The Iranian Left and the “Woman Question” in the Revolution of 1978–79

Abstract

The relationship between feminism and socialism in both the theoretical and practical realms has been marked with difficulty and “unhappiness.” Feminists have criticized leftists for their lack of attention to sexual domination, and many socialists, in turn, have looked at women's liberation movements as a bourgeois deviation or, worse yet, a conspiracy against the workers' struggle. In 19th-century social democratic movements in Europe, conflicts between feminist-socialist advocates of women's rights such as Clara Zetkin and “proletarian anti-feminism” among workers and communists were constant. Eventually, guided by the theoretical insights of a number of socialist leaders such as Bebel, Engels, and Zetkin, socialist parties of the First and Second Internationals came to realize that the cause of the women's movement was just and to accept autonomous women's organizations. The Third International, or Comintern, although it initially claimed to liberate women “not only on paper, but in reality, in actual fact,” treated the inequality of women as a secondary consideration. Focusing on production and labor conflict, the Comintern paid attention only to women's exploitation by capital to the extent that “by the end of the 1920s, any special emphasis on women's social subordination in communist propaganda or campaigning came to be regarded as a capitulation to bourgeois feminism.” Leftist women activists lost their organizational autonomy and had to work under the supervision of their national communist party.