foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Debating the Outcome of the Revolution, Especially on Women's Rights
were planning to demonstrate against the chador; the whole idea struck me
as patronizing and silly and although I was eager to hear what Beauvoir had
to say, I also realized that she was quite vain and quite beyond arguing at that
moment . ... Beauvoir had been a serious disappointment, flouncing out of
the room in' a cloud of opinionated babble about Islam and the veiling of
women. (Said 2000a)
During these same days, Rodinson published a report on the growing
persecution of Baha'is: "Baha'is have been killed, their houses burned, their
tombs profaned, their children kidnapped, and their parents required to convert
to Islam for their return." This had been orchestrated by the regime, he
concluded, since most Baha'i places of worship had already been closed down
by the police (Rodinson 1979). There were many more reports in the French
press on demands for autonomy by Iranian Kurds, against whom the new
regime sent helicopter gunships, before negotiating an uneasy truce.
The mainly French delegation of eighteen women that had gone to Iran
on March 19 returned after two weeks. During and after their trip, a few of the
delegates tried to put a positive face on their visit, adopting a stance very different
from Millett's. Writing in the March 24 issue of Le Matin de Paris, a leftist
daily paper, the feminist theorist Catherine Clement reported that many Iranian
women felt ambivalent about the March 8 demonstration, because they
also supported Khomeini. Clement quoted one woman demonstrator who
claimed that right-wing elements had swelled the feminist march on the last
day. This demonstrator also attacked Millett: "Where were these American
women who came to Iran today when the SAVAK was torturing four thousand
Iranian women?" (cited in Clement 1979b; see also Clement 1979a;
Briere and Macciocchi 1979). She was evidently unaware of Millett's years
of anti-shah activism in New York, something Clement did not inform her
readers about either. Such opinions were something of an exception among
members of the international feminist delegation to Iran, however. Most of
the reports by the women delegates painted a very bleak portrait of women's
rights in Iran (see for example Kaup 1979; Macciocchi 1979).
For her part, Millett continued to stress the courage and intelligence of the
Iranian feminists, implying that the struggle was not over yet: "These are the
most polished feminists I have ever seen. God, are they good at what they do.
They fought the shah at the risk of their lives, and they're fighting on. When
we marched, men volunteers-friends, brothers, husbands, lovers-made a
circle around us to protect us. They understood that women's rights were
democratic rights. Those marches were the whole spirit of the insurrection"
(cited in Kempton 1979).9
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