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Chadors, Feminists, Terror : The Racial Politics of U.S. Media Representations of the 1979 Iranian Women's Movement

Sylvia Chan-MalikThe ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2011 637: 112

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211409011

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>> Version of Record - Jul 25, 2011

What is This?

I


Chadors, Feminists, Terror: The

Racial Politics of U.S. Media Representations of the

1979 Iranian

Women’s Movement

BySYLVIA CHAN-MALIK

On March 8, 1979, Iranian women took to the streets of Tehran for International Women’s Day. This article examines American media representations of the week- long protests and explores how the event occasioned the emergence of a distinctly American—and deeply racialized—“discourse of the veil,” in which “Islam” was rendered a national catchphrase for terror and the figure of the “Poor Muslim Woman” entered U.S. cultural discourse as a symbol of a new world order. Through analysis of U.S. media coverage, this piece tracks how discourses of second-wave feminism, a post–civil rights rhetoric of racial and cultural pluralism, and late–Cold War logics of secularism and liberal democracy intersected to create a racial-orientalist discourse of the veil, which would subsequently be deployed to justify U.S. military aggression in the Middle East while perpetuating state violence against women, immigrants, and people of color throughout the 1980s and into the post-9/11 era.

Keywords: Islam; Iran; race; feminism; Muslim women; U.S. media representations; “discourse of the veil”

ran’s “Green Movement” of 2009 might be called the first of the popular uprisings for democracy

currently sweeping the Middle East. Instigated in the wake of

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection in June 2009, the move-

ment arose to protest what many claimed was Ahmadinejad’s

fraudulent election and his corrupt antidemocratic regime. In

the weeks that followed, “prodemocracy” supporters protest-

ing Ahmadinejad’s rule, driven by social media networks such as

Facebook and Twitter, clashed with the president’s supporters, who

claimed the opposition was being


fueled by Western imperialist, pro-

Zionist forces seeking to derailthe will of the Iranian people.

Sylvia Chan-Malik is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her recent publications are featured in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion; The Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History; and The Encyclopedia of Women and Islam. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2009.DOI: 10.1177/0002716211409011

112 ANNALS, AAPSS, 637, September 2011

1CHADORS, FEMINISTS,


In the American media, many immediately noticed the similarities between 2009 and 1979, when political tumult had swept through Iran following the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power. As Hooman Majd of Newsweek wrote, “It was the summer of the ‘Twitter Revolution,’ it was 1979 redux, it was the beginning of the end of the 30-year Islamic regime in Iran” (Majd 2010). At the same time, the 2009 protests also immediately summoned a flurry of media confusion surrounding precisely what the protestors were fighting for, as many in the Western media framed their efforts as a pro-Western revolution to throw off a theocratic “Islamic fundamentalist” regime. Central Green Movement leaders continually opposed such characterizations, stressing that their agenda was far more focused on attaining electoral transparency and civil rights, as opposed to a complete overthrow of their current political system.

Such confusion has long marked the U.S. media’s engagement with Iran. In this article, I focus on American television and news coverage of the Iranian women’s revolution of March 1979, an event that produced very similar forms of ideological and political mystification as the Green Movement has in our contemporary moment. Yet while the U.S. media response to the Green Movement can and should be contextualized in the frameworks of post-9/11 global order and U.S. engagements in the Middle East, I argue that the 1979 Iranian women’s revolution cannot be viewed simply through the lens of a nascent rise of orientalism and Islamophobia that would gain ground throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, I describe how U.S. media framings of the Iranian women’s protests and their demands for “freedom” were deeply shaped by American discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality and reveal the contours of the types of misunderstand- ing and appropriation that continue to characterize our understandings of the Middle East, and in particular Iran, to this day.

“Blissful Detroit”In Betty Mahmoody’s 1987 memoir Not without My Daughter,

Betty’s courtship with Sayyed Borzog Mahmoody begins in a hospital in Carson City, Michigan, in 1974, where she meets “Moody,” as he is called, while undergoing treatment for severe, debilitating migraines. Moody, an Iranian Shiite Muslim doctor pursuing his studies in the United States, is the therapist assigned to her case, and immediately his



treatments become the “bright spot” of her stay (Mahmoody 1987, 47). Betty describes Moody as “the most caring doctor I had ever encountered” (Mahmoody 1987, 47), and as her final therapy session ends, Moody asks for her phone number and plants a gentle kiss on her lips. “I had no way,” Betty recalls, “of knowing where that simple kiss would lead” (Mahmoody 1987, 47).

Betty’s statement implies that she was, at the time, unaware that this “simple kiss” would bring about her and Moody’s eventual love affair and marriage; the birth of their daughter, Mahtob; and most important, the horrifying and now well-known story of her and Mahtob’s captivity and subsequent escape from Iran following Moody’s transformation from “caring doctor” to violent, misogynistic,

1 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN


abusive, tyrannical Muslim fanatic during the family’s visit to Tehran.1 However, where the kiss immediately leads, for all intents and purposes, is Detroit, where the couple continue their love affair while Moody completes a three-year resi- dency at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital. During this time, Betty and Moody’s attraction solidifies into a full-blown relationship, a time of which she writes, “Our lives were busy and blissful. [Moody] was a good part-time father to my children. Together we took Joe and John [her sons] on outings to the zoo or on picnics, and often to ethnic festivals in Detroit where we were introduced to eastern culture” (Mahmoody 1987, 51).

She says little else about Detroit until later in the text, when—after a rocky stint in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the now-married Betty and Moody’s relationship is strained due to the events of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—they move to a small town in Michigan named Alpena, where Moody suddenly finds himself out of work. Betty orders him back to Detroit to find a job, and reluctantly, Moody goes, finding a position at a medical clinic the very next day. Betty stays in Alpena, and the two return to seeing each other only on weekends, “a routine that was deli- ciously reminiscent of our courtship years” (Mahmoody 1987, 345). Thus, their relationship is rejuvenated, and Moody realizes that “his professional future lay [in Detroit] in one capacity or another,” due to how “he found much less bigotry in the metropolitan environment” of Detroit than anywhere else he and Betty had lived (Mahmoody 1987, 345).

Thus, for Betty Mahmoody, it seems, Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s is a site of opportunity and happiness, where love blossoms and wealth grows. For most of Detroit’s actual residents, however, the period in question reflected a decidedly different reality—a moment in which the city (and almost all of the American Midwest) entered a severe recession from which it would never recover, becom- ing the very symbol of the “rust belt”—a site of empty auto factories and unem- ployed workers, and a city unable to survive the constant shifts of an increasingly global economy.2

Additionally, long after the string of race riots that rocked Michigan and the rest of the country at the close of the 1960s (the 12th Street riot in Detroit, which left forty-three dead and 467 injured, still stands as one the deadliest in the nation’s history), racial tensions continued to fracture the state, leading many to characterize the city the way the title of an 1971 anthology put it: A City in Racial Crisis (Gordon 1971).3

Then what to make of Betty and Moody’s harmonious Detroit, a city of their blossoming and (later) rejuvenated love, ethnic festivals, and minimal racial bigotry? What



discursive strategies allow Betty to describe Detroit from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s with such fondness and in such an overwhelmingly affirmative light? Indeed, the Detroit Betty describes in Not without My Daughter reveals none of the era’s harsh realities and does little to reflect an era in which white flight, the globalization of industry, and the federal government’s rollback of 1960s civil rights gains would gut the city’s economy and produce the conditions that served as catalysts and context for the host of social ills the city experienced during this time: the crack cocaine epidemic, the mass incarceration of African American males, steep rises in drug-related violence and property crimes, wide-scale



poverty and unemployment, and anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiment (e.g., the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982).

Furthermore, from Betty’s perspective, Moody appears to be the only Muslim in Michigan, an exotic anomaly who teaches Betty “Islamic cooking” and instructs her on the basic tenets of Islam. By the early 1980s, however, Detroit had already become home to a large diaspora of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East (including many Iranians), as well as being the birthplace and a central headquar- ters for the Nation of Islam (NOI). Yet Moody stands as the text’s prime example of a “Muslim American”: a resolute foreigner from the Middle East who claims to love the United States and partakes in all of its privileges while secretly harboring the mind and soul of a fanatical fundamentalist. The multilayered history of Islam within various immigrant and African American communities does not exist in Betty’s America—only the singular image of a violent, two-faced, and irrevocably foreign Moody. Thus, while Mahmoody’s text goes on to provide consistently graphic, detailed, and meticulous descriptions of the religious practices of Islam and the filth and corruption of Iran, her characterizations of the American land- scape are void of detail, unfailingly celebratory, and conspicuously not graphic. Betty’s Detroit—and, in effect, her America—is a place where interracial romance flourishes; where one lives the global resonances of Detroit not through poverty or prison, but through ethnic festivals and exotic food; where Islam is foreign and far away; and where an urban center like Detroit is a hazy, dreamlike paradise of readily available employment, little prejudice, and unproblematic intercultural and interracial connections.

I am interested in exploring how such a vision of America—an America whose “freedoms” are continually posited in contrast and comparison to the consum- mate “unfreedom” of Islam and Iran—is irrevocably rooted in a national subjecthood like Betty Mahmoody’s: that of a white, middle- to upper-class American woman writing through the historical lens of the 1970s and 1980s. Such a subjecthood, I contend, has been crucial in determining the discursive contours of post- 9/11 American orientalism and Islamophobia, which I assert are steeped in liberal late–Cold War discourses of civil rights, feminism, and citizenship that emerged in the United States at the close of the 1960s and crystallized into national “common sense” by the close of the 1970s, a time in which the formal language of “equality for all”—namely for minorities and women—was rendered a



rhetorical mainstay in the formal language of the state. I suggest it is this subjectivity that enables the production of Betty’s “blissful” Detroit, a perspective that, first, elides the ravages of racial inequality and the mass production of social death so pervasive during the historical instances she takes up in the “American” portions of her text, and second, dismisses the presence of Muslims and Islam within the United States, thereby providing the vision of America necessary to stand in contrast to Islam and Iran—that of a tolerant, harmonious, Christian nation.

In the standard Saidian critique of American orientalist portrayals of Muslim misogyny and the “Poor Muslim Woman,” the focus has generally been on the inac- curacy of portrayals of the Orient and the Islamic Other. In an alternative method of orientalist critique, I consider the “domestic” logics of American orientalism



that shaped national perceptions of this country’s first encounter with the issues of gender and Islamic terror: the Iranian women’s movement of March 1979. Taking place shortly after the overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi and after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise as the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Iranian women’s protests marked a moment in which the U.S. nation-state, an ardent supporter of Pahlavi’s regime (while Pahlavi, in turn, had been an indispensable ally of the United States), grasped hold of a specific explanation of why Khomeini was a tyrant, why Iran was in turmoil, and why Islam was the enemy. From that moment on, “women’s rights” became a rallying call that could be employed by the United States to explain the ills of the Middle East and the “terror” of Islam. Eight months before the saga of the Iranian hostage crisis, and more than two decades before the events of 9/11, media coverage of the women’s movement in Iran ushered in an orientalized conception of Islam as a symbol of an irrevocably foreign and oppressive religion, culture, and political ideology that endures until this day.

The American media coverage of the Iranian women’s movement recast the long- standing orientalist narrative of the Poor Muslim Woman on distinctly American intersections of discourses of nationalism, civil rights, and second-wave feminism taking place at the time. Thus, while the context of a global orientalist narrative as tied to the trajectory of Euro-American imperialism was, and is, certainly a crucial framework in understanding how those such as Mahmoody have constructed their images of a free United States versus a barbarous Islam, it is also important to understand that current conceptions of Islam and the Middle East emanating from the United States must be seen through a decidedly racialized orientalist lens—to be called racial orientalism here—in which transnational logics of orientalism and imperiality are also understood as always working in relation with domestic neocolonial legacies of white supremacy, anti-black racism, and anti-immigrant xenophobia.

In this racial orientalist dialectic between global orientalism and American racism, the language and ideology of second-wave feminism in the United States have played, and continue to occupy, a crucial role in constructing a contemporary “discourse of the veil,” pitting “feminism” against “Islam” on opposite ends of the orientalist divide. White American feminists took up the cause of the women of Iran en masse in 1979, staging protests against Khomeini, rallying against the veil, and ultimately viewing the



events in Tehran as, in the words of Ms. magazine, “the beginning of a new unity . . . for international feminism” (Kelber 1979, 96). What was striking about the zeal and passion with which these feminists took up this “internationalist” cause is that it took place amid a maelstrom of criticism directed at them by black and third-world feminists in regard to “domestic” issues of racism, elitism, and cultural insensitivity—all crucial components to understanding the long and complex history of Islam in America.4

Since that time, the plight of the Poor Muslim Woman has been taken up time and time again within the mainstream American publishing industry in a substan- tive corpus of literature documenting the abuse of women under Islam and Islamic terror (Brooks 1995; Goodwin 1994; Latifa 2003; Sasson 1992, 2001, 2004; Souad 2004). Concern for the Poor Muslim Woman’s fate has enabled political alliances



between such unlikely bedfellows as the Feminist Majority and former first lady Laura Bush, and it was featured prominently in the post-9/11 speeches by former president George W. Bush and former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz in their calls for the continuation of the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002).5

To explore the racialized and gendered structure of this racial orientalist national narrative, this article proceeds in three parts. In the first section, I track the narrative’s construction in relation to the enemy of Islamic terror from the end of the 1970s and into the present by considering the nation that came to meet the women of Iran in March 1979. In an examination of the mainstream media coverage of the protests, both on television and in print, I investigate the discursive strategies by which the U.S. press constructed a distinctly American discourse of the veil by refracting the age-old orientalist narrative of the Poor Muslim Woman through liberal discourses of pluralism, gender equality, and what Mary Dudziak has called “cold war civil rights,” in which racial progress was championed by the state to assert American superiority over the Soviet Union (Dudziak 2000). However, in this instance, the same “story that led ultimately to the conclusion that, in spite of it all, America was a great nation” was used to declare American superiority over Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Islam (Dudziak 2000, 46).

In the second section, I turn to the press’s coverage of American feminist Kate Millett’s trip to Iran to march in solidarity with the women of Tehran. I suggest that Millett’s presence enabled the deployment of “feminism” as an ideological stand-in for the nation; in other words, Millett’s “feminist” presence in Tehran functioned as proxy for the “American” values of progress, freedom, and equality, a means by which the nation could assert its superiority through noting the incompatibility of “feminism” and “Islam.” As such, the “cold war civil rights” notion of a racially harmonious nation joined with the notion of a country committed to the ideals of gender equality and women’s rights in the project of asserting American dominance—an ideological union, I contend, that remains to this day.

In the third and fourth sections, I examine the ways in which white American feminists themselves constructed the issue of Islam and the women of Iran, and how feminist discourse has subsequently come to occupy an uneasy space in this American racial orientalist discourse of Islam. I consider how the “plight” of Iranian women suffering



under militant Islam was employed as a means though which U.S.-based second-wave feminist activism could “go global,” and I argue that this move was partially premised on mainstream American feminists’ inability to deal with “domestic” issues of race, in particular the assertions of black and third-world feminists and the raced history and presence of Islam in the United States.

Constructing an American Discourse of the Veil

On Thursday, March 8, 1979, less than a month after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power, Iranian women took to the streets of Tehran for



International Women’s Day. While the marches, rallies, and speeches of the day had been planned well in advance, a spate of recent actions and comments made by Khomeini on the status of women in the newly minted Islamic republic, including a reported remark in which the ayatollah stated that all working women should be required to wear the black head-to-toe covering of the chador, seemed to fuel a maelstrom of anger among many of the women in Iran’s capital city and brought them out en masse in the day’s heavy snows to voice their objections to the clergy- man’s views. Up to thirty thousand women joined the day’s protests, many of whom belonged to “progressive” and “leftist” organizations and had been central organizers and participants in the revolutionary struggles that had overthrown the mon- archy of Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose regime had come to be viewed as corrupt, authoritarian, and a puppet of the American government.

During the revolution, progressive and leftist middle-class Iranian women, most of whom had traveled extensively or been educated in Europe or the United States and would most likely not veil otherwise, had taken up the chador as a sign of solidarity with their brothers and sisters in struggle.6

Wearing the chador had been a means of displaying the unity of the opposition during the revolution; most women had not expected to continue wearing it after the shah’s downfall, nor had they thought veiling would become an official policy of the newly installed Islamic state. As such, many of the women felt not only anger, but betrayal over the ayatollah’s remarks, frustrated that a revolution that had seemed to promise women so much had yet to follow through on its word.

The American media had closely followed the events of the Iranian revolution, from the early rumblings among the anti-shah forces led by Khomeini (who had been living in exile on the outskirts of Paris in early 1978), through the shah’s forced departure from Iran in mid-January, to Khomeini’s triumphant return on February 1, 1979. Throughout these reports, the American press expressed a deep skepticism that the revolution would succeed, constantly stressing the ragtag nature of Khomeini’s supporters and the power and might of the shah’s military. On April 2, 1978, the New York Times reported that “the Shah looks secure in his nearly absolute power” (Hoffman 1978), and as late as December 13, 1978, the paper cited President Jimmy Carter as “asserting that the Shah of Iran would be able to over- come his present difficulties and maintain power” (T. Smith 1978).7

In piece after piece, the media described the shah as a dedicated reformer who modernized Iran, brought



immense wealth to the nation, and liberated women, while his challengers were named “the strangest revolutionaries ever to challenge a ruler” (Gage 1978). And while some reporters did challenge and criticize the shah’s rule, such criticisms “hardly had the sound of ringing condemnation,” as William Dorman and Mansour Farhang (1987, 147) write in their study of American press coverage of Iran between 1951 and 1978.8 A question posed by the New York Times Magazine aptly described general U.S. bewilderment toward the events in question:

How could Iran, with its oil and strategic situation between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf, between Europe and the Middle East, fall under the sway of a holy man



out of the mists of the 13th century? How could the Shah, a monarch who commanded more tanks than the British Army, more helicopters than the United States First Calvary in Vietnam, be pressured so neatly out of power? To many Americans and Europeans, the whole thing must seem mad. (Apple 1979, 19, italics added)

Such sentiments preempted and thus framed the coverage of the women’s movement from the very start: a notion that Iran had fallen from the hands of the enlightened, modernizing shah and “under the sway” of a religious madman, and that the protesting women were the first in the nation to “come to their senses” about what was going on.

These narratives detailing the ayatollah’s “madness” and demonstrating how enlightened Iranian women were “coming to their senses” became quickly apparent when the story of the Iranian women’s protests broke on American television the evening of March 8. On television screens across the nation, the three major news networks—CBS, ABC, and NBC—displayed images of hordes of chador-clad women and a grave-faced Khomeini to demonstrate, as ABC’s Tehran correspon- dent, Jack Smith, put it, the “hysteria of the revolution”;9 while the procession of protesting women marching in the day’s heavy snows for “women’s rights” and “freedom,” mostly with hair uncovered and wearing Western-style clothing, were the manifestation of, in the words of CBS reporter Mike Lee, “Iran’s simmering post-revolutionary tensions.”10

In major newspapers across the country, the story broke more gradually. A handful of papers such as the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times ran lead stories on the protests on March 9, while the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune reserved the bulk of their coverage for their March 11 Sunday editions. Throughout the week, the coverage ebbed and flowed as bursts of reporting followed the major demonstrations staged by women in Tehran between March 8 and March 13. On some days it was the lead story; on others, it was delegated to a quick news item or short article to run down the day’s details.11

Both the TV and print coverage early in the week were quick to focus on the chador as their central image. In addition to the barrage of footage of women in chadors in every report, American journalists also explicitly used the rhetorical trope of the veil to frame their reporting on the events. NBC news anchor David Brinkley’s introductory remarks for the network’s March 8 report typified the standard orientalist assumptions that characterized the coverage early on:



The chador is the traditional veil and cloak worn by women in conservative Moslem countries, a symbol of modesty and a station inferior to men. In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini has ordered, at least the women who work for the government, to get back into it. Those accustomed to Western clothes don’t want to. Today, several thousand of them went to the prime minister’s office to protest.12

This equation between the veil and “a station inferior to men” was apparent in the print media’s coverage as well. Los Angeles Times reporter Charles T. Powers echoed the emphasis on the chador when he characterized the situation in Iran as



one in which “the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as the moral and political power in Iran, has embarked on the battle of the veil,” while headline after headline employed the veil as its central trope. “Veiled Warning: Modern Iran Women Cool to Holy Edicts” (Powers 1979) read the headline on Powers’s Los Angeles Times piece, while the New York Times Sunday magazine ran a feature titled “Iran’s ‘New Women’ Rebel at Returning to the Veil” (Ibrahim 1979). A San Francisco Sunday Examiner (1979) piece on March 11 called the protests “an unveiled threat” to Khomeini. Every article provided a definition of the chador—“a black wraparound garment” (Powers 1979); a “full-length cloak” (Randal 1979c); “the head-to-toe veil orthodox Islamic custom dictates” (San Francisco Chronicle 1979b); “a shapeless, full-length Moslem veil” (Chicago Tribune Wire Service 1979b); “the traditional head-to-toe covering of Moslem women” (Jaynes 1979a)—and often offered stark orientalist oppositions between “the medieval principles of old Islam” (San Francisco Chronicle 1979a) and the modern female protestors dressed in “tight jeans or Western dresses” (San Francisco Chronicle 1979b), “skirts and jeans” (Ibrahim 1979), and “blue jeans and jackets” (Randal 1979c).

Orientalist discourse that used the issue of the veil to paint a firm dividing line between Khomeini’s “Islam” and “modernity” flowed readily and easily throughout all of the media’s coverage, especially on the op-ed pages of papers across the country. After the very first day of the protests, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an editorial characterizing Khomeini as gripped by “righteousness” and “religious fervor,” asserting that the revolution had occurred due to the shah’s efforts to “bring his country too rapidly into the twentieth century” and arguing that the ayatollah “had better yield women the equality they are winning almost everywhere else in the modern world” (San Francisco Chronicle 1979a). The Chicago Tribune spoke of “a conceptual gap” between Khomeini’s followers and the female protestors, a gap that “seems unbridgeable” because, concluded reporter James Yuenger, “it spans centuries” (Yuenger 1979). The aforementioned piece by Charles Powers in the Los Angeles Times terming the events a “battle of the veil” characterized the conflict this way: “The basic question” wrote Powers, “is whether an Islamic revolution means a step backwards in time” (Powers 1979).

The media’s coverage demonstrated that standard orientalist discourse of the veil as a signifier of Islam’s oppression of women would be a primary logic through which Americans came to understand the events in Iran. In hindsight, the immedi- ate public fascination with the chador



and the issue of veiling and the media’s reli- ance on orientalist tropes was to be expected. The discourse of the veil had long been an expression of the West’s orientalization of Islam, the main idea of which was that “Islam was innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation epitomized that oppression, and that these customs were the fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic societ- ies” (Ahmed 1992, 152). As post–World War II America assumed the helm of Western global power, it made sense that it would also absorb the imperial discursive legacies that had undergirded the colonial principles of its European predecessors in regards to Islam and the Middle East—namely, the colonial feminist ideology of those such as Lord Cromer and the Victorian male establishment who had



espoused the language of feminism to promote British expansionism in Egypt— utilizing the same discursive tactics to initiate their own colonizing mission in the region, as one might say the Bush administration did after 9/11.

Yet in March 1979, while one could make the case that oil politics, the U.S.- Israel alliance, and a general desire to expand U.S. markets (all of which were central factors in President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to broker the Egypt-Israel treaty) might constitute the beginnings of the current U.S. neo-imperialist occupation of the Middle East, the nation was not, for all intents and purposes, involved in an active colonizing mission, as nineteenth-century Great Britain was. As such, while the American discourse of the veil that occurred around the women’s protests in Iran certainly mimicked many of the discursive legacies of British colonial feminism, and undoubtedly utilized much of the same orientalist lexicon of phrases, terms, and ideas employed by Lord Cromer and his associates, the context within which it was deployed—historically, ideologically, and culturally—was vastly different and reflected a very different construction of “empire” than that of its predecessors.

To comprehend the imperial locale from which this neo-orientalist discourse of the veil emerged, it is first important to note that the central figures in the saga of Khomeini versus the women of Iran were, in fact, the “modern,” Western- educated, and unveiled women of Iran. These were, as mentioned above, women the media consistently portrayed as wearing jeans and skirts, holding hands with their boyfriends, and, most significantly, acting unambiguously “defiant” in the face of Khomeini’s edicts and Islam’s religious strictures. In fact, beyond the continuous spotlight on the chador, the most frequently featured item in all the week’s coverage was the “defiance” of the female protestors. On television, reports showed women engaged in passionate debates with men on the streets of Tehran and pumping their fists in the air, demanding “liberation.” In piece after piece in the print media, reporters spoke of how “thousands of women in Iran marched in Tehran in defiance of the veil” (San Francisco Chronicle 1979a); how “thousands of Iranian women [were] defiantly marching on Prime Minister Mehdi Barzagan’s office”; how the “defiant, fist-waving women threatened further demonstrations” (San Francisco Sunday Examiner 1979); how every march that was staged “took place in defiance of [Khomeini’s] government” (Randal 1979a); “and how the women were all “dressed defiantly in anything they wanted to wear” (Los Angeles Times 1979b). TV and print reports described in detail ferocious standoffs women encountered with male religious fanatics and Khomeini supporters,13 while television images emphasized that the women were under constant threat, demonstrated through pictures of “fanatic”



mobs of screaming, snarling Iranian men seemingly surrounding the protesting women at every turn—for example, ABC illustrated this dynamic on the opening night of its coverage by showing the image of a lone, bareheaded woman arguing passionately while surrounded by a group of angry, gesticulating Iranian men.

The images that emerged from the protests generally depicted the women of Iran with their hair uncovered and wearing stylish Western attire, such as Jackie O–style sunglasses, flared jeans, and fur-collared coats. Television coverage offered



sound bites of young Iranian women telling the camera in flawless English that they were marching for “freedom”14 and “liberation”15 and saying that since the end of the revolution, Khomeini had turned “against women” and was now “a dictator” and “a fanatic.” The women were also often shown with their fists raised in the air—reminiscent of the salute that had become the symbol of the Black Power movement in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, the female protestors featured in the American media’s images were definitely not black; nor did they even look particularly Arab or Middle Eastern, as had women featured in popular depictions of postrevolutionary women in Algeria in 1962 (who had also employed the veil as a symbol of opposition to French colonialism and struggled with a return to “traditional” Islamic values and gender roles following their revolution), or more recent images of women in Iraq and Afghanistan in our contemporary era. In fact, many of the fair-skinned, straight-haired Iranian women featured in American television news reports and print media looked far more phenotypically white. For example, on the March 12 NBC News broadcast, the segment on Iran featured a long, lingering shot of a heavily made up blond female protestor whose eye shadow, glossed lips, and feathered hair almost rendered her an Iranian version of a Charlie’s Angel, one of American television’s most popular shows at the time. A cover story for the New York Times Sunday magazine on the issue of women and Islam in Iran featured as its central image a photograph of a woman named Susan Kamalieh, a sandy-haired “liberal” Iranian female painter who, according to reporter Gregory Jaynes (1979b), loved skiing; lived with her boyfriend; drank beer with her friends; and painted “in a pair of sandals, jeans, and a denim shirt,” often “slip[ping] one bare foot out of a sandal and scratch[ing] the back of one calf with her toes.”

Liberal Western morals and “feminist” values like Kamalieh’s figured prominently in most American media accounts—in another New York Times article, reporter Youssef Ibrahim (1979) quoted an unnamed Iranian female technician at the protests expressing her frustration at the constant comparisons the “religious fanatics” were making between the female protestors and women in the United States: “They are calling us American dolls because we don’t want to wear the chador. They say our moral character is flawed because we wear Western clothes. . . . Doesn’t [the ayatollah] know that his Islamic women can also fool



around under the chador?”Thus, it seemed that in the eyes of the American media,

the protesting women of Iran looked, thought, and acted a great deal like American women circa 1979— in particular, those white, educated, middle-class, and unmistakably “defiant” second-wave feminists currently involved in their own “battle of the sexes”—for example, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Kate Millett—who had spearheaded the feminist movement and sexual revolution in the United States throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s. In fact, the Iranian women featured in the TV coverage and newspaper photos filling the streets of Tehran could almost be mistaken for those American women who had marched in equality drives and “Women Power” protests throughout the earlier part of the decade—protests that had fueled a “revolution in the status of women” (as a New York Times [1970] editorial called it)



by advancing the tenets of second-wave “equal rights” feminism (gender equality in all spheres, abortion rights, and female autonomy)—save for the occasional woman in a chador or bearded mullah at the edges of each image’s frame.

Demands for “equal rights” were listed in almost every news report as the central goal of the women of Iran—Iranian women were repeatedly reported as wanting the same things as women in the West: “equal civil rights with men; no discrimination in political, social and economic rights, and a guarantee of full security for women’s legal rights and liberties,” reported the New York Times (Jaynes 1979a), as well as rights of “education, abortion, child-care, divorce, and employment,” reported the Washington Post (Randal 1979b). While all of these demands undoubtedly did reflect the true desires of many of the Iranian female protestors, and certainly represented legitimate demands in the face of Khomeini’s edicts, few news reports discussed how the lives of the vast majority of Iranian women who lived outside the urban centers—mostly poor, working-class peasant women who worked in the fields and rural industries—were still plagued by the same issues they had struggled with before the revolution (i.e., poverty, hunger, and lack of opportunity) (Moallem 2005; Tabari 1980, 1986).

In other words, the American media represented the Iranian women’s movement by explicitly rehashing the terms, antagonisms, and goals that had characterized the women’s liberation movement in the United States just a few years earlier, portraying the protesting women of Iran as the international doppelgangers of “liberated” American women, and then by implicitly iterating the widespread acceptance of the ideology of equal rights feminism as an accepted part of “our” nationalist discourse. However, in this case, the “enemy” was not only the struc- tures of sexism and male dominance American women had rallied against, but sexism and male dominance as sanctioned by fundamentalist Islam. As such, the postrevolutionary struggles of the women of Tehran were cast not only in the binaries of East versus West and Islam versus modernity, but in a new binary of “Islam” versus “feminism” in which the two concepts became diametrically opposed; women were marching “to protest the increasingly antifeminist overtones of Iran’s fundamentalist Moslem revolution” (Randal 1979c) and mounting “a growing feminist revolt [as] a direct challenge to . . . Khomeini” (San Francisco Sunday Examiner 1979); while all who opposed the protests or supported Khomeini’s views were, whether they knew it or not, inherently



“antifeminist,” “antiwoman,” or “male chauvinist pigs.” In this way, supporting the “feminism” of the women of Iran, as the press uniformly did in March 1979, became not only a means of supporting “feminist” ideals in general, but also a way of asserting nationalist pride in the face of fundamentalist Islam, an equivalence that would become increasingly deployed in the years to come.

Kate Millett versus the Ayatollah Khomeini

Such discursive equations between “feminism” and “nation” were enabled by the historical moment at hand—in particular, the fact that in 1979, the idea of



feminism was enjoying a moment of widespread public acceptance in the United States in which issues of gender equality at work and at home, sexual autonomy and freedom, and abortion rights had moved out of the realm of the “radical” and into the space of national “common sense,” if not in actual practice, then at least through mainstream cultural rhetoric and the formal language of the state. For example, in 1977, twenty thousand delegates had gathered in Houston, Texas, for the first federally financed conference on women’s rights, and women’s studies departments were being established across the country. In 1978, President Carter had issued Executive Order 12050, which ordered the establishment of a National Advisory Committee for Women, while Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (which, as its name suggests, banned employment discrimination against pregnant women), and two major cities—San Francisco and Chicago— were headed by women (Dianne Feinstein and Jane Byrne, respectively). In the cultural arena, the success of films with decidedly “feminist” storylines, such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Norma Rae (1979) and the following year’s Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and 9 to 5 (1980), reflected the ways in which notions of shifting gender roles and female empowerment—as well as the anxieties surrounding them—were at the forefront of popular national consciousness, as well as how the public was hungry to see portrayals of how “feminism” was reshaping the contours of American lives.

This widespread appeal of popular feminism spurred a great deal of public interest in radical feminist activist and author Kate Millett’s journey to Iran, a story that comprised a significant portion of the week’s news coverage of the women’s protests, in particular in the print media. Millett, the author of Sexual Politics, the 1970 text often regarded as the first and most prominent manifesto of the American women’s liberation movement,16 had long been involved with the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI), an American- based anti-shah organization, and in early 1979, she was invited by a group of Iranian feminists to speak in Tehran for the events of International Women’s Day. While Millett’s initial arrival in Iran in early March did not make the news, the American feminist quickly became a focal point for the American media after reportedly commenting that the Ayatollah Khomeini was a “male chauvinist pig” on March 11, 1979, a statement that was roundly repeated in the U.S. press on March 12. Millett made headlines again a few days later when news outlets learned of the Iranian government’s plans to expel the feminist from Iran, after which the press closely followed the events of Millett’s arrest, detention, and subsequent ejection from Tehran.17



Prior to her Iran coverage, Millett’s profile in the press had been decidedly unflattering. Following the publication of Sexual Politics, a piece in the New York Times dubbed her the “Karl Marx of New Feminism” (Bender 1970), and her general portrayal in the mainstream media was that of an aggressive renegade who had positioned herself as “a high priestess of the current feminist wave” (Prial 1970) by advocating for the complete abolition of sexual difference, decrying the traditional nuclear family as “patriarchy’s chief institution” (Prial 1970), and label- ing Freudian psychology as a counterrevolutionary force infused with “male



supremacist bias” (Bender 1970). In addition, Millett was described as a typically “unfeminine” feminist, a woman who swore “like a gunnery sergeant” and worked as a sculptor in a Bowery loft in New York (Prial 1970). In its August 31, 1970, edition, Time magazine featured Millett on its cover; the cover story called her the “Mao-Tse Tung of Women’s Liberation” who had come along to take on the role of “ideologue to provide chapter and verse for [second-wave feminism’s] assault on patriarchy” and whose 1970s text had supplied a “coherent theory to buttress [feminism’s] intuitive passions” (Time 1970a). It included a quote from George Stade, a professor at Columbia, who said that reading Millett’s work was “like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker.” Portrayals like these reflected early national attitudes toward and opinions of the women’s liberation movement as a radical fringe group of man-hating women who had traded their “femininity” for, as one article described Millett, a “casual dashiki-workpants-sandals lifestyle” (Time 1970b).

Yet as already discussed, in 1979 such views appeared to have evolved since the start of the 1970s, a shift that was apparent in the press’s later assessment of Millett. From the beginning of the coverage of Millett’s journey to Iran, she was often described as a courageous patriot—a far cry from the portrayal of almost a decade prior when she had been compared to Marx and Mao. Calling her “one of the few Americans daring to speak up publicly in what has become an extremely anti-American revolution” (Reuters 1979), journalists delighted in Millett’s characterization of the Ayatollah Khomeini as a “male chauvinist pig,” citing Millett’s words in their headlines (e.g., “U.S. Feminist Calls Khomeini ‘Chauvinist’”) and on air (David Brinkley of NBC and Walter Cronkite of CBS reported on Millett’s comment in their broadcasts on March 12 and March 15, respectively), although in reality, Millett’s full comment had actually discouraged use of the term. Asked by a reporter at a press conference she organized to introduce her Iranian feminist colleagues whether she thought the phrase could be applied to Khomeini, Millett had replied that although “it would be germane . . . it would be a simple idiot way of describing him” (Randal 1979b). And, she continued, “when we are dealing with something as serious as this, when people’s lives are at stake, we should avoid banal phrases” (Reuters 1979). The lack of context in reporting Millett’s comment demonstrated the press’s desire to depict the events of the women’s protests in distinctly American terms, downplaying the fact that many left-leaning



liberal women of Iran were actually wary of Millett’s presence in the region. As one Iranian woman commented,

I think [Millett] has no right to talk for Persian women. . . . We have our own tongues, our own demands. We can talk for us. . . . She and no one else who is not Iranian can say anything that we should listen to about Iranian women. She does not know us. I do not know what she is doing here. (Kifner 1979)

Yet the reporting of such sentiments was rare, save for a few accounts that did so to demonstrate Iranian and/or Muslim women’s inability to comprehend the benefits of Western feminism. For example, the Washington Post reported on March 12 that at the press conference in which Millett made the comment



about Khomeini’s chauvinism, she had magnanimously invited those women who had been heckling her to join her on the podium. The women had declined, because, the Post explained, “talking out problems—and the techniques of consciousness-raising—have not caught on in Iran” (Randal 1979b).

The hostility toward Millett’s opinions was contextualized within the mood of anti-American, “xenophobic postrevolutionary times,” not the fact that Millett seemed to continually speak of the goals of Iranian women as nothing more than an offshoot of the American women’s movement, at one point saying at a press conference, “Our rights of education, abortion, child-care, divorce, employment in the professions—all the things we have fought for since the commencement of the women’s rights movement in 1847—are in great jeopardy in this society” (Randal 1979b, italics added). Of course, Millett’s citation of 1847 as the beginning of the women’s rights movement was a reference to the actions that led up to the Seneca Falls, New York, convention of 1848, the first women’s rights convention in the United States, and thus inadvertently ignored and dismissed any feminist movements that might exist beyond a Western/American historical paradigm.

On March 15, 1979, Millett was refused entry to the Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran, where she had been scheduled to hold a press conference. After being formally asked to leave by the hotel’s manager, Millett decided to hold the conference instead on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, where she discussed the recent report that Iranian Deputy Premier Abbas Amir had said she would be expelled from the country for “provocations against the revolution.” The Los Angeles Times reported that Millett appeared flustered and tense throughout her interviews, her “hands . . . shaking in nervous reaction to the confrontation in the lobby” she had just had with the Intercontinental’s manager (Los Angeles Times 1979a). The paper then went on to report that a single Iranian woman “heckled” Millett as she spoke, telling her that she did “not have the right to decide what is happening in Iran.”

Three days later, on March 18, when Millett was detained by the Iranian government and ordered out of Iran, the Chicago Tribune Wire Service (1979a) reported that Millett told ABC News that she was “absolutely terrified” and could “not understand why I have been treated like this. . . . I came in friendship to help my sisters.” “Iran Expulsion Terrifying, Says Kate Millett,” read the headline on the second page of the Los Angeles Times on March 19, in an item that quoted Millett as



telling the Associated Press that she “had never been so terrified in my life,” and that the experiences of the last 24 hours, during which she had been deported from Tehran to Paris, “had made her understand the true meaning of human rights” (Pabst 1979). Three weeks after her expulsion, Millett told Los Angeles Times reporter Nancy Rivera that she was still bewildered: “I never did anything illegal or even impolite. I had gone there in peace and in the best will in the world, being thrilled by the insurrection and the hopes of a democracy in Iran. I’m still in a kind of state of astonishment” (Rivera 1979).

Thus, in the space of a week, the American press transformed Kate Millett from a brash, outspoken feminist who had come to Iran to defend the nation’s women from Khomeini into a terrified and defeated victim of fundamentalist



Islam, confused and trembling over how her good intentions toward the people of the region could have been so misconstrued. Such was the power and barbarity of Khomeini’s brand of Islam, the coverage seemed to say, an ideology that could make even an iconoclast like Kate Millett shudder in its wake. Like Betty Mahmoody, Millett was a white American woman who seemed to have begun her affair with Iran and Islam, this time in the form of her involvement with CAIFI, with the best of intentions, only to be thwarted by malicious foes gripped by fundamentalist ideology and religious fervor who were unable to stomach her “modern” ideas about women’s rights and international feminist solidarity. Instead, these enemies of Western/American modernity and freedom terrorized, captured, and ultimately rejected Millett and her feminist ideals.

In a sense, Millett’s story was a harbinger of the captivity narrative of the hostage crisis that would come to grip the nation at the close of the year: that of an American caught, held, and terrorized by radical Islam. Except in this case, the true prisoner was not Millett, but a white American “feminist” subjecthood, a subjectivity that had become part and parcel of “our” national identity and came to characterize the nation’s direct opposition to fundamentalist Islam. As Americans looked on at the events of that week, what had happened to Kate Millett appeared a clear indication of the type of treatment “American” values such as “democracy,” “equality,” and “feminism” would receive in the Islamic Middle East, and provided ample justification that “Islam” should, from here on out, like the Soviet Union, be viewed as a dangerous and formidable enemy of the United States.18

“The Beginning of a New Unity”Race was rarely mentioned in the week’s coverage,

despite the intense media attention on a religion that had just one decade earlier been primarily known in the United States as that of black American Muslim figures such as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Elijah Muhammad—perhaps the only “Muslims” the American public had ever known before 1979. Indeed, the only brand of “militant Islam” most Americans had heard before that of the Ayatollah Khomeini was that practiced by the Nation of Islam, once considered by white Americans as “the hate that hate produced,”19 a group one judge who had presided over a 1965 case involving black Muslims called “the personification of Lucifer—dangerous, exotic zealots with mystical motivations” (Spiegel 1979). For most black Americans,



however, Islam had long held very different meanings; as Melani McAlister has argued, in the 1960s and 1970s, “Islam” functioned as a significant cultural trope for black American communities, a symbol of antiracism, anticolonialism, and black nationalist radicalism (McAlister 2001).20

As discussions of feminism far overshadowed any discussion of Islam’s significance in the context of American racial politics, Islam became quickly and effectively de-linked from blackness in national public discourse, irrevocably jettisoned from the domestic terrains of the nation’s racial politics into the realm of foreign



policy. No longer would mentions of the religion elicit images of black men in bow ties or discussions of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Instead, it seemed that “Islam” in national public discourse would be forever transformed into an orientalized trope, reflecting all that America was against and/or was not.21

A year after the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke anti–affirmative action case and what would soon reveal itself to be a steady rollback of the civil rights gains of the 1960s, and as black militancy and nationalism, antiracism, radicalism, and anticolonial thought fell (perhaps forever) out of the national eye, this elision of the raced history of Islam in the United States coalesced with changing attitudes toward race, in particular the way in which racism no longer seemed a viable issue of national concern.22

Indeed, the only discussion of race that appeared in the coverage of the protests was through the persistent language of “equal rights” that pervaded the news of the women’s struggles, such as a Chicago Tribune editorial published after the end of the protests, which concluded,

Iranian women have no choice but to make it abundantly clear they will not surrender their hard-won rights and freedoms in the name of religion or revolution and dewest- ernization. They deserve the sympathy and support of all who value human rights—and who would be protesting in their behalf if they were blacks being forbidden to participate in major areas of national life. (Chicago Tribune 1979, italics added)

Thus, in the eyes of the Tribune’s editorial staff, the struggle for African American civil rights was a battle that had already been won; black Americans were no longer “being forbidden to participate” in all aspects of American civic life, and thus, “we” Americans could move on to the project of sympathizing with and supporting the women of Tehran.

This discursive transfer of Islam’s significance from the realm of black domestic politics onto the global stage was further buffered by the fact that the feminism deployed by the national media during its coverage of the women’s protests in Iran was also conspicuously “un-raced,” a white, middle-class feminism untouched by the ferocious internecine debates about issues of race, class, and sexuality that had been spurred on by the writings, theory, activism, and direct challenges of African American, third-world, and postcolonial feminists critiquing the racism, classism, and homophobia of mainstream second-wave white feminism at the time.

Yet such a construction was not advanced only by the mainstream news media, but by prominent feminist



activists, organizations, and publications themselves, such as the preeminent publication of the American feminist movement, Ms. magazine. Thus, I want to consider how the Iranian women’s protests were constructed in Ms. and in relation to the racialized contexts in which discussions of feminist activism were taking place at the time.

By the close of the 1970s, black and third-world feminists had become increasingly vocal in their criticisms of the mainstream—and overwhelmingly middle-class and white—feminist leadership and their political agenda. Since the early 1970s, black women and other women of color had been defining and



developing their own definitions of feminist principles, principles that simultane- ously addressed the sexism of their own ethnic and racial communities alongside the racism and elitism of mainstream white feminism. In 1977, a group of American black feminists calling themselves the Combahee River Collective released their landmark “Black Feminist Statement,” in which they declared that while black feminist organizing and principles had certainly developed in relation to the second wave of the women’s movement, “black feminism”—whose practitioners were “actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and operated on the central principle that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking”—was “the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women face” (Combahee River Collective 1978). Feminists of color like those of the Combahee River Collective challenged, as Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill have written, “the hegemony of feminisms constructed primarily around the lives of white middle-class women,” taking issue primarily with unitary theories of gender that did not and could not acknowledge women’s existences “not merely as gendered subjects but as women whose lives are affected by our location in mul- tiple hierarchies” (Zinn and Dill 1996, 321).23

The effects of such internal debates could certainly be seen playing themselves out on the pages of Ms. in 1979. The publication opened the year with a full-page photo on the front page of its January issue featuring Michelle Wallace, the young black American woman writer who had just published Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, the controversial and now well-known text addressing the issues of black male sexism within Black Power movements and cultural construc- tions of black women. Calling it “the book that will shape the 1980s,” the magazine ran an eight-page excerpt accompanied by a list of black women’s groups in the United States, and stated on its table of contents page that this issue of the magazine would “inaugurate a series of special reports by and about black feminists that will feature personal voices and contemporary perspectives on the sexual politics of black womanhood” (Ms. 1979, 3). Accompanying Wallace’s excerpt was another blurb from the editors stressing that the magazine’s focus on black women would continue: “Next month,” the editors wrote, “the special report by and about black feminists continues. The February Ms.—and other issues to come—will include additional personal voices and contemporary perspectives on the sexual politics of black womanhood” (Ms. 1979, 3).

The extended excerpt, the list of black women’s



organizations, and the editors’ repeated declarations of commitment to the perspectives of black women revealed Ms.’s pointed desire, at the start of 1979, to present itself as a publication that was sensitive to issues of race. Yet the publication of Wallace’s text was accompanied by no other black feminist perspectives, such as that of poet June Jordan, who later that year published a scathing critique of Wallace’s text in the New York Times Book Review that ultimately accused Wallace’s text of playing into the hands of the white feminist establishment. In her review, Jordan wrote, “You do have to concede champion qualities to Miss Wallace’s capacity for unsubstantiated, self-demeaning, historical pronouncement,” and summed up the text as “nothing more nor less than a divisive, fractious tract devoid of hope or dream” (Jordan 1979).



Palpable throughout the review, perhaps even more so than her frustration with the text, was Jordan’s anger with the way Black Macho had been held up by the white American feminist establishment as a groundbreaking text in a time when, as she wrote at the very start of her review, “American mass media rolled the camera away from black life and the quantity of print on the subject became too small to read.” Citing a string of recent events such as the Bakke decision and the passage of California’s Proposition 13, Jordan asserted that in 1979, more than ever, “collective affirmation [and] political resistance” was needed from the black American community to counter the “swift and radical reversion to national policies of sys- tematic exclusion and disablement of black life” that had taken place in the United States throughout the 1970s (Jordan 1979). At review’s close, Jordan stopped just short of implying that the text’s popularity was due mainly to the desire of white feminists, and all white Americans, to sweep the issue of anti-black racism under the nation’s rug:

Why did Michelle Wallace write this book? And, I wonder, how does it happen that this book has been published—this book and not another that would summarily describe black people to ourselves, and to the other ones who watch us so uneasily? . . . It is something to think about, indeed. (Jordan 1979)

While Jordan’s was only one opinion among many, one might conclude that the magazine’s singular focus on Wallace’s text seemed to expose Ms.’s desire to declare itself in solidarity with black women without engaging in any sort of sustained critique of white women’s racism.

This desire to assert sisterhood without simultaneous self-reflection became even more clear in the magazine’s February issue, when the magazine ran four short pieces by writers Alice Walker and Audre Lorde and activists Sandra Flowers and Christine Bond titled “Other Voices, Other Moods” in what it now called its “Continuing Series on the Sexual Politics of Black Womanhood.” While all four of these featured authors were known as outspoken critics of white racism—and, in particular cases, the racism of white second-wave feminists—the published pieces took to task only sexism in the black community, ignorance in the black community, and homophobia in the black community (Walker, Flowers, Bond, and Lorde, 52–56) as the premier agents of black women’s oppression—featuring no black feminist critiques that addressed the continuing legacies of anti-black racism or white supremacy in the United States or acknowledged the existence of racism within the mainstream women’s movement itself or



attempted to link the feminist cause with any type of antiracist goals.

Furthermore, following the February issue, this series was suddenly and uncer- emoniously dropped. Without apology or explanation, no pieces with anything to do with race ran in the March 1979 issue, and for the remainder of the year, Ms. offered no more articles on “the sexual politics of black womanhood,” unless one counted an essay on raising an only child penned by Walker for the August 1979 issue (Walker 1979) or an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s 1979 commencement speech at Barnard College, published in the September issue (Morrison 1979). Instead, the magazine chose to turn its eye toward less contentious issues, such as women in the workplace, balancing a career and motherhood, women’s financial



independence, fashion, and female health. With titles such as “How to Get Dressed and Still Be Yourself” (Thurman 1979) and “Is Success Dangerous to Your Health?” (Ehrenreich 1979), the majority of the stories published for the rest of the year addressed the grievances of white, middle-class women and explored how such American women could live their lives guided by feminist ideals.

In addition, most of these subsequent stories in Ms. functioned in a decidedly “domestic” framework, focusing on feminism in American contexts and rarely linking the predicament of women in the United States with that of other women around the globe. Profiles and features were of American women (e.g., Jacqueline Onassis, Barbara Walters, Patty Hearst, and Jane Fonda), and analysis of the feminist movement was grounded in discussion of various U.S.-based organizations and institutions (e.g., the labor movement, women’s colleges, and women’s art collec- tives). Thus, feminism seemed a resolutely American affair; little to none of the language of globalism and/or transnationalism that permeates discussion of feminism today made its way into the pages of Ms. circa 1979.

“Five Days in March”

However, the one “international” story that did find its way into the publication that year concerned the women’s movement in Tehran. On the cover of Ms.’s June 1979 issue—beneath story titles such as “How to Find a Feminist Therapist” and “Dolly Parton Has the Last Laugh”—ran the headline “Iran: The Women’s Revolution Goes On.” The accompanying piece, written by longtime feminist and political writer Mim Kelber, opened with the question, “Was the revolution a beginning of Women of the World United?” (Kelber 1979, 96). It then posed another question to its intended audience of American feminists: “Do we know . . . that Iranian feminists need our support—and vice versa?” The article went on to provide a summary of the events leading up to the protests of International Women’s Day on March 8, 1979—the participation of Iranian women in the revolution, the deposal of the shah, Khomeini’s rise to power, and his subsequent conservatism and calls for women to return to the veil. To her credit, Kelber generally offered a rich and complex portrait of the Iranian women’s movement, noting from the start of the piece that “feminism”



in Iran was not a Western import, that “Persian queens ruled long before the Koran, and feminist activists existed as early as the 19th century in Iran” (Kelber 1979, 90).

Kelber also attempted to avoid the simplistic characterizations that much of the mainstream press had engaged in that rendered the shah as modern and pro-woman and the ayatollah as backward and sexist, informing Ms. readers of the despotism of the shah, the torture and persecution of political prisoners under his rule, the American CIA’s involvement in the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and installed the shah in 1953, and the numerous rapes of Iranian women suffered at the hands of SAVAK, the shah’s secret police. She stressed that women had voluntarily taken on the chador during the revolution and did not overemphasize or fetishize the significance of the veil.



Two central points emerged from Kelber’s piece, however, that demonstrated how women’s actions were directly linked to the fates of American feminists:(1)Western/American feminist involvement with this issue was central to the success of Iranian women’s goals, and (2) the struggles of the women of Iran would ultimately be a boon for the feminist cause worldwide. Pinpointing Kate Millett’s participation in the March 8 protests as a pivotal moment, Kelber wrote,

Not until Kate Millett, the guest speaker invited for March 8 by the Iranian feminists, had arrived did press attention begin—and only then did police protection follow. The lesson was not lost: international attention could be helpful to the women’s struggle to keep the anti-Shah revolution democratic. (Kelber 1979, 90)

At article’s close, Kelber offered a resounding yes to the question she had posed at the start of the article as to whether the Iranian women’s protests signaled the start of a new phase of the feminist movement. “For the women in Iran,” she concluded, “for women all over the Islam [sic] world threatened by a growing religious fundamentalism, and for international feminism, the five days in March can and must be the beginning of a new unity” (Kelber 1979, 96). Statements such as these echoed sentiments expressed by Millett at the time of her visit to Tehran; when asked by a New York Times reporter why she had come to Iran, she replied, “I’m here because it’s inevitable. This is the eye of the storm right now. Women all over the world are looking here. It’s a whole corner, the Islamic world, the spot we thought it would be hardest to reach, and wow, look at it go!” (Jaynes 1979a). In addition, at a New York demonstration staged in front of Rockefeller Center on March 15, 1979—“the first large-scale show of solidarity with those agitating for women’s rights Iran”—featuring prominent feminist activists such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, actress Marlo Thomas, and author Susan Brownmiller, organizers called the day’s events part of an “international feminist action” that coincided with demonstrations across America and in Paris, London, and Rome (Cummings 1979).

Perspectives like these demonstrated the importance white Western/American feminists placed on their own participation in an “international” feminist struggle such as the one taking place in Iran, as well as their belief that these “five days in March” would bear a strong significance on the very future of Western feminism. Thus, it is important to note that the “growing fundamentalism” within the “Islamic”



world provided the necessary catalyst to spur on “the beginning” of this new international feminist unity. Such a notion once again emphasized the fundamental opposition between “feminism” and “Islam,” and implied that if tenets of second-wave equal rights feminism could flourish in this “Islam world”—in particular the Middle East where feminists like Millett had thought it “would be hardest to reach”—then that was certainly a sign that Western-style feminism certainly was ready to go global.

Furthermore, Millett’s unfettered enthusiasm in her characterization of Western feminist participation in Iranian women’s struggles as “inevitable” and the events in Tehran as “the eye of the storm,” alongside Kelber’s confident assessment that the struggles “can and must” signal the start of global feminist unity, revealed the



sense of destiny many second-wave activists felt in regard to what was going on in Iran. For while certain of feminism’s tenets were enjoying a moment of widespread acceptance in mainstream America in 1979, the organized feminist movement itself was, in many ways, in decline, as “feminism” became more of a lifestyle and a way of thinking as opposed to an activist agenda—a development that would ultimately result in what Susan Faludi later famously named the “backlash” against feminism that took place in the ensuing Reagan years.

This desire to “spread” feminist ideology internationally was readily apparent in an essay by Ms. magazine founder and original publisher Gloria Steinem in the magazine’s December 1979 issue, which was titled “The Decade of Women.” Titled “The Way We Were—And Will Be,” Steinem’s piece detailed the ideological and cultural shifts the feminist movement had engendered among American women and within the nation throughout the 1970s, from the coming-to- consciousness experienced by many women in the early stages of the movement to the then-current popular support of almost every major feminist issue, from “the supposedly ‘easy’ ones like equal pay, women in political office, and equal access to education to the supposedly ‘controversial’ ones like the Equal Rights Amendment, a woman’s right to choose abortion, and the question ‘would you work for a woman?’” (Steinem 1979, 61). Steinem told a tale of women coming into their own sexuality, into their own power, and detailed how feminism had transformed every aspect of American life—from relationships and families to work and finance to politics, language, and the very conception of sexuality. By article’s close, Steinem offered this synopsis of the decade in question:

The ’70s were a decade in which women reached out to each other: first in consciousness- raising groups that allowed us to create a psychic turf (for women have not even a neighborhood of our own); then in movement meetings and a woman’s culture that cre- ated more psychic territory; and finally across national and cultural boundaries. The 1980s can build on these beginnings. (Steinem 1979, italics added, 94)

In other words, Steinem characterized the American second-wave feminist movement as an ever-expanding enterprise, one that had begun with the establishment of “psychic turf” within the minds of privileged white women, then increased through the conquering of more “psychic territory” throughout the West, and was now growing even more “across national and cultural boundaries.” And while



perhaps unintentional, Steinem’s description of the feminist movement’s desire for expansion and territory was fittingly imperial, a portrayal that demonstrated how the movement wished to expand its borders beyond the domestic realm and claim more territory beyond national boundaries.

Yet all of this energy and enthusiasm emanating from white middle-class American feminists in support of the women of Iran and against the fundamentalist Islam enemy contrasted with a pointed lack of energy and enthusiasm on the part of these same activists in regard to addressing issues of racism and elitism. As Combahee Collective head Barbara Smith pointed out in 1979, white feminists appeared “tired of hearing about racism” and, like so many post–civil rights era white



Americans, had deemed themselves “not racist” because of how they felt they were “capable of being civil to black women . . . because I do not snarl and snap at black people” (B. Smith 1980, 49).

Furthermore, few feminist critiques of the ayatollah’s edicts and fundamentalist Islam were combined with indictments of American involvement and oil politics in the Middle East—the central catalysts to the development of movements of religious fundamentalism. As a result, from the “feminist” perspective, a flattering portrait of the nation once again emerged, one in line with the vision of a free and just America imagined by the mainstream press in its coverage of the Iranian women’s protests and the “blissful” America later imagined by Betty Mahmoody. By constructing themselves against the enemy of fundamentalist Islam, turning away from the issue of what Margaret A. Simons has called “a schism in the sisterhood” (Simons 1979), and by insisting on a teleological discourse of progress in the movement in which they moved uncritically toward a “global feminist unity” premised on unitary and universalizing notions of second-wave ideology, white feminists at the close of the 1970s unwittingly allowed their cause to be subsequently aligned with the nationalist and racial orientalist rhetoric that would come to dominate the ensuing Reagan years and continue on into the post-9/11 era.24

Throughout the 1980s, such a racial and gendered orientalization of Islam became central in enabling the Reagan administration’s initiation of Islamic Terror as the nation’s preeminent foe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and laid the discursive groundwork for the racialization of Islam that would occur in the post- 9/11 era. In this way, the national discourse on Islam, terror, and the “plight” of women within Islam that emerged in March 1979 left a lasting legacy in the national imaginary and commonsense understandings of “who we are” as a nation, constructing the liberal vision of a free, feminist, and multicultural nation as a fundamen- talnecessarycounterparttothedecidedlyunfree, antifeminist, andantidemocratic ideology of Islamic Terror.

Notes1.For those not familiar with Mahmoody’s book, the text’s description on the

back cover of its 1991 edition reads, “In August 1984, Michigan housewife Betty Mahmoody accompanied her husband to his native Iran for a two-week vacation. To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Muslim faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans are despised. Their only hope for escape lay in a dangerous underground that would not take her child.” The autobiography, written in collaboration with William Hoffer (who also cowrote



Midnight Express, a similar story of an American held captive in a Turkish prison), is perhaps the most well-known American story of a woman suffering under Islamic Terror, a cautionary tale of the dan- gers of cultural and religious mixing and the rampant misogyny of “fundamentalist Islam.” The reviews of the book were overwhelmingly favorable. “The picture of a bicultural marriage under strain is instructive,” wrote Maude McDaniel in the Washington Post (McDaniel 1987), while Marita Golden of the New York Times Book Review said that the text “can be read as a cautionary tale . . . based on the seductive but often misleading assumption that culture can be acquired and discarded like an article of clothing” (Golden 1987). In most cases, Betty’s descriptions of women’s oppression and Iranian Muslim male misogyny were



immediately accepted as incontrovertible fact. “There can be no doubt,” wrote McDaniel, “that the condition of women [in Iran] is most unhappy. Every aspect of female life is controlled or subject to ‘criticism,’ from clothing to the amount of sugar in one’s tea. . . . Mahmoody has reason to despise Iran.” In 1991, just prior to the first Gulf War, the book was made into a Hollywood feature film starring Sally Field; it has since been translated into more than a dozen languages, enjoying bestseller status all over the world.

2.In a 1998 essay, historian Jeffrey Mirel writes, “During the 1980s, [Detroit’s] population continued the precipitous decline that had begun four decades earlier. At its peak in 1950, Detroit had almost1.9 million people. Over the next 40 years, the city lost almost 47 percent of its population, registering just over 1 million inhabitants in the most recent census. One consequence of that massive population loss was the increasing racial and social class homogenization of the city. Due to the almost unrelenting exodus of whites since the 1950s, by 1990 over three-quarters of Detroit’s inhabitants were African American, most of whom lived in racially-isolated neighborhoods. . . . Detroit remained not only racially segregated but also overwhelmingly poor. Since the 1970s, the city has become a classic case of deindus- trialization with a massive loss of manufacturing jobs. Not surprisingly, it has suffered from chronically high rates of unemployment. As late as 1992, unemployment in the city stood at over 15 percent, more than double the United States average” (Mirel 1998, 412).

3.For additional reading, see Sugrue (1998).4.U.S. feminism’s roots in, as Louise Newman has written, “race-specific ideas

about gender, citizenship, social development, and racial progress” and as a discourse “about the evolutionary advantages that accrued to white women because of their race, and a demand that power should be reconfigured in U.S. society to take account of this fact”—in other words, a project of securing “white women’s rights”—has often stripped mainstream white American feminist discourse of the nuance and insight necessary to understand that when one constantly focuses on the “oppression” of women of “other” cultures, nations, ethnicities, and races, it is generally at the expense of acknowledging and addressing the many layers of such “oppression” taking place at “home” (Newman 1999, 183).

5.Former President George W. Bush, in an editorial marking the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the New York Times, named “respect for women” as a “nonnegotiable demand of human dignity” in the War on Terror and said “the oppression of women [is] everywhere and always wrong” (Bush 2002). In relation to the American occupation of Iraq, then–deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post published on February 1, 2004, citing the advancement of women’s rights in the “new Iraq” as proof of American progress in the region, a symbol that U.S. efforts were “helping give birth to freedom in a country that was abused for more than three decades by a regime of murderers and torturers” (Wolfowitz 2004).

6.Anne H. Betteridge notes in an early account of the protests, “Wearing the veil represented a particular moral stance—morality defined positively by Islamic law or negatively by opposition to the immorality of the Shah’s regime and to the West in general” (Betteridge 1983, 130). Of course, the adaptation of such a gendered trope as the veil as a symbol of resistance during the revolution was problematic in a number of ways. As Minoo Moallem points out, while it would be a “mistake to read women’s acceptance of the fundamentalist encouragement to wear the black chador as a sign of either passivity or religiosity [for] women perceived it as rather a gendered invitation to political participation and as a sign of membership, belonging, and complexity,” it also served to reinforce “a hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity as central practices of citizenship” in Iran (Moallem 2005, 110). The complex and multilayered meanings of the veil as a positive assertion



of Islamic identity and cultural resistance and/or Muslim women’s religious piety, and/or a symbol of hegemonic masculine dominance over women’s bodies, and how such meanings circulate in shifting constellations of power determined by material circumstances that cannot be understood through the lenses of Western-based secular-liberal thought is a subject that has been taken up in recent texts such as Moallem’s and cultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005), which examines the practices of the women’s piety movement in contemporary Cairo.

7. It can be argued that American unwillingness to accept the waning power of the shah lay in the monarch’s importance as a U.S. ally in the region. Between 1958 and 1978, the United States sold more than $18 billion worth of arms to Iran and helped to organize and equip a vast state security structure that gave the shah absolute power. In return, the shah, as reported by Nicholas Gage in the New York Times on July 9, 1978, “committed his country to protect the vital routes of the Persian Gulf that carry more than half the oil used by Western countries. Furthermore, the income from his arms purchases plus the



American technology he buys to help develop his country return to the United States almost $2 annually for every $1 the United States spends on Iranian oil.”

8.“Invariably,” Dorman and Farhang (1987, 147) continue, “news accounts balanced discussion of the absence of even modest political freedom with a virtual litany of assertions about the shah’s social accom- plishments or his general popularity. . . . [R]arely if ever has the American press accorded such consider- ation to rulers with a record like that of the shah.”

9.ABC World News Tonight, March 8, 1979. This clip and all subsequent television news coverage were obtained through the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

10. CBS Evening News, March 8, 1979.11.An aspect of the coverage that I am unable to explore in full detail at

this time is the manner in which the story of the women’s protests was presented as an inseparable companion to the reporting on President Carter’s trip to Egypt to broker the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, which was eventually signed on March 26, 1979, making Egypt the first country in the Middle East to officially recognize Israel as a state. Both stories were presented as interconnected harbingers of the changing relations between the United States and the Middle East; reporting from the Middle East, Peter Jennings said at the beginning of ABC’s March 8 report, “It is perfectly clear that what is going on in Iran has a direct effect on [the peace] talks and the ones Mr. Carter will hold in Jerusalem. The revolution in Iran has shaken Egypt as well as Israel,” as well as the entirety of the region. Almost four months earlier, the New York Times had already reported that “the political turmoil in Iran” was “troubling officials [in the U.S.] because [these officials] are beginning to see it as a symbol of a much wider fundamentalist counterrevolution that is influencing politics all the way from Lebanon through Syria and Saudi Arabia to Pakistan” (Reston 1978).

12. NBC Nightly News, March 8, 1979.13. The San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle (1979) reported on “Moslem

zealots enraged by the unveiled protestors”; while the Washington Post (Randal 1979a) described harassments from “nastier, jeering, and taunting Moslem men boasting allegiance to Khomeini”; and the Chicago Tribune Wire Service (1979b) spoke of mobs of “male revolutionaries [who] hurled stones and curses, brandished knives, and fired rifles at the women, who, despite these threats, stood their ground and persisted with their protests, steadfast in their efforts to reject the chador.”

14. CBS, March 8, 1979.15. ABC, March 11, 1979.16. Millett’s text has often been criticized for its studied ignorance of

issues of race. Margaret Simons has criticized Millett’s comparison of slavery and racism to her analysis of sexual politics: “[Millett] both misrepresents the slavery experience and ignores the experiences of minority women in the analysis as well as masks the differences between the situations of white and minority women. Her theory relies on an ethnocentric view of women’s power, of the character of sex roles, and the meaning of family” (Simons 1979, 391). In a piece exploring Western perceptions of the Islamic veil, Homa Hoodfar writes that Sexual Politics indicated Millett’s “lack of commitment to and understanding of issues of race, ethnicity, and class” (Hoodfar 1997, 267).

17. Millett herself later catalogued her journey in her 1982 autobiography, Going to Iran, in which she describes the events leading up to her trip to Tehran and her time there, including her detention in an Iranian prison. In passages such as these, describing some of Millett’s first impressions of Tehran, the account provides a clear idea of the orientalist, and often racist, assumptions Millett held of Iran and Islam, in which she describes her first encounter with women in chador as “terrible. Like black birds, like death, like fate, like everything alien. Foreign, dangerous, unfriendly. . . . And the men beside them too, oddly enough, nondescript in their badly cut



Western suits, a costume that had none of the power of an Arab robe” (Millett 1982, 49).

18.Another fascinating aspect of the press coverage of Kate Millett that I do not have the space to discuss here is the portrayal of Millett’s relationship with her “partner,” photographer Sophie Kier. Millett was open about her homosexual relationship with Kier and had once lamented how the mainstream feminist movement had shunned her after discovering that she was, as she called it, a “queero.” Called Millett’s “companion” throughout most of the press coverage, Kier was featured prominently in the press photo that accompanied the story of Millett’s ouster from Iran, a picture of her with Millett at Tehran’s airport as they waited for a plane to take them out of the country. In addition, it is important to strongly acknowledge how many Muslim feminists themselves felt about Millett’s visit to Tehran: that Millett’s journey was a gratuitous act of self-promotion that ultimately did nothing to aid the cause of Islamic feminism. Homa



Hoodfar offers a succinct account of this perspective: “Given the atmosphere of anti-imperialism and anger toward the American government’s covert and overt policies in Iran and the Middle East, [Millett’s] widely publicized trip to Iran was effectively used to associate those who were organizing resistance to the com- pulsory veil with imperialist and pro-colonial elements. In this way her unwise unwanted support and presence helped to weaken the Iranian women’s resistance” (Hoodfar 1997, 267).

19. This was the well-known title of the 1959 CBS documentary hosted by journalist Mike Wallace that introduced the Nation of Islam to American television audiences.

20.In her book Epic Encounters (2001), McAlister writes, “In the early to mid-1960s, the Nation of Islam brought its interpretation of Islam to prominence in the African American community and defined Islam as the religion of black American militancy” (p. 91). In addition, transnational affiliations between black Americans, the Middle East, and Islam were also developing at the end of the 1970s. In February 1979, black American UN Ambassador Andrew Young praised Islam as “a vibrant cultural force in today’s world” and said that the Ayatollah Khomeini would certainly someday come to be regarded as “a saint,” though later that year Young would be forced to resign from his post after taking a meeting with Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat (New York Times 1979). Journalist Askia Muhammad wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post in August 1979 that black Americans themselves felt a growing sense of connection with Islam and the Middle East, saying that for “millions of black Americans, Moslem and Christian alike, Arabs are ‘blood brothers’—sharing similar geographical and cultural roots” (Muhammad 1979).

21. In fact, the only discussions of race that appeared in the coverage of the protests were in the persistent language of “equal rights” that pervaded the news of the women’s protests, such as a Chicago Tribune (1979) editorial published after the end of the protests that compared the plight of Iranian women to the segregation of black Americans, saying “Iranian women . . . deserve the sympathy and support of all who value human rights—and who would be protesting in their behalf if they were blacks being forbidden to participate in major areas of national life.”

22.A significant effect of such a perception is the way in which it silenced the long and indigenous history of black American Islam. This is a silence that is only now—through recent scholarship on the long-standing presence of Islam in the Americas, the legacies of Islam in black America, and the perspectives of black American Muslim women—beginning to be broken. For further reading on the roots of Islam in the Americas, see Austin (1997), Diouf (1998), and Gomez (2005). For reading on the Nation of Islam and Islam’s resurgence and development in twentieth-century black America, see Curtis (2002), Jackson (2005), Lincoln (1994), McCloud (1995), and Turner (1997).

23.On the ground, black women’s critiques of white feminists were often fierce. For example, at the first National Women’s Studies Association Conference held in 1979, Combahee River Collective head Barbara Smith lambasted the sentiments of white women who claimed that the subjects of race and racism had been talked about too much, saying, “This, of course, is not true. If it had been all we had all talked about . . . we might be at a point of radical transformation . . . that we clearly are not” (B. Smith 1980, 48).

24. As Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood (2002) have pointed out, white American feminists took up the cause of Afghan Muslim women suffering under the rule of the Taliban en masse, while maintaining “a studied silence about the crucial role the United States had played in creating the miserable conditions under which Afghan women were living” (pp. 340–41), while also, I might add, remaining silent about racism against Muslim American communities and the harassment and abuse of Muslim American women, especially those



who wore the hijab. In other words, while there was no active colonizing mission by the United States in the Middle East in 1979, the combination of white second-wave American feminists’ dis- avowal of race, the absence of critique of American foreign policy, a fundamental opposition to Islam, and the clear desire to expand a universalizing feminist ideology beyond the nation’s borders—issues that all coalesced around interpretation of the women’s movement in Iran—engendered the roots of the American colonial feminism and feminism-as-imperialism that continues to constitute a large portion of the current discourses of Islamophobia.

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