Iran’s Mourning Mothers Terrify Authorities

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Iran News, Women's Rights

Jan 19, 2010


by Alex DiBranco

It’s hard for a conservative regime to defend itself as “protecting” women and “motherly virtue” when you beat up and arrest women peacefully demonstrating for news about their disappeared children. That’s why these “mourning mothers” and Iran’s women’s rights movement has authorities so terrified.

The women’s rights movement has always raised a dangerous specter for the authoritarian Iranian regime. To admit that women have equal rights would be to reject their conservative, traditional interpretation of Islam for a more modern approach that would severely rock the status quo in the other aspects of society that protesters have agitated against.

Haleh Esfandiari — scholar, grandmother, and women’s rights activist — said that, a few years ago, authorities didn’t know how to deal with woman protesters. “Now the gloves are off,” she relates to Abu Dhabi’s The National. But the more seriously Iranian authorities take the women, the more the crack down on female protests, the worse they look to the world and their own people.

These women have Iran’s government running scared, lashing out, and digging it’s own grave. Arrests of women from radical families, who themselves have no ties to the demonstrations, just make them look worse. The women they claim to “protect” with conservative religious laws are standing on the front lines of protests over Iran’s disputed election, winning the hearts and minds of a broad range of people, and getting attacked and killed for their brave stance.

Already, the respect these women have gained is upsetting traditional gender roles, as was apparent when Iranian men donned green headscarves and posted photos online last month to show solidarity with a detained student freedom fighter and women. Way to go, cross-dressing for freedom and women’s rights!

Source: Change.org