Shifting the Center : Iranian Rural Women Transform Their Lives
The extensive body of work on women’s question after the Islamic revolution in Iran, for the most part, focuses on formal discourses and universalizes the life of one segment of women. This paper emphasizes that Iranian women are diverse, focuses on an agricultural village to discuss rural women experiences and how they are transforming their lives. The picture of rural women which emerges from this study is different from that of urban middle class Iranian woman and is far from the dominant image of Muslim women as secluded, veiled and passive. Women of this village face multi-layered relations of domination which is based on capitalism, patriarchy, Islamic ideology, generation, gender and other factors. However, women, individually and as a group, within their limits and possibilities, attempt to improve their situation. This paper provides a strong evidence that we must break with the tradition that conceptualizes Islam as monolithic, Muslim women as passive and Iranian women as one.