Walden Forum Addresses Women's Impact on Iran, the Muslim World

Join us as we celebrate “International Women’s Day” with a discussion that offers us three voices/perspectives on the role women assume in Iranian society. Our guests will discuss the social, political and educational opportunities that exist for Iranian women. They also will examine the role women play in contemporary politics (and how that involvement has shifted and expanded throughout Iran’s history).

This Walden Forum will be held on Friday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m. at The First Parish 1815 Meeting House in Wayland.

The conversation will include how the lives of Iranian women have changed since the 1979 Revolution, including why women are required to wear a veil. Sharing their thoughts on wearing the veil will address some of the most common misconceptions Westerners hold of Muslim women, generally, and Iranian women, specifically.

First, Shavarini, university lecturer and author, will present the educational opportunities available to women and how those compare to their male counterparts. Shavarini highlights how obstacles and empowerment push young women forth in one of the most successful public arenas in which they have gained ground. Second, Nazila Fathi will discuss how the 1979 revolution empowered traditional women and drew them from the margins into the center of society. The process has modernized a huge section of Iranian society in ways that a secular regime wouldn’t have been able to do. But the regime’s repressive policies against women also have turned them into the most defiant force in contemporary Iran. And finally, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, will discuss women’s political participation in the Muslim World and particularly in Iran.

Mitra Shavarini is a lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Desert Roots: Journey of an Iranian Immigrant Family (2012); Educating Immigrants: Experiences of Second Generation Iranians (2004) and the coauthor of Women and Education in Iran and Afghanistan: An Annotated Bibliography (with Wendy R. Robison, 2005). She holds an Ed.D. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. 

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, the “Lion Woman’’ of Iran, is a visiting scholar at UMass Boston. Dr. Haghighatjoo has held academic positions at MIT, Harvard and the University of Connecticut. Dr. Haghighatjoo is an expert in Iran’s internal affairs and an advocate of human rights, women’s rights and democracy. In Iran, she was a member of Iran’s reformist parliament from 2000-2004. Currently, she works on “State Feminism” to define the institutionalization of women’s issues in Iran and show how it both promotes and limits women’s position there. She has published book chapters and papers on the Iranian women’s movement and democratic movement in Iran. She also is working on a book manuscript entitled A Voice for Truth. She has authored a book entitled Search for Truth (published in 2002). Dr. Haghighatjoo has been extensively interviewed and quoted by the international media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, BBC Persian TV and Radio, Voice of America, CNN and others.

Nazila Fathi is a journalist, translator and commentator on Iran. She reported out of Iran for nearly two decades until 2009 when she was forced to leave the country because of government threats against her. She was based in Tehran from 2001 for The New York Times until she left, during a time when she penned over 2,000 articles for the Times. Prior to that, she wrote for Time magazine, Agence France Press and the Times. She translated a book, History and Documentation of Human Rights in Iran, by the Noble Peace Prize Laureate, Shirin Ebadi, into English in 2001. She has written for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy and Harvard Nieman Report and has been a guest speaker on CNN, BBC, CBC and NPR. She received her Masters of Arts in Political Science from the University of Toronto.