Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Iran, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

Iran lies between Iraq and, further north, Turkey to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea border Iran to the north, and thee Persian Gulf to the south. Iran covers 636,293 square miles.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many people lived by herding animals. Some of the Kurds and the Shahsevan in the northwest, Qashqai, Bakhtiary, Lurs, and Kamseh in the southwest, Baluch in the southeast, and Turkmen in the northeast lived in nomadic camps, traveling with their animals in search of water and pastures. Beginning in the …

The Power Paradox In Muslim Women’S Majales: North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals As Sites Of Contestation Over Religious Politics, Ethnicity, And Gender, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

During revolutions, rebellions, and movements, women are often called on to serve contradictory roles. They are asked to perform workpolitical, communicative, networking, recruiting, military, manual - that generally goes beyond the society's usual gender restrictions. At the same time, women serve as symbols of movement identity, unity, commitment, and righteous entitlement. To fit into this idealized symbolic image, individual women must fulfill often "traditional" or even exaggerated "feminine" behavioral and attitudinal requirements, such as loyalty, obedience, selflessness, sacrifice, and "proper" deportment: all in all, they are to put aside any personal aspirations and wishes for self-fulfillment and give their all …

Wife Abuse And The Political System: A Middle Eastern Case Study, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

Although wife abuse is common in Iran, it is a subject which has received almost no attention from scholars and little has been written on it. The purpose of this article is to examine the problem, to show the connection between wife-beating and the Iranian political system, and to raise questions for further research. The data on which this analysis is based come from my own research as well as from published sources. The two case histories of wife abuse presented exemplify social process in a political system characterized by arbitrariness and the need to dominate. The degree to which …

Aliabad Women: Revolution As Religious Activity, Mary E. Hegland

Faculty Publications

An apparent paradox of the Iranian Revolution has been the tremendous participation of Iranian women in the revolution, in terms of the numbers of women who were active in demonstrations, contrasted to the subsequent setbacks in the position of women in Iran and their decreasing participation in public life. In this chapter, I argue that the great majority of women participating in the revolution did not consider their actions to be outside of traditional social, cultural and religious parameters. Neither did they expect their participation in the revolution to be the first step in gaining improved status and more important …