Abstract
Iran's government has tended to enforce gender social relations through both family and employment policies. Officially, women's employment is discouraged unless it is necessary for her family's survival, and the home is considered the best and the most suitable place for women. The state's discourse makes a sharp distinction between public and private spheres. Nonetheless, women's higher literacy rates and the increasing number of college educated women combined with high inflation, which has lowered both the purchasing power of middle and lower class households, and women's aspirations for financial independence and intellectual autonomy, have led them to seek paid employment. The most educated women target public administration or the private sector, while less educated women seek job opportunities in the informal sector of the economy. Decision-making authority within the family and the quest for gender equality in Iranian society are two of the outcomes of women's paid employment that is likely to alter gendered power relations.
This article is based on my fieldwork in Iran between 1994 and 2008, and it stresses the importance of women's income-earning activity as a crucial means to change power relations between men and women both in the family and in society. I examine the family institution as a site of powerFootnote1 and argue that, by analyzing family dynamics and women's everyday life, we can understand better the politics of ordinary Iranians and the relationship between state and society. The article's underlying assumption is that the private and public spheres are not separable worlds, but rather they are interconnected and are aspects of the same socioeconomic system.Footnote2 Following Danièle Kergoat, I argue that the gender division of labor is a power relationship to the detriment of women:
Gender division of labor, which is a form of social division of labor, assigns men to the sphere of production and women to the sphere of reproduction. Gender division of labor has two organizing principles: separation (between men's work and women's work); and hierarchy (a man's work is more valuable than a woman's). These principles are applied through legitimizing the naturalist ideology. As a result, men obtain valued social functions in political, religious, military or economic realms.Footnote3
The State and Gender
The Iranian civil code legally determines the relationship between men and women and promotes a gender division of labor. It grants excessive privileges to men on the ground that the economic function is the main attribute of men. In other words, the law recognizes and sanctions men's authority over women in both the public and the private spheres because men are perceived as breadwinners and protectors of women. Nonetheless, gender social relations can be changed through women's access to education, knowledge, technology, and related jobs because they are founded on a gendered division of labor.Footnote4 With regard to women's professional activity, this work is likely to lead them to economic independence and intellectual autonomy, because it enables them to compete with men's financial and intellectual authority and to challenge it both within the family institution and in the society. It undoubtedly will introduce a change in matrimonial harmony founded on men's domination promoted by law. However, in the Iranian job market, the social and economic gap between college-educated active women with prestigious and well-paid jobs and less educated women with part-time jobs in the formal or informal sectors of the economy is increasing. This adds to the heterogeneity of women and reinforces hierarchical power relations among them, which, in turn, hinders the alliance of various classes of women.
The financial dependency of women on men is so central in Iran's legal system that if a husband refuses to pay household expenses, his wife can file for divorce. It is also due to man's economic function that the law considers him the head of the household and compels the wife to submit to her husband (article 1105 of the civil code). If a woman refuses to comply with her husband's authority and demands (including sexual demands), legally he is allowed to sanction his wife financially by refusing to pay her expenses (article 1108 of the civil code). The Islamic law of inheritance is yet another good illustration. Like other religious authorities, Ayatollah Morteza Mottahari (d. 1979), whose ideas influenced the development of Islamic-based legal codes in Iran, argued that because being breadwinners and meeting women's expenses by providing them with dowries (mahr) and household expenses (nafaqeh) are men's responsibility, and because women's financial needs therefore are much less than those of men, men should inherit twice as much as women.Footnote5
Since 1979, state policies have tended to enforce gender social relations through both family and employment policies. As a result, women's employment outside the home is discouraged unless it is necessary for her family's survival, and the home is considered the best and the most suitable place for women. Following the election as president of the radical populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, and his contested re-election in June 2009, new sets of regressive policies were imposed on women's rights. By these measures, the government also tried to find a solution to the crisis of masculinity that has been aggravated by high rates of unemployment among men. The government also attempted to slow the increasing number of highly-educated women whom conservative politicians fear are likely to implement changes in gender power relations between men and women. For example, first they adopted a quota in favor of men in the universities, and then they prohibited women's access to several university majors. In the summer of 2012, a total 36 universities announced that they will bar women from pursuing 77 fields of study, such as engineering, accounting, education, counseling, and chemistry. Additionally, economics, administration, psychology, library sciences, and literature began reducing gender quotas by 30 to 40 percent.
In 2007, the government prepared a new Family Protection Bill that marks further regression of women's rights and is in contradiction to the needs and realities of the society.Footnote6 Among the most controversial provisions of the proposed bill is Article 22, which removes any requirement to register temporary marriages (sigheh). The removal of the registration requirement eliminates any financial or legal protections for women in these unions, as well as for any children who are born into temporary marriages. In June 2012, however, the article was amended to make registration of temporary marriages obligatory in certain cases, such as those involving a pregnancy. Setareh Hedayatkhah, a spokeswoman for Parliament's Cultural Commission, had proposed that no conditions should be put on the registration of temporary marriages, but rather registration should be compulsory for all of them. Her proposal was turned down, however, with Mohammad Dehghan, a member of Parliament's Legal and judicial Commission, stating that the main appeal of temporary marriages is that they remain unregistered.Footnote7
Article 23 authorizes polygynous marriages contingent upon the financial capacity of men. It does not set specific parameters for adequate financial resources to support multiple wives, or define overall concepts of justice or equal treatment of multiple wives. Most notably absent from the Family Protection Bill is any effective requirement for the consent of the first wife before her husband may take a second wife. Likewise, in March-April 2010, Ahmadinejad questioned Iran's modern demographic behavior, declaring that two children per family were not enough and claiming that the country could support a 30 percent rise in the population. According to the last census of population and housing taken in 2011, the country has 75 million inhabitants, 53.6 million—71 percent—of whom live in urban areas, and the population's annual growth rate is 1.2 percent. In July 2012, Ali Khamenehi, the religious leader, questioned family planning programs, which were implemented in 1989 during the administration of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and he declared that the Iranian population should rise to 150 million. Following the leader's speech, Mrs Marziyeh Vahid Dastjerdi, Ahmadinejad's Minister of Health, declared that family planning would be abandoned.Footnote8 On May 20, 2014, Khamenehi, who believes the Iranian population should be doubled, issued a decree urging the government to end family planning and to implement population policies to increase Iran's population mainly through financial and nationalistic incentives.Footnote9
Ahmadinejad's government also had started to criticize women's economic activity outside the home, with the exception of the gender-segregated sectors (especially education and medicine where employed women are supposed to serve exclusively the female population). Measures were undertaken to decrease women's employment in the public sector that employs almost 40 percent of urban active women, with the aim of forcing women back to domestic life. Despite President Hassan Rohani's calls for sexual equality and his stands against the conservative clergy, including the leader, his government has taken no measures so far to enhance women's economic activity or to guarantee their rights both within and outside the family institution.
Advocates of an ideal of Islamic femininity, however, are likely to change their interpretations of the shari'a when women's wage earning work becomes necessary. Khamenehi declared:
Islam authorizes women to work outside the household. Their work might even be necessary but it should not interfere with their main responsibility that is childrearing, childbearing and housework. No country can do without women's work force but this should not contradict women's moral and human values. It should not weaken women, nor compel them to bend or to stoop low.Footnote10
Despite their lip service to women's activity, the political and religious elite prefer women to stay at home and leave social, political and economic activities to men. I strongly believe in the social value of women's work, and I think that through work women can and should show their capabilities.Footnote11
Ever since the revolution, no law was passed in favor of women. In the administration, all key positions are handed over to men who have less work experience and a lower level of education than us.Footnote12
Islam prefers that women take care of housework … But if the husband's earnings are not enough to meet his family's needs, then his wife is authorized to work in order to complete her husband's earnings, provided that her work corresponds to her condition as a woman and that she maintains her chastity. If the costs of marital life prevent a young man from getting married, then woman's work outside the family becomes even compulsory in order to enhance marriage which is the tradition of our Prophet.Footnote13
Gendered Occupations
The results of my qualitative fieldwork in Iran from 1994 to 2008 established a correlation between women's level of education, economic independence and their free choice in both marriage and divorce. For this very reason, men prefer not to permit their wives to work unless women's revenues are absolutely needed. In Iran, however, income-earning activity for women has become a value. In our survey of 7,633 married women, 77 percent were in favor of men and women's equal access to work. Controlling for education, 71 percent of illiterate women favored works compared with 81 percent of literate women, and 88 percent of women with college degrees.Footnote14 However, in rentier economies dependent on revenues from the sale of oil to foreigners, including Iran, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, women's labor participation in the formal sector of the economy is much lower than in neighboring non-oil countries such as Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia or Turkey (see Table ).
Table 1 Women's labor participation rate in the formal sector of the economy, percent of female population age 15+(2012).
Currently, 50 percent of active Iranian women are employed in the service sector, 25 percent in the manufacturing sector, and 25 percent in the agricultural sector. The percentage share of active women in the service and agricultural sectors has increased compared with 1996 (by 1.2 and 8.3 percent, respectively), while their share in the manufacturing sector has decreased by 9.5 percent.Footnote15
Table 2 Percentage of women's employment by sector, 10 years and older.
The increase in women's agricultural activities can be explained by the fact that young men leave the countryside to seek jobs in towns and leave agricultural activities to women. In 2013, the unemployment rate for women 10 years and older was twice that of men (21.2 versus 8.1).Footnote16
Although over 40 percent of Iranian women active in the formal sector are college-educated, they seldom hold supervisory or decision-making positions.Footnote17 According to official statistics, the highest percentages of women holding supervisory responsibilities are found in the ministries of Education (40 percent) and Health (12.5 percent) where sex segregation in employment is the most important.Footnote18
In addition to active women in the formal sector of the economy, economic crisis and lack of job opportunities in the formal sector pushed increasing numbers of women to seek work in the informal sector, although the official statistics do not account for their activities. During fieldwork, I often met women who declared themselves as housewives but turned out to have income-earning activities. Some were carpet weavers, while others were hairdressers, tailors, caterers, janitors, housekeepers, and petty traders. These women usually are less educated than their counterparts in the formal service sector of the economy, and they often work at home. Through their income-earning work, however, they have acquired financial independence and contribute actively to the household expenses. But these jobs are not prestigious or well-paid, and their work generally does not allow them or their families to achieve any upward social mobility. They effectively remain invisible to the people for whom they provide paid services. Furthermore, they generally do not have work contracts, benefits or social security, and receive scant social recognition from the government or middle class and upper class society. Furthermore, the informal sector jobs confine them to socially undesirable work that effectively exclude them from the public and decision-making spheres.
In addition to the women in paid employment, there are 5.5 million other women who engage in unpaid work in family enterprises. Iran has over one million family enterprises (carpet weaving, dairy products, etc.) with 6,600,000 employees, 84 percent of whom are women. In my nationwide survey of 10,350 women 15 years and older, 18 percent of active women had two jobs and 73 percent of them worked for a member of their family without pay. Women who work in family enterprises usually do not define their activity as a job because they do not earn a wage. An example is Hâjar, who is in her 30s, a mother-of-three, and lives in Esboumahaleh, a village near the city of Gorgan (in Golestan province, northern Iran). Her husband is a high-school teacher but also works on his own land. Her parents pressured her to marry at 16, and she was forced to quit school. She described her work:
I consider myself a housewife because I work on our own land. I do not work for others, and I have no salary. My husband and his brothers have bought a tractor, and he sometimes works on our land. He sells the products himself and keeps the money.Footnote19
Women, Work and Authority
In order to measure the impact of education and employment on women's individual behavior and the changes that they introduce in family dynamics, I conducted a qualitative survey in Baluchistan, Esfahan, Golestan Hormozgan and Tehran provinces. I carried out open-ended interviews with over 250 women active in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy. College educated, employed married women in my survey had met their husbands at work, in the university, or through their friends, and their marriages were exogamous, based on love and free choice. Both husband and wife worked. Arranged and endogamous marriage was much more prevalent among less educated women from more modest social backgrounds. Despite their diverse regional, social or family origins and ages, they all valued their work, which, they believed, allowed them to take distance from the traditional role of mother and wife. Some believed that through work they could create a different relationship to their family and society and even change power relations.
As Sylvia Walby has argued, the emergence of different levels of citizenship to a great extent is related to the transformation of patriarchal society.Footnote21 The transformation of private patriarchy to public patriarchy and the change in gender relations seem impossible without women's civic and political rights and without their access to social citizenship that is likely to provide them with an alternative to their financial dependency on their spouses. An example of what Walby means was articulated in my survey by Maliheh, a 42-year-old school teacher in eastern Tehran:
I've been a school teacher for 20 years and am very satisfied with my job. Thanks to the strength it gives me, I can accomplish housework. I need to work outside the home. Even after my retirement, I'm planning to continue to work in a private school. My children grew up with a working mother and are very proud of my activity. Women can be in charge of the same responsibilities as men. I believe that women's outside work is very beneficial to them. Through their income-earning activity, they can contribute financially to the well-being of their family. They can understand social realities better and transmit their experience to their children better. [I believe that] society values women who are educated and active.Footnote22
I have been working since I was 18, and I am accustomed to work. I absolutely need my financial independence. I also notice that, thanks to my financial contribution, I have earned a lot of authority at home. Doing housework is extremely monotonous but working outside the home puts me in contact with social life. Moreover, because I work, my husband takes part in the housework. This is precisely what he did not do when I was staying at home on maternity leave.Footnote24
Educated working women are valued by their family, especially their own mothers. Mozhdeh, a 35-year-old engineer in Tehran, said:
My family encourages me to continue to work. When my son was born two years ago, I decided to quit my job temporarily to take care of him at home. But my parents, especially my mother, were against that. She urged me not to quit and promised to take care of my baby. I leave my son at my parents' every morning and pick him up after work. My professional activity has led my parents and parents-in-law to respect me much more than my sister who is a housewife.Footnote25
I notice that people both in my social environment and in my extended family respect educated working women and stigmatize housewives. They take us seriously and ask us advice while in their imagination housewives are ignorant.Footnote26
I'm originally from Qaemshahr (in Mazanderan province in northern Iran). Esfahan is very traditional compared with my hometown. In northern Iran, women participate actively in economic and social life and as a result have earned authority. But even here in Esfahan, when people find out that I'm a high-school teacher, they behave differently and respect me. I profoundly believe in gender equality and in my classes I attempt to transmit my values to my students and urge them to be active in the social, political and economic life of their society.Footnote27
In contrast to low or middle income families where women's income-earning activity is necessary for their family's survival, in upper middle class families, men with high incomes usually prefer that their wives stay at home. Mahine, 37, a mother-of-three, an engineer and a state employee in Tehran, remarked:
I like my job. Ever since I was 17, I always wanted to work and never imagined myself a housewife. This is quite normal because my mother was a high-school teacher and I saw her working when I was growing up. Moreover, her family life was not affected by her job because she had the same vacations as us. She became my role model and I was raised with a very positive image of working women and the idea that women's economic independence was crucial. My mother kept telling me that after marriage I should insist at all costs to work outside of the home. She encouraged me not to limit my existence to taking care of my husband and children. I started to work soon after my marriage, when I graduated from university. At the beginning my husband was not against my work. He was even glad to have a working wife. Even following the birth of our first son he did not object to my work. My mother and mother-in-law took care of the baby while I was at work. But after our second and third children were born, he started asking me to quit my job and to stay at home. He says that it is much better for our children. He is an engineer and a liberal professional and earns a very high income. My salary is therefore not necessary for the well-being of my family. Faced with my refusal to quit, he stopped insisting and thinks that sooner or later I'll be persuaded that taking care of my children and husband is more important than working outside the home.Footnote28
In addition to the majority of educated active women who value their work as a means of social participation, some women explained the increasing number of job-seeking women by arguing that the privileges granted by law to men, especially in matters of divorce and polygyny, have provoked anxiety among women, leading many of them to undertake an income-earning activity. According to Mahvash, a 46-year-old high-school teacher in Esfahan:
Many women believe that if their husbands divorce them, they would lose everything and would be devoid of financial support. Without financial means, they cannot obtain their children's custody either. For this very reason they seek a paid job.Footnote29
The husband's authority in the family institution is reflected in his power to make important decisions. Women usually participate in decision-making when it comes to housework or their children's education before puberty. Hâjar illustrates typical women who have no income-earning activity and leave decision-making authority to their spouses:
My husband makes almost all decisions alone because he earns our living, is older and has more experience. I once asked him to go for something and it turned out to be a mistake and as a result we had many troubles. From then onward, I said to myself that I should let him decide. Even concerning our children's education, I always ask his opinion.Footnote30
Although being a janitor in a medical office is not a prestigious job, I like to work in order to be independent from my husband and others. An illiterate person like me has not much choice. To me, the ideal job for a woman is to be a state employee in the administration. When I see these women, I say to myself, ‘My God, I would have loved to be one of them.’ It is my dream, but I know that they have pursued higher education to attain their status. For this reason, I always tell my children that I will continue to work to provide them with the financial means so that they can study in order to become somebody.Footnote31
After my husband's sudden death, my three sons and I remained with no resources. Contrary to what I expected, the state did not help us. I thus realized that in order to survive, I had to rely exclusively on myself. I first rented one of the three rooms of my house and started looking for a job. But because I'm illiterate, the only job I could find was carpet weaving. I work at home and sell my carpets. With the money I earn, I pay my children's education so that they can pursue higher education and get themselves a better situation.Footnote32
I agree with women's work outside the home. They must work in order to be financially independent. A woman who works is the honor of her husband.Footnote33
Because I'm illiterate I want my children to get a good education. We don't differentiate between our sons and our daughter. If they want to learn a foreign language or computer we will provide them with every means we have. I prefer to spend money on their education rather than buying things for our house. My husband sells the products, but he brings the money home and gives it to me.Footnote34
Even in remote, economically stagnant Sistan and Baluchestan province, located in the southeast and bordering on Afghanistan and Pakistan, low-income women expressed pride in their income-earning work. For example, Kaniz, 44, lives in a small house in a poor neighborhood of Zahedan, the provincial center, along with her husband, two young daughters, her son, her daughter-in-law and their baby. She works in the cafeteria of the local university and is very proud to be the only breadwinner for her family and to be in a position of authority. She said:
My husband has a small retirement pension and is ill. It is thanks to my salary that we all can survive. Our son married two years ago, thinking that he would find a job quickly but has remained unemployed. I thus accepted that they live with us temporarily. I keep telling him and my daughter-in-law that one child is enough. Children's education costs a lot of money. I tell them that if they want to have more children, they should move out of our house. I want my daughters to continue their studies and find a job before getting married. A woman should not rely financially on her husband.Footnote36
I want my daughters to continue their studies and get highly educated. I think they also should find a job before getting married, because after marriage they won't have this opportunity. If I were educated like my husband, I could have found a job with higher income than what I earn now. Because I don't have any educational credentials, I had not many options and became a shopkeeper. My small shop is next to our house and I earn some money working some hours a day in the shop. I sell clothes and beauty supplies. I do everything myself. My husband does not interfere with my activity. I prepare the list of things I need to buy, then I go to the bazaar to purchase them and bring the goods to the shop. I spend the income I gain for the needs of my children, especially their education.Footnote37
I decide how to spend my income. I decide what to buy. There is no difference between men and women. They have the same capabilities. For example, I do take all administrative steps on behalf of my husband. In the administration, everybody thinks that I'm the school principal. But men, especially in small towns and villages do not encourage women's activities.Footnote38
Housework and Children's Education
The social and cultural impact of women's income-earning activities still is limited, at best, to their own families and social environment. Moreover, the approval they receive has not had much effect on their responsibilities for domestic work and children's education, both of which remain almost exclusively women's domain. Many of my interviewees agreed with Nahid, who said:
It is women who do the housework. Even when I'm exhausted I must prepare to eat, clean the house, take care of the baby. But my husband, like other men, does not exhaust himself. When he is tired he takes a rest!Footnote39
Laws, dominant ideology and discourse along with social customs play a crucial role in maintaining the gender division of labor in the domestic and family sphere and keeping men and women in unequal social relations. An example is Maryam, who works on farmland far from her home, leaving early in the morning and returning late in the afternoon. Like her educated or uneducated rural or urban counterparts, she does the housework, cleaning, cooking, sewing etc. after her outside work. ‘It is very hard. It is exhausting but I do all the housework. My husband does not help me.’Footnote40
Likewise, Hâjer, who works on her family's agricultural land, said:
When I'm very busy or must go out shopping, I leave the children at home and my husband takes care of them. But it is I who does the cooking, cleaning and everything else. My husband works a lot and is often very tired. When he returns home, he eats and then takes a rest. Housewives work a lot and should have rights. But it seems that men have many more rights.Footnote41
A woman who works outside the home is much more tired than a housewife. Like many other working women, on week days I wake up early in the morning to serve breakfast and prepare my children for school. Then I take them to school before going to work. After work I go shopping for dinner before taking my children to different classes. Waiting for their English, computer or music classes to end, I return home to cook dinner. Then I pick up my children and help them with their homework. After dinner is served, I cook for the next day because my children eat lunch at home while I'm at work. Then I wash the dishes and clean up the house before going to bed at midnight, exhausted. Shopping and housework are my responsibility. My children are still too young and I don't ask them to help. My husband never takes the initiative to do so. If I want or need his assistance, I must beg him over and over again, and he takes his time to provoke me because he thinks that housework is women's responsibility. I am aware that this situation is to my detriment, but in order to avoid disputes with my husband I end up doing all the housework myself.Footnote42
Nobody helps me at home. My children are too busy with their homework and my husband has never shared the housework. My condition was even worse before, when, for financial reasons, I had two jobs. But even then, I was alone to do the housework. It never occurred in my husband's mind that, after 12 hours of work outside the home, I was exhausted and needed to rest. No working woman wishes to take all the responsibility for heavy housework when she returns home. But she does so because of her life condition and because she tries to avoid quarrels with her husband that would create a violent environment for her children. It goes without saying that this situation causes tremendous pressure and makes working women's life very stressful. They are worn out. From their tender age, men's upbringing in their family makes them believe that housework is women's exclusive responsibility. My husband is no exception to this rule. Ever since our marriage, I have tried to change his views, but now I realize that I have failed because it was already too late. Moreover, social customs, laws and official discourse all promote gender inequality. Under these circumstances, when women are considered inferior beings, how do you expect me to fight against everyone and persuade my husband to accept the principle of gender equality and an equal division of housework?Footnote43
Conclusion
Housework that is undertaken almost exclusively by women reinforces the practice of private patriarchy that keeps women in the private sphere and contributes to the creation of professional inequalities for working women. Gender inequality also is reproduced in the job market through job discrimination and gender segregation of women who are perceived as mothers and wives throughout their professional lives. These intertwined processes thus help shape women's life experiences and maintain gendered social relations both at home and in society.
Repeated attempts by the government to enforce private patriarchy through new provisions, however, are likely to be challenged in a society in which modern social and behavioral patterns have taken root among women. Moreover, in the current context of a deep economic crisis and a sharp decrease in the purchasing power of households, women are likely to continue seeking wage-earning jobs, in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, cherishing financial independence and social participation, and pursuing higher education as a means to empowerment. Likewise, Islamic laws and institutions that tend to reinforce patriarchy and gendered social relations in both the public and the private spheres are likely to continue to be challenged, especially by youth, precisely because they are in contradiction with women's demographic, social and cultural realities.
Notes
1 On the family as a site of power, see further Christine Delphy (Citation2001), Penser le genre [Thinking about gender] (Paris: Sylleps).
2 D. Spain (Citation1993) Gendered Space and Women's Status, Sociological Theory, 11(2), p. 139.
3 D. Kergoat (Citation2004) Division sexuelle du travail et rapports sociaux de sexe, [Sexual division of labor and gender social relations], in H. Hirata (ed.), Dictionnaire critique du féminisme [Critical dictionary of feminism], 2nd edn. (Paris: PUF), pp. 35–44.
4 P. Tabet (Citation1998) La construction sociale de l'inégalité des sexes: Des outils et des corps [Social construction of sexual inequality: The tools and bodies] (Paris: L'Harmattan).
5 Ayatollah M. Mottahari (Citation1993) Nezam-i Hoghugh-i zan dar Islam [The system of women's rights in Islam], 17th edn. (Tehran: Sadra), pp. 283–284.
6 Available at: http://www.payvand.com/news/12/mar/1064.html
7 Available at: http://www.payvand.com/news/12/mar/1064.html, 03/06/12, and http://learningpartnership.org
8 Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2012/08/120801_l39_dastgerdi_population_control.shtml?s
9 ISNA, May 20, 2014. News code 93023019253.
10 From CitationAyatollah Khamenehi's sermon on December 16, 1992, in: Cheshmeh-ye Nour, Tehran, 1995, p. 269.
11 Author Interview, Tehran, July 1996
12 Ibid.
13 S. J. Mostafavi (Citation1995) Behesht-e khanevadeh [Family paradise], vol I, 10th ed. (Qom), p. 117.
14 The quantitative survey, conducted in 2002, was a joint project of the Statistical Center of Iran and two French research institutes: CNRS-Monde iranien and IFRI. For some results see A. Kian (Citation2008) From Motherhood to Equal Rights Advocates, in: H. Katouzian & H. Shahidi (eds.), Iran in the 21st Century (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 86–106.
15 Labor Force Survey Summary findings, Summer 1392 (2013) (Tehran: Statistical Center of Iran) and available online at: http://amar.org.ir/Default.aspx?tabid = 1242&articleType = ArticleView&articleId = 571.
16 Ibid.
17 Statistical Center of Iran (1379/2000), Vizheguiha-ye ejtemayi-eghtesadi-ye zanan dar iran [Women's social and economic specificities in Iran] (Tehran: SCI), p. 159.
18 Ibid. p. 295.
19 Author Interview, Esboumahaleh, Iran, January 2004.
20 Ibid.
21 S. Walby (Citation2000) La citoyenneté est-elle sexuée?, in T. H. Ballmer-Cao, V. Mottier & L. Sgier (eds), Genre et politique. Débats et perspectives (Paris: Gallimard), pp. 51–87.
22 Author interview, Tehran, July 1996.
23 Ibid.
24 Author Interview, Esfahan, August 1996.
25 Author Interview, Tehran, July 1996.
26 Author Interview, Esfahan, August 1996.
27 Ibid.
28 Author interview, Tehran, July 1996.
29 Author Interview, Esfahan, August 1996.
30 Author Interview, Esboumahaleh, January 2004.
31 Author Interview, Khakh-e Sefid, Iran, July 1995.
32 Ibid.
33 Author Interview, Esboumahaleh, Iran, January 2004.
34 Author Interview, Esboumahleh, Iran, January 2004.
35 Author Interview, Gonbad-e Kavous, Iran, January 2004.
36 Author Interview, Zahedan, Iran, December 2003.
37 Ibid.
38 Author Interview, Keykha, Sistan and Baluchestan province, Iran, December 2003.
39 Author Interview, Tehran, July 1996.
40 Author Interview, Esboumahaleh, January 2004.
41 Ibid.
42 Author Interview, Tehran, July 1995.
43 Author Interview, Tehran, July 1995.
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