Not in Our Name

HE should have first corrected his own vices and then given us advice”.

- 

More than a century ago, Iranian activist Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi scorned men who tried to dictate women's behaviour while ignoring their own failings. The line today resonates in a different context. Leaders and elites in the United States who claim moral authority to “save” women abroad are doing so in the light of the Epstein scandal, which proves they fail to protect women at home. More than a century before the world debated the “liberation” of Iranian women through airstrikes, Astarabadi was already waging a quieter war of her own. In the late 1800s, she sat at a small wooden desk in Tehran and composed The Vices of Men, a blistering satire written as a direct rebuttal to a misogynistic text called The Education of Women, which instructed women to be silent and obedient. The manuscript circulated among a small readership during her lifetime but was not formally published until 1992. It scandalised the Qajar elites and positioned Astarabadi as one of Iran's earliest feminist intellectuals. More importantly, she established a genealogy of resistance, built through literacy, intellect and defiance. No weapons or foreign intervention was required.

ALL-WOMAN TEAM

An Iranian newspaper clip from 1968 reads: "A quarter of Iran's Nuclear Energy scientists are women." The picture shows scientists posing in front of Tehran's research reactor

WOMEN AND DEMOCRACY