favour of State-controlled prostitution in the form of temporary marriage, which could last as little as a few minutes!
Women are economically dependent on men. Economic and emotional dependency forces women to accept cruelty and hardship from men. During the Shah's time when women were given the right to divorce and to oppose polygamy, a tremely difficult to do so. Nowadays, the Law does not permit a woman to divorce, nor to oppose polygamy.
A woman can only divorce her husband in very special circumstances. Women can not oppose polygamy at all! Women are forced to reproduce. The State has taken full control over women's lives and their bodies. Abortion is illegal and contraceptives are restricted to those whom the State approves.
Women are not accepted as legal
guardians of their children. In the event of the death of their husbands, the immediate male relatives will be
children's guardians. Women could
not have custody of their children after divorce, they can only look after
them for a specified period of time,
namely 7 years for a girl and 2 for a
boy.
Women are forced to cover their
hair with scarves, the colour of which
is, even, determined by the State. They have to wear long and loose gowns with trousers or thick stockings. The State's punishment for an unveiled woman is lashing (75 lashes) or imprisonment, and if it is repeated for a specified number of times,
The Islamic mob injures women who are not veiled or who are showing bits of hair, but cutting their faces with knives or razor blades, throwing acid at their faces, etc. Sex segregation in offices, universities, schools, etc., is also used as a tool to remove women from active participation in decision making.
Women workers have been sacked in great numbers as the economy, through bad management, is in deep crisis and unemployment is biting the hardest ever. This is the usual theme of capitalist economies where women workers. During recession they are first to lose their jobs and during ex-
production they are brought in to fill unskilled and poorly paid jobs which men don't want to do.
Sacking women from their jobs has been justified by the Islamic republic
Tact to put women in their "natural" place (i.e. home). Married
Ware forced to do part time jobs, while a handful of nurseries in workplaces, which were not even sufficient to meet all needs, are closed
Othe Islamic backward practices which reinforced women's submission to men and their position as men's property existed and the state did not sufficiently intervene to change anything. Although the Shah introduced some reforms to involve women in produc•••• ...
More valuable
than gold •
Aby Striking Miners' •
Children • Socialist Viewpoint No. 11 March 1986 pl6
tion, they did not change women's social position fundamentally.
The Islamic republic, however, as its name suggests, enforces Islamic
Religion is no longer a private affair but an ideology which the State bases its activities. Therefore, the call for separation of
from the State is very
Women from Iran's natonal and religious minorities are heavily oppressed by virtue of their belonging to a specific national or religious Tewish Zoroastrian Kurdiah Christian women. The wholesale murder of Bahaiis in Iran and their persecution
Also the war that the regime has imposed on Kurdistan has devastating effect on women in Kurdish towns and villages. Women who are active in opposition to the regime face brutal torture in prisons. Young girls are raped before their execution because Islamic ideology places a dead virgin in "heaven".
Mothers are tortured in front of their children or vice versa. Pregnant women are brutally raped and tortured. Islamic ideology allows all that to happen as it considers women political prisoners as spoils of war who are, ultimately, subject to their
We feel that we have to expose this brutal regime to everyone who has the slightest illusion about it.
As the media is silent about all that brutality which goes on in Iran, as part of an imperialist plot. and as Britain continues its silent support of the Islamic republic in Iran we must fill the gap!
A new booklet of poems. prose and drawings by miners' children about the Great Strike of 1984-5 is now available: proceeds from sales go to Women Against Pit Closures. The booklet is E1.50 plus postage from MUTG, 10. West Bank. London N16 5DG. (Cheques payable to "More Valuable Than Gold).
End "Scabby Doc's" All-out action needed
OR NEVER! PERHAPS Macoutes" wear colour-coded overalls rather that brutal sunglasses: but the regime of "Scabby Doc" Murdoch in Fort Wapping reduces trade unionism to persecuted. clandestine status.
The chips are down for the Fleet Street unions. If the NGA, SOGAT and the NUI do not fight now for an escalation of action to deeat Murdoch's union-busting. will not fight any of the growing queue of newspaper bosses waiting to tear up hard-won agreements and slash jobs by the thousand.
The signs from the print union leaders are very negative.
• Leaders of SOGAT - its assets sequestered - persist in regarding pickets and outside supporters as a bigger threat than Murdoch, and have organised nothing to combat the brazen "justice" of sequestration.
•NGA leaders hve been equally lowkey, holding back from blacking action on Murdoch's titles: both unions have held back from action against members still scabbing for Murdoch.
• The NUJ has failed even to call out its News International chapels in defence of the journalists victimised and sacked for carrying out the union's limp policy of refusing to move to Wapping.
• While rail unions have boycotted Murdoch's titles, their members have been angry that the papers have been carried by TGWU-organised lorries!
• The TUC has ducked out of any fight to ostracise and expel the EETPU whose scab workforce at Wapping is the key to Murdoch's union-busting exercise. The TUC demands on the EETPU were so weak-
SOCIALIST VIEWPOINT