The One Million Signatures Campaign and Other Movements

Excerpted from Iranian Women's One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality: The Inside Story

Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani

The One Million Signatures Campaign does not operate in a vacuum, and must continually ask itself how it can interact with other social movements and political parties (to say nothing of the government) without losing its independence. Somewhat connected to this issue is the question of the role of men in the movement.

Of these two matters, the latter is probably the simpler to resolve. Women predominate numerically in the Iranian women’s movement as they do in such movements the world over. But in a highly patriarchalsociety such as Iran’s, where men are vastly more likely than women to have managerial and organizational skills and experience, the presence of even a relatively small number of males in the movement for women’s legal equality can raise concerns of a “crowding out” effect according to which men come to displace less seasoned females in key leadership posts.

Clearly, the women’s movement should on grounds of both principleand practicality want to appeal to as many segments of Iranian society as possible, and that very much includes the half of it that is male. Men who embrace the struggle for women’s equality as a matter of conviction must by no means be discouraged. Yet worries about women losing control of their own movement have a reasonable basis.

In order to balance these considerations, women’s organizations should stop now and then to assess the role played by men in their ranks. It may be that at some junctures—early in the history of a women’s group, for instance—the presence of men could threaten to stifle the development of women’s leadership skills. In a more mature group, however, men might have no such effect. In any case, women must be able to make their own independent history and traditions, and manage their own activities. Once they do these things, the presence of men need no longer be seen as problematic or threatening. Women can and should stand on their own feet and experiment and gain experience without the interference of men, but once a certain amount of experience is gained, they can find among men allies for the cause of equality.

Looking back over the past two decades, we see evidence of just such a growth process. With the idea of equality before the law gaining greater currency and a new generation of equality-affirming men arising, the One Million Signatures Campaign is proud to have drawn the male participation that it has.

Those worried about men as threats to the independence and integrity of the women’s movement should pause to reflect that such threats may come from women as well. The female gender of a group’s members does not necessarily prove that they work for the advancement of women. Female groups aligned with the government, for instance, typically place the demands of their mostly religious ideologies above the problems of women. There are leftist women’s groups who will do likewise when it comes to their own guiding agendas. In both cases, women and their needs take a back seat to some other notion of what matters. Although there may be times where such groups make common cause with the women’s movement and even lend it important new dimensions, their attainment of leadership roles in the movement would threaten its independence gravely.

Interaction with Political Parties

Far knottier than the problem of what to do about men is that of whether and how to interact with political parties or party-like groups. Iranian political culture is strongly patriarchal, and the ubiquity of patriarchal views within various political movements, factions, and parties makes engaging them difficult for the One Million Signatures Campaign.

In order to gain equal rights for women, the campaign will have to find ways to spread its message of equality and fair treatment among the political class, and that means engaging parties. The key to doing so without becoming dependent on them is first to gain independent legitimacy within Iranian society at large.

Movement members who fear partisan manipulation should beware of falling into a self-pitying “victim” mindset that ends up painting women (whether wittingly or not) as helpless children who may well need men and a male-dominated government to lead them around. Worries about manipulation can be overblown. Even if the government and various other political forces begin to pay attention to women’s issues for purely cynical reasons—because women vote, for example—good results may ensue as the discourse of equality gains further public traction. Especially in our society, where all media are state-dominated, we must seize every chance to raise public awareness of women’s problems and concerns.

It is true that political groups have in the past “used” women without giving much in return. But instead of bewailing such situations, we need to learn to turn the tables and “use those who would use us” in order to press our own demands for fairer treatment. The women who let themselves be mobilized for the revolution against the Shah in 1979 may have harbored hopes for fairer treatment, but they found themselves swept up in what soon became an Islamic revolution that did not, to say the least, have gender equality in mind.

One group, Women’s National Unity (founded in 1980 and banned in 1982), found through a survey that 90 percent of those who wanted to join were motivated by loyalty to a leftist political organization and sought solidarity with workers rather than any particular improvement in the lot or status of women. The lesson of that era should be clear: women need to be conscious of their interest in equality as women, and must not allow themselves to be diverted into working for someone else’s agenda. The One Million Signatures Campaign represents an application of this insight. For the first time in the history of Iran, women have their own independent demands to serve as an impetus for their political efforts.

We also need to change the way we look at history, and stop dwelling on futile complaints about how women’s rights have been ignored. Instead, we should look back in order to move ahead, analyzing Iranian history with a view to devising strategies that will lead to success. We should analyze events closely to see how women themselves could have acted differently at various points to achieve better results.

In looking at the so-called reform era from 1997 to 2005, for instance, we can see that women, in effect, went in without a plan, voted for Mohammad Khatami in keeping with the general tide of the times, had no particularly well thought-out ideas about how to press their demands, and wound up with little or nothing to show for their trouble—not even a token woman cabinet minister. And yet they may have learned from all this the new approach that underlies the One Million Signatures Campaign and its success so far.

More than anything else, the campaign needs to maintain its capacity for independent thought, approaches, methodology and analysis in order to recognize and pursue that which benefits women within the multilayered fabric of our society. This does not mean that we must distance ourselves from any space occupied by political parties, other social movements, or even governments. On the contrary, we should never fear to enter those spaces, but with eyes wide open and in service of our own clear goals.

Relations with Other Women’s Movements

A recurrent issue that the One Million Signatures Campaign has faced from the very beginning has been its relationship to other transnational movements and activists. Social movements that focus on protesting certain inequalities have no choice but to publicize and universalize their demands. To do this, they need connections that transcend borders and tap into international channels for the expansion of protests. Yet at the same time, such connections must be continually and critically appraised and fine-tuned if they are not to have negative consequences.

In considering the relationship of the Iranian women’s movement to similar multinational ones, we are driven to reflect on the great social power of immigrants—in this case, the millions-strong diaspora of Iranians abroad—who are multilingual and multicultural and form a prominent presence in the arts, the academy, commerce, the media, and the Internet, and who exert significant influence on public and official opinion in the countries of the wealthy global North.

The special circumstances and abilities of immigrant women— women whose roots lie in the less-developed countries of the global South—result from their understanding of the social fabric and culture of their homelands as well their understanding of international norms and discourses. Given their ability to take advantage of the opportunities that exist in progressive societies, these immigrants occupy a special position in the transnational women’s movement and have the potential to introduce the perspectives and aspirations of the global South to global public opinion.

We women in local movements can mobilize the forces of the transnational women’s movement, but if we are not careful and do not know what we are doing, we run the risk of winding up followers and parasites of transnational groups. Such groups offer dynamic possibilities that make them very attractive, but in the end, everything depends on the local movements and how they take advantage of these possibilities. If local movements, and here I am of course thinking particularly of the Iranian women’s movement, become absolute followers of the values, theories, and discourses that are predominant in transnational women’s movements, the locals will likely be doing neither themselves nor anyone else any favor.

Women of “Southern” origin who produce the discourses that are dominant in transnational movements are often seen mistakenly as representing Southern countries in an unmediated way. This imprecise understanding creates the risk that the demands of local movements in the global South will be misidentified as being virtually identical to those of immigrant women in the global North. Local movements can benefit from the larger megaphone that transnational movements can give them, while transnational movements can likewise benefit from a dynamic relationship with local women’s rights activists. Nobody benefits if the “locals” simply become hangers-on of the “transnationals.”

There can be no doubt that the transnational women’s movement has influenced civil society movements throughout the world, including Iran. But the real and problematic knot to be untied is to determine how the relationship can be kept creative and intelligent rather than stultifying and reductive. There is much thinking and writing to be done on this matter. My own very preliminary view begins with the observation that the rise of the Internet and related forms of rapidly scalable global communications has allowed women within Iran to tell the world including the Persian-speaking diaspora—about their quest for justice as never before.

With help from the relatively open atmosphere that flourished in Iran during Khatami’s presidency, the independent women’s movement managed the huge achievement of making “the woman question” a matter of discussion and concern within governmental and paragovernmental spheres. There was extensive talk in the press and among political and religious groups as well as more international attention.

With the attention came international funding for women’s social projects, international conferences on women-related themes, and various NGOs (many of which were associated with this or that faction within the Iranian government) that suddenly found themselves considered part of the women’s movement because of their putativel “nongovernmental” activity in some sphere that could be construed as involving women or touching on their concerns.

There were good things about all the attention and money, especially the way they made the political powers that be sit up and take notice, but they had a downside as well. The quest for justice and the culture of dissent waned as an ethos of charity and donation waxed. The volunteerism that had long been the lifeblood of the Iranian women’s movement suffered as NGOs became tempting sources of employment, particularly to younger women trying to make their way in an economy that is chronically unable to produce enough new jobs for the vast numbers of young Iranians who graduate from school each year. Activists became office workers, local initiative drained away, and any tiny group with a good PR team and funding from abroad could gain access to a global communications channel and make the mistake of thinking that this might substitute for the hard, long-term work of finding and training volunteers to make change from the bottom up.

The women’s movement became honeycombed with pyramidshaped groups—each one typically dominated by its founder—that replicated the pattern of narrow hierarchy which has long beset Iranian political culture and society generally. The international donors who were paying for all this hardly noticed or cared, however, since it was easier for them to deal with a single person at the top rather than a band of fractious, unpredictable volunteers anyway.

The Problem of the Transnationals

The problem was not that a part of the Iranian women’s movement reached out to transnationals; the problem was that too many locals lost their focus on being critical toward power, and let themselves become project-based and service-oriented. The local movement may have looked colorful on the outside, but its lack of true volunteers betrayed its hollowness. The drive to achieve the legal recognition of rights and change opinion was seriously dissipated.

As we have seen, in a country such as Iran, the existence of discriminatory divorce laws and laws that allow men to have several wives has led to horrors for numerous women. These unjust laws are among the reasons why so many abused women run away from their husbands’ homes, and so many others remain in thrall to husbands who may be psychologically unstable, fanatics, abusers, and even drug addicts who force their wives into prostitution. From such situations spring a host of further evils, including female self-immolation and husband-murder.

International organizations, unfortunately, tend to focus on sensational cases at the expense of real civic work that addresses the institutional and legal roots of the problem of women’s intensely precarious position in Iranian society. These organizations are ill equipped to grasp the intricacies of Third World societies, especially Muslim ones, and consequently encourage a “victim” mentality while at the same time risking counterproductive confrontations with governments and jeopardizing the work that local women’s movements are trying to do.

Stoning and the African practice of female circumcision are surely evils, but so are Iran’s lopsided divorce laws and legalized polygamy. International attention tends to focus on high-profile cases of the former two while ignoring the need to work against the latter two. Activists of Iranian origin abroad—well meaning but underinformed about realities on the ground—are too often given funding for promising-
sounding projects that go nowhere.

High-profile transnational efforts against sensational evils have their place. The problem arises when they so completely and one-sidedly overshadow—as they too often do—lower-key local efforts to advance desperately needed reforms. Then, instead of working together, the “transnationals” and the “locals” wind up working at cross-purposes, or else the locals become hapless followers of freewheeling, well funded, superficially sophisticated, yet essentially clueless outsiders.

Local women’s activists should understand such pitfalls and not let themselves become distracted from their own priorities and the basic needs of their own societies. When it comes to such an effort, having clear goals is a source of enormous strength. Here is where the One Million Signatures Campaign has been of great help in keeping the Iranian women’s movement true to its calling as a critical and people-centered movement for the realization of equal rights, and also perhaps in pointing a direction for Iranian civil society as a whole.

It is doubtful that without the support of renowned international figures such as Shirin Ebadi, the campaign would find a place among the transnational women’s movements, no matter how effective and unique it was inside the country. But at the same time, given what the campaign has so swiftly achieved, it is equally doubtful that any small group with global media access will ever again overshadow justiceseeking local movements that take their appeal into the streets.

Indeed, the One Million Signatures Campaign has changed the game to the degree that small groups must now demonstrate societal roots and begin recruiting and training activists if they are not to have their legitimacy questioned. Activists who can boast outside money but no social base inside Iran are already noticeably thinner on the ground.

Copyright © 2009 Women's Learning Partnership

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