Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War

By Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh

Eighteen months after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, hundreds of thousands of the country’s women participated in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in a variety of capacities. Iran was divided into women of conservative religious backgrounds who supported the revolution and accepted some of the theocratic regime’s depictions of gender roles, and liberal women more active in civil society before the revolution who challenged the state’s male-dominated gender bias. However, both groups were integral to the war effort, serving as journalists, paramedics, combatants, intelligence officers, medical instructors, and propagandists. Behind the frontlines, women were drivers, surgeons, fundraisers, and community organizers. The war provided women of all social classes the opportunity to assert their role in society, and in doing so, they refused to be marginalized.

Despite their significant contributions, women are largely absent from studies on the war. Drawing upon primary sources such as memoirs, wills, interviews, print media coverage, and oral histories, Farzaneh chronicles in copious detail women’s participation on the battlefield, in the household, and everywhere in between.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9780815655169

Book preview

Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War

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Iranian Women

and Gender

in the Iran-Iraq War

Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh

Syracuse University Press

Cover: The female volunteer holding a rifle in the center is twenty-year-old Khorramshahr native Shahnaz Mohammadizadeh. This particular photo was taken by photojournalist Saeed Sadeghi in the early morning hours of September 24, 1980, on Molavi Street in Khorramshahr, two days before Mohammadizadeh was killed in combat. According to Sadeghi, he had driven sixteen hours from Tehran to Khorramshahr through Abadan the day before. After spending the night in a car in the Shaykh Kut area of the town south of the Karun River, he crossed the bridge on foot and entered the city center, which was effectively the front line under heavy shelling while the Iraqi ground forces penetrated the city from the west and the southwest. Sadeghi is one of the major war photojournalists who documented the entire war in the front lines and beyond.

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3702-8 (hardcover) 978-0-8156-3710-3 (paperback) 978-0-8156-5516-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Farzaneh, Mateo Mohammad, author.

Title: Iranian women and gender in the Iran-Iraq War / Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, [2021] | Series: Gender, culture, and politics in the Middle East | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020019718 (print) | LCCN 2020019719 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815655169 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815637028 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780815637103 (paperback) | ISBN 9780815637028 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780815637103 (paperback) | ISBN 9780815655169 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988—Women. | Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988—Participation, Female. | Women and war—Iran. | Women in war—Iran—History—20th century. | Women—Iran—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC DS318.85 (ebook) | LCC DS318.85 .F374 2021 (print) | DDC 955.05/42082—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019718

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to all Iranian women who stand

for justice and inclusion and who don’t falter.

For Maryam and Maya

and

in memory of the martyrs

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction: Omnipresent and Marginalized

1. Neighborly Scorn

2. Iranian Women, 1925–1980

3. Women of Khorramshahr and Abadan

4. Women of the State

5. Home-Front Sacrifices

6. Participation in Unlikely Places

7. Female Prisoners of War

8. Women without Men

9. The War Continues Forty Years Later

10. Iranian Women and Gender Since the War Ended

Conclusion: The Travails of Inclusivity

APPENDIX A. Articles about Women’s Participation in the Iran-Iraq War, 1980–1988

APPENDIX B. Most Bombarded Cities in the War

APPENDIX C. Female War Participants

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1. Female combat volunteer in Khorramshahr

2. Female volunteers at the Jame‘ Mosque of Khorramshahr

3. Sepah permit for Fatimah Joushi to carry weapons

4. All-female neighborhood support group in Abadan

5. Fatimah Joushi volunteering at Abadan’s OPD hospital

6. Female photographer on the front line

7. Female health-care professional caring for the chemically wounded

8. Mother of three martyred sons

9. Umleila Hassanzadeh’s Helal-e Ahmar-e (Red Crescent) ID card

10. Women volunteers at Umleila Hassanzadeh’s home

11. Document stating what Umleila Hassanzadeh donated to the war front

12. Donations being carried out of Umleila Hassanzadeh’s home

13. Thank you letter from a soldier to Umleila Hassanzadeh

14. Woman carrying a rifle to protect her home

15. Fatimah Yazdani’s Sepah volunteer form

16. Zahra Rafiee’s Sepah volunteer form

17. Seamstress volunteer group at the Ahvaz Laundry Facility

18. Young women volunteers at the Ahvaz Laundry Facility

19. Women volunteers wash uniforms

20. Iranian POW Masoumeh Abad speaks to female volunteers

21. Women and children of Godasia deliver donations

Maps

Map 1. Neighboring Iran and Iraq

Map 2. Khorramshahr

Map 3. Abadan

Preface

The freezing wind was so bitter and relentless that it forced me to remain inside the dark military tent to prevent further cracking of the skin on my face. The tent was one of tens of thousands set up across Iran by the Red Crescent, which was collecting public donations for the Iran-Iraq War. The year was 1982, and I was fourteen, a volunteer among a sea of volunteers who wanted to defend their nation.

Another volunteer and I stood behind a long table; our tent was situated in the middle of a grassy knoll near the three-way intersection where narrow Shah Abbas Street joined the newer Bozorgmehr Boulevard east of the city of Isfahan.¹ Women and children, young and old men were donating everything from canned goods and traditional Isfahani wheat crackers to homemade jam, sweaters, socks, and cash, stuffing the latter into tin boxes. I had been at my post for three hours since school got out, and it was right before the call to prayer when a middle-aged woman approached the tent. She walked up to the table murmuring something under her breath, and while she secured the chador draping her head by biting on the black cloth, she pulled off two gold bangles from her wrist and put them on the table in front of me. I remember staring at her and then at the eighteen-karat gold bangles that I knew cost a fortune. I picked up the pair and said, God bless! She said something like, Sell them and spend the money to defeat the bastard Saddam.

For years, I recalled that episode while I tried to forget many other memories that originated in the strange four-year period of my involvement in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88.

Twenty-six years later, when I returned to my hometown of Ahvaz in the Southwest and took a short trip to Khorramshahr, I went sightseeing and asked my taxi driver to take me to the legendary Jame‘ Mosque. For those familiar with the history of the Iran-Iraq War, the struggle that took place at the Jame‘ Mosque is the epitome of Iranian resistance against the enemy. It is synonymous with how the city resisted the Iraqi invasion and how its residents sacrificed their lives to keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy.

In this struggle, gender lines faded, and camaraderie was felt in its truest sense. If we were to use the name Sacred Defense, which is how the Islamic Republic refers to the eight-year conflict, this mosque represents the meaning of that compound in both a religious and a national sense. During the Battle for Khorramshahr (September 22–October 26, 1980), this mosque served as a place of worship, an emergency room, a battlefield kitchen, a civilian shelter, an ammunition depot, and, most of all, a logistics center coordinating everything for city-dwellers now turned volunteer fighters to prevent the city’s fall.

As I entered the mosque on that hot summer day in 2009, I came across the portraits of many martyrs mounted on the walls. I slowly looked at the black-and-white photos of young and old men, noticing how some had barely sprouted mustaches—much like myself twenty-six years ago—while others looked old enough to be grandfathers. The male-dominated presentation of the war memorial suddenly reminded me of another group of martyrs, though: the female volunteers who had died alongside the men, fighting the same war. There was not a single photo of a woman on that wall, even though I knew Shahnaz Hajishah was one of the young females who had been martyred by Iraqi artillery only two blocks from this place before the city collapsed. I knew many women martyrs had died in the city and near the mosque, so I sensed that a part of history was missing. It was then that I recalled with particular immediacy the chador-wearing middle-aged woman twenty-six years earlier in front of my Red Crescent donation tent—that memory convinced me that this historical gap must be filled.

This book was not easy to research or to write, for three reasons. First, official sources about women’s involvement in the war are scarce. Also, cultural limitations and taboos have prevented many women from writing about their sacrifices and suffering, and men who worked closely with them during the war do not mention them as a significant part of the war in their own accounts. Second, writing about war takes one to a very violent and disturbing setting that human instinct automatically shies away from. One fights the war anew while researching and writing about it. One lives the experience of those who were actually involved, regardless of how many years have passed. And, third, doing research about any subject inside Iran, including the war, and regardless of one’s citizenship is similar to playing Russian roulette! At any moment, things can go wrong, and the fear of such a possibility adds a stressful dimension to the experience.

For me, the most difficult part was reading firsthand accounts of women in combat, women prisoners of war, and mothers who kept waiting to hear news of their missing loved ones. The photos are no less disturbing: pictures of blistering people—men, women, children—some running for cover, bleeding and crying, the dead with their mouths and eyes open. But it is a necessary genre, writing about war and women, because—despite the omnipresence of war—accounts of it can sometimes help us avoid its horrors. And it is only then that we can appreciate the destruction that it has created for the entire populace, not just men, and for decades after it is over.

Acknowledgments

Many people must take credit for helping me along the way in publishing this book. I am indebted to all mentioned here and to those who are left out because of my faulty memory. I am thankful to several people in Iran and the United States.

In Iran, I thank Seyyed Mehdi Abtahi, Fuad Ahmadi Saber (Hameidawi), Habib Ahmadzadeh, Kazem Akhavan, Naser and Parvin Alekhamis, Yaser Arab, Mahboubeh Azizi, Behnaz Baqerpour, Esmaeil Davari, Ali Dehbashi, Hossein Dehbashi, Ali Fereydooni, Fatimah Joushi, Alireza Kamarei, Shahriar Khonsari, Marjan Mahdipour, Marzieh Mohammadi, Mansoureh Motamedi, Kameleh Mousavi, Mohammad Norouzi, Behzad Pazooki, Mohammad Qassemi, Morteza Qazi, Mohammad Porhelm, Masoumeh Ramhormozi, Saeed Sadeghi, Hamed Salahi, Nosratollah Samadzadeh, Morteza Sarhangi, and Abbas Sawki. The folks mentioned here were key in facilitating my research in Ahvaz, Khorramshahr, Abadan, Tehran, and Isfahan through various institutions, including the Red Crescent, the Library of War, the National Archives and Library, the Cultural Front Studies of the Jihad Construction Corp, the Foundation for Safeguarding and Publication of Values of the Sacred War, the Document and Research Center of the Sacred Defense, and the Organization for Islamic Propaganda of Gilan and Tehran.

I similarly owe gratitude to the following people in the United States who were instrumental in the completion of this project. I thank the faculty of the History Department at Northeastern Illinois University and its chair, Charles Steinwedel, for their intellectual support and encouragement in completing this project: Katrina Bell-Jordan, Christina Bueno, Liesl Downey, Jeremy Dudash, Gloria Gibson, Daniel Gotschalk, Patrick Miller, Wamucii Njogu, Ed Remus, Zachary Schiffman, Marco Torres, Ana Ghoreishian (University of Arizona), and Delbar Khakzad (Canada). Touraj Daryaee (University of California at Irvine) with Afshin Marashi, and Marjaneh Seirafipour (University of Oklahoma), and Claudia Yaghoobi (UNC Chapel Hill) were gracious in inviting me to their campuses so I could present parts of the book, which were key in fine-tuning some of the points made here. I thank Margaret Peggy Solic and all the outstanding and caring staff at Syracuse University Press, including Kelly Balenske, Mary Doyle, Lisa Kuerbis, Victoria Lane, Nora Luey, Fred Wellner, and Kay Steinmetz. I also thank Annie Barva for her masterful help with copyediting this book. Northeastern Illinois University’s generous Council on Research grant (2018) and research stipend (2019) made my research in Iran and Germany possible.

I also thank the following individuals and organizations whose generous grants to Syracuse University made this book more affordable: Mohammad and Jalal Farzaneh (Farzaneh Family Foundation), Olga Davidson (Ilex Foundation), the Persian Heritage Foundation, Northeastern Illinois University History Department, and the American Institute of Iranian Studies.

I wrote this book in memory of my late mother, Azam Simkeshzadeh Isfahani, who refused to conform to the traditional gender roles of the 1930s and rebelled against violations of her rights as a female growing up in an affluent family that reserved the right of education only for its males. I dedicate this book to my daughter, Maya Farzaneh, with the hope that she follows what lessons she might take from it when she is old enough to appreciate the content. Last but not least, I thank my amazing love and companion, Maryam Sattari Sobhani, who supported this work in every imaginable way and bore the hardship that came with it. I am indebted to her for all she does every day. With much love and gratitude to the most significant women in my life, Maryam and Maya.

Chronology

Iranian Women and Gender in the Iran-Iraq War

Introduction

Omnipresent and Marginalized

For every male who fought in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), there were at least one and very likely two, three, or four females who helped him fight it.¹ Although history has forgotten this significant fact, it remains nonetheless: millions of Iranian women participated in the war. They struggled in several ways, not only fighting alongside men on the front lines but providing key logistical support at the home front. As part of their struggle, Iranian women voluntarily carried guns, gathered intelligence, operated on the wounded, cared for the injured, buried the dead, guarded ammunition depots, organized kitchens, cooked food, reported news, photographed the war, engaged in propaganda, drove trucks, flew reconnaissance-mission flights, washed, cleaned, ironed, and sewed uniforms and hospital bed sheets, trained male and female volunteers, donated blood, gave up material wealth, and, most dramatically, encouraged other women and their men—including fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, cousins, friends, and strangers—to volunteer and fight to the bitter end. For many, though, this period was not bitter at all, but a sweet beginning of something greater, an honorable existence, a life with national and spiritual pride and dignity for those who survived, and the rewarding afterlife that God granted to martyrs.

Yet even though women provided such varied services, men chastised in the process, belittled, beat, threatened, used and then ignored, and eventually forgot them until the women volunteers began speaking out to seek recognition. They never complained about what they did because they considered their actions honorable, which God rewarded in many ways. They continued to take part in the war and as a result were raped and displaced, lost loved ones, miscarried, lost limbs, got exposed to chemical warfare agents, were captured and held for years, and went missing. Today, they await news of men who never returned, commit suicide, care for disabled veterans, and die from the long-term effects of various war injuries. They continue to fight the ghosts of the same conflict as they now have to care for men who became disabled—some taking employment for the first time in their lives, some returning to school after abandoning it, some marrying disabled veterans, some founding foundations to help others like them, some becoming matriarchs, and some presented with only a collection of bones in place of their loved ones.²

Iranian women are mentioned in the official state half-truths about the war only as part of propaganda with an agenda, some suggest.³ This is only partially true. A number of women have independently been trying to get their stories heard and to provide their own narratives of what they did and experienced during the war and in thirty years after it.⁴ And state institutions have notably offered resources for them to do so. Thus, it is disingenuous to claim that the Islamic Republic’s narrative of the war excludes women altogether. Iranians learn more about women in that conflict through publications and television programs that state organizations produce, such as Revayat-e Fath (Narrative of Triumph), which releases the series Nimeh-ye penhan-e mah (The Hidden Half of the Moon), although there is much to be discussed on that front.⁵ Other organizations somehow connected with the state and serving as propaganda tools of the regime also highlight women’s situation in the war. However, during the eight years of the war, Iranian print media used some variation of the word zan (women) only ninety-three times (0.004 percent) in the more than 20,187 articles printed about the conflict (see appendix A).

It is also noteworthy that the women who have told their stories and the women who have written their stories for them have convinced various institutions connected to the government to publish the women volunteers’ accounts, which has proven effective. Moreover, once some accounts are published, other female volunteers read them, but these others may have had different experiences or have a different view of their experiences (Who keeps records for serving God?), so they, too, want to tell about their lives as volunteers to demonstrate their commitment to Islam and Iran and to tell the public that they must not be forgotten. Various Persian-language websites superficially discuss women’s voluntary actions during the war, which makes the subject readily available to those interested in gaining more knowledge of it. For example, Paygah-e Ettelaat Resani-e Howzeh (Seminary Information Propagation Center) has partially dedicated some pages to information about women’s involvement in the war.⁶

Regional politics and at heart a desire to energize the weakened Arab nationalism played a major role in Saddam Hussein’s decision to attack Iraq’s longtime eastern neighbor.⁷ Politically and publicly, he disagreed with the terms of the Algiers Agreement of 1975. He canceled it in a live broadcast during a session of Iraq’s National Assembly five days before launching his assault. The treaty had established peace and stability between the two countries and put to rest decades-old disagreements.⁸ Not totally disconnected from his political motivation, Saddam’s brand of Arab nationalism drove him to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan in the Southwest, assuming that because it was home to ethnic Arabs of Iran, they would automatically rise against Tehran, unite with their non-Iranian Arab brethren, and accept living under Arab instead of Persian rule. But to his surprise an overwhelming majority of Arab Iranians mobilized to fight against him. Arabs were not the only ethnic group that volunteered to fight as countless male and female Azeri, Baluchi, Kurdish, Lor, and Turkmen volunteers as well as non-Muslim Baha’i, Christian (Armenian), Jewish, Mandean, Sunni, and Zoroastrian Iranians stepped forward and offered their lives and services to defend Iran.

According to female war volunteers, they participated in the war either to defend their nation or to safeguard their religion or to do a combination thereof in official or volunteer positions. Their participation occurred either in the framework of the military and its related organizations (including militia groups born after the Revolution of 1979) or in self-forming female groups. Although a significant number of women from across Iran sent their men to fight or volunteered to provide logistical aid in the war effort, the residents along the border regions with Iraq were the most dangerously active in a variety of roles and the first ones on the front line. These women lived in provinces of Kurdistan, Kermanshah, Ilam, and Khuzestan, which I collectively refer to as the war zone. Between some cities in the war zone (e.g., Khorramshahr) and the front line stood only a street or a roundabout, and in other places (e.g., Ahvaz and Kermanshah) there were a few miles between them.

Women’s duties on the front lines were not limited to reporting news for the state media, preparing war propaganda, and photographing the events; they also trained others in paramedic skills, became first responders, operated as intelligence and counterintelligence informants, taught other women combat defense, and prepared the public for when Iraq used chemical weapons against fighters and civilians. These other responsibilities were organized under the auspices of the new paramilitary groups Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Sepah) and the Basij-e Mostazafeen (Mobilization Force of the Oppressed, or Basij). The other postrevolutionary group that provided many volunteers for the war was the Jahad-e Sazandegi (Jihad Construction Corp, or Jahad). The Jamiyyat-e Helal-e Ahmar-e Iran (Red Crescent Fellowship of Iran, hereafter Helal-e Ahmar), played a significant role in delivering paramedic and disaster relief with tens of thousands of volunteers and paid employees.⁹ Female members of Sepah, Basij, Jahad, and Helal-e Ahmar delivered many services in the war zone. Some engaged in the unpleasant tasks of preparing and burying the dead, and some performed surgical operations, delivered babies, and protected and transferred the children of orphanages to safe zones. One of the strangest duties that some women undertook was to protect cemeteries from wild dogs. When Iraqi artillery aimed at cemeteries in Khorramshahr and Abadan, it exposed the freshly buried bodies, which became prey to the wild dogs that ran rampant in the cities. Because all men were at the front lines, women volunteered to guard the gravesites and shot animals at night, a violent and mentally stressful responsibility.

At the same time, inside the war zone and in faraway places women formed many support centers in their neighborhoods. Volunteers gathered in narrow alleys, public squares, mosques, and private residences to prepare food and collect clothing, cash, and other necessities, which they shipped to the front lines. These groups organized in the most basic but essential ways that included collective cooking to prepare and deliver fresh bread, beans, and potatoes to the soldiers. They also volunteered to sew new tents, sleeping bags, uniforms, and boots and to repair damaged ones. In addition, some all-female groups organized cash and gold jewelry collection drives. Women of all socioeconomic backgrounds contributed to these drives either by donating their gold earrings, wedding bands, and bangles or by turning over what little food they found in their stash, maybe a half-dozen eggs or a pound of rice. It was not uncommon to witness at times women donating sentimental objects, such as the silver-framed mirrors and candelabras (ayeneh va shamdan) presented to them as gifts on their wedding day.

What rendered Iranian women’s contributions so significant was that in making them they disregarded gender roles and sociocultural limitations that had been placed on them for centuries. These women, according to some, never imagined engaging in something as masculine as war, but they had no choice because the war was imposed on them; or, as one female volunteer put it, she did not go to war, the war came to [her].¹⁰ Women who lived in southwestern border towns such as Susangerd and in larger cities such as Khorramshahr and Abadan in Khuzestan or in villages such as Gilan-e Gharb in the province of Ilam were forced to challenge their gender roles because the war was as historical an event as it was politically and socially liberating. The women’s experience in war eventually led to their greater participation in and contributions to spheres outside the home, which was exactly the opposite of what Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his supporters had intended. In some instances, in the border towns where the patriarch of the family or the male next of kin was either killed or taken prisoner by the Iraqi army, women were assaulted, killed, or kidnapped. But on many occasions they fought back every chance they had, and there are many eyewitness accounts of women’s fearless responses to the invaders. For example, an elderly woman whose home was occupied by the enemy gave the appearance of gratitude and appreciation toward the eight to thirteen soldiers who stayed at her abode and trusted her. She routinely baked them bread and made their stay more comfortable. But then at one point she poisoned their bread, killing a number of them, and escaped before anyone discovered what had taken place.¹¹ In other cases, some women refused to leave homes that were in immediate danger of falling into Iraqi hands, and they took on the role of defenders with weapons that the regular standing army or revolutionary militias such as Sepah and Basij gave them. In Khorramshahr, women were trained to fight in the most basic ways, made Molotov cocktails to attack Iraqi tanks in and around the city, and at times even took up heavy arms in face-to-face battle.¹²

As significant as such actions were, the most striking way women fought was by encouraging their men to volunteer to fight on the front lines. Without exception, male volunteers who later wrote about their experience in war highlight the women in their lives and how their encouragement and support made it easy for them to leave home. Male voluntarism depended on women’s cooperation. The men needed the women’s blessing and support to do what they needed to do. The women assured their men and took on the responsibility of performing all domestic duties, raising the children, and sometimes earning a living while the men were at war. They fought the war on the home front, while their men engaged with the enemy on the war front. More notably, they welcomed the martyrdom (shahadat) of their sons and husbands, bestowed upon those God considered worthy because of their sacrifice. In some cases, they also welcomed the martyrdom of their mothers, sisters, and daughters. These women considered the martyrdom of their loved ones an honor not only for themselves but also for their survivors because their loved ones had offered themselves to defend Iran and Islam, not necessarily in that order. The mothers who disregarded their most human instinct of cherishing and loving their sons and daughters paid the ultimate price for their belief, a price equal to that paid by the martyrs themselves or arguably even higher in that they had to live with their losses for a long time.

This book predominantly focuses on the role of female participants in the war and how the war turned into an opportunity for women to demonstrate their abilities and commitment to Iran and Islam. They challenged the patriarchal view of female incapacity and of intrepid prowess as strictly part of Iranian masculinity. But like other women who have participated in wars at other times elsewhere in the world, Iranian women fought a war made by men and were dragged into it even while the patriarchy continued to frame it as solely a masculine endeavor.

Iranian women were fundamental to the human condition, as Juliette Mitchell has argued about all women,¹³ but they were also marginalized. Their marginalization took place when they were assigned their own world, the family, as a cultural creation. In the case of war, they were and are not given credit for their participation and sacrifice. Like women of other cultures who are remembered mostly for the behind-the-scene logistical support they provided in wars, Iranian women are noted for the sacrifices they made in their role as the family, but in fact they contributed in many other key positions outside the family sphere as well. Hence, we must historicize Iranian women’s participation in the Iran-Iraq War as part of a general historical fact that dates back to the ancient period.

As Joan Scott asserts, high politics as a gendered concept also assigned gender roles during this war.¹⁴ A small portion of the upsetting of such gender roles was owing to Khomeini’s open reception of women’s involvement,¹⁵ but it was also overwhelmingly owing to the women’s own challenging attitude and their desire to change their gender roles based on the promises of equal treatment made to them. Women who participated in the war were the victims of the male-dominated high politics that (mis) managed the war with failed strategies. The Iran-Iraq War created a situation in which the leadership needed to balance Islamic ideological values with the practical concerns of waging a conventional war. In one of the most violent periods in Iran’s history, women took this opportunity in the wider history of their struggle for inclusiveness to pave the way for more political clout in the future but only inched toward success.

War has changed the lives of tens of millions of women globally. It generally affects women in a different way because of their varied gender roles and cultural expectations. But, like men, they are killed, sexually assaulted, and physically and mentally tortured during war. Furthermore, they lose their loved ones, their homes, and their livelihoods. Yet almost everyone still considers war a solely masculine affair. This is not to say that men are immune from such misfortunes, but in patriarchal societies such calamities add a new layer of complex social issues for women because in addition to being marginalized by high politics, they now are thrown into a whirlwind of challenges that seem almost unbeatable considering how society and culture view women without patriarchal protection.

Iranian women had to face and challenge their expected gender roles and build new gender relations as they were thrown into the stormy waters of war: not having a patriarch (mard-e bala sar, literally meaning a man above one’s head) meant carrying the burden of proving themselves to be a worthy mother, wife, daughter, and sister. They had to continue life in the most dignified manner, and that, as we shall see in the following chapters, was never easy. Some of the women were forced to remarry because the absence of a man in their lives might mean a negative view of them in society. Many others refused to remarry even when there was no hope that their husbands would return from the battlefield or imprisonment. Many overcame such challenges and withstood the vast cultural negative attitudes toward a manless woman to build a new life for themselves and their children, with or without marrying a second time. Female displacement occurred domestically and often internationally once women without men were forced to look for safety outside of the war zone. As a key outcome of war and the displacement of families, some women were forced into prostitution.¹⁶

Physical battery as part of general violence against women is most often a direct result of war-induced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Women are often on the receiving end of the psychological torment that men who return from the battlefield or captivity experience. Frustration, nervousness, intolerance, and aggressiveness are translated into one form of violent behavior or another, and women are predominantly affected by them. Iranian women were no exception to this phenomenon and faced these same challenges after the war ended.

During the monarchy, women served in the military but never as part of the cadre of men who made important decisions. After the Islamic Revolution, the government ordered the army to fire all women officers, and it was only in the ideologically agreeable paramilitary organizations that women became active. Yet even in paramilitary roles that were not gendered, women’s participation was influenced by their race and class, as we will see in the case of Kurdish and Arab women of the West and Southwest, respectively, who became involved in the war. In many aspects, gender roles remained the same before and after the revolution, but in some instances they changed drastically. The Pahlavi monarchy had granted women more freedom to socially engage outside home than any other regime in recent memory. Freedoms such as allowing women to join the police force and the army and to fly planes were unprecedented beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. After the revolution, however, women lost many of their rights to engage in such activities, were forced to wear the hijab, and were severely punished for not doing so. They were taunted if caught with a male companion unless they were married and told their testimony was worth only half that of a male witness. Such basic rights were replaced with different Islamic mores that the state forced women to follow. These cultural practices were already familiar to those who had been sidelined as disenfranchised women but were viewed as barbaric and draconian by those who had not experienced them previously or had embraced the new freedoms during the monarchy. In addition to losing significant basic rights by the time the war began, women were the first group of Iranians to feel the war’s wrath. As they lost their men, they were told to accept their fate: they were the Zaynabs of their time, and, hence, sacrifice was their duty.

Cynthia Enloe rightly argues that sacrifices are feminized during national crises, and prowess and chivalry become masculine attributes.¹⁷ The Iran-Iraq War as a national crisis was no different. Islamic edicts coming from the republic’s leaders, Khomeini chief among them, persuaded mothers and wives to sacrifice by taking on more duties at home and sending their men to war, and they portrayed the men as brave males who would be divinely rewarded for sacrificing their lives by ascending to heaven to live an eternal life of honor in the next world. Many women stayed home and guarded the family base and the home front by doubling as fathers, coaches, and in some cases breadwinners. High politics exclusively practiced by male politicians made the females pawns of their game. Men acted without women’s input in the war room, while women became the one group most affected by the former’s missteps when urgent decisions went amiss in response to the Iraqi onslaught. When President Abolhassan Banisadr refused to send or was prevented from sending troops to the Southwest in the early months of the war, or when political bickering in Tehran allowed the Iraqi army to advance farther inside Iran, women and children became the first victims. Mishandling of the conflict continued to put the lives of women in danger because they were on the front line of both offense and defense, and that negligence continued after the conflict was over, when everyone, including women, needed help to recover but didn’t receive it.

The same challenges that afflicted gender articulation during the war continued after it ended. These challenges were also related to ethnicity and class. Judith Butler’s suggestion that differences in class, ethnicity, and local culture affect women’s experience in conflicts and influence discussion of gender within societies rings true in this case.¹⁸ The majority of women who volunteered in the war were from the provincial areas bordering Iraq and home to various ethnic Iranians, such as Kurds, Arabs, Lurs, and Azeris, and by and large many of them belonged to the lower socioeconomic sector, which highlights Butler’s assertion.¹⁹ Women in these circumstances remain understudied because their traditional and religious articulation of gender does not fit the secular model. They worked closely with Sepah, Basij, and Jahad. Because of their revolutionary activities, their service as an arm of the Islamic Republic, and their religious expression of womanhood, struggle, and activism, they are not considered important research subjects within feminist studies.²⁰ In fact, the pejorative term fatmeh commando (commando Fatimah) used against women associated with revolutionary organizations originates from such prejudices against a distinct group of Iranian women who do not necessarily have a western liberal perspective of women’s rights and gender roles.

Furthermore, local culture affected gender roles, too. Women belonging to the lower socioeconomic class of varied ethnicities in rural settings were more involved in the economy of the family and more liberated from the constraints of urban conservative culture, both of which continued during the war. The Kurdish woman Farangees Haydarpour, for example, came from a poor rural background and was very different from many other Iranian women before and during the war because her environment allowed her to express her gender without the usual social constraints seen in the city. But she challenged her gender role even further by hacking to death an Iraqi soldier who had invaded her village. Stories similar to hers affect the discussion of social gendering that continue in the public sphere today. The challenge here is daunting because women’s actions in the war must be contextualized as well as described: they effectively were in a war situation that was made more difficult for them by male machismo.

Despite being key participants in the war, women could not avoid being women, whatever they [did], to borrow from Mary Beard.²¹ As discussed later and shown in some of the women’s accounts, some men doubted them, whereas others appreciated their capability and commitment. Although women’s massive response to the needs of war both inside and outside the war zone, their acceptance of their men sacrificing themselves, and their toleration of the complications from the men’s absence and death or capture should all be viewed as significant, they nevertheless remained women, and at times others sabotaged their work or questioned their capabilities. They could not help being women whatever they did. But no matter how they were perceived, they were still asked to do more. At one point, the state felt that continuing the war would be impossible without women’s involvement, and that is why the war lasted so long: it received women’s support.

Many historical women associated with wars have globally established the fact that women have always been an integral part of all conflicts. Two notable Egyptian women, Ahhotep I and Ahhotep II (c. 1560s BCE), were the first women queen/warriors mentioned in the earliest historical records as participating in battles.²² After them, women were continuously present in wars: Amage, the Sarmatian queen of the second century BCE, Huang Guigu in the Warring States period of China of the third century BCE, the Vietnamese Trung sisters and the Celtic queen Boudica of the first century CE, the Parthian Rhodogune of Persia in the second century CE.²³ Women fought alongside men and by themselves in defending their territory against a foreign or domestic adversary. It was the same during the medieval period: many women participated in wars, from Olga of Kiev and Xiao Yanyan of China in the tenth century to Akkadevi of India in the eleventh century, the Mongol Mandukhai Khatun and Japanese warrior women of the fourteenth century, and the Italian Onorata Rodiani of the fifteenth century, just to name a few.²⁴ Women of the twentieth century also did the same.

Scholars have demonstrated how soldaderas (Adelitas) during the Mexican Revolution and women during both world wars participated in the conflicts on the front lines or on the home front and selflessly offered their services in every capacity available to them, serving as both positive forces and partners in conflict.²⁵ From the British nurse Mary Borden to the American writer Edith Wharton in the First World War to Nancy Wake of New Zealand and the tens of thousands of Soviet women who fought against the Nazis in World War II, these women, among others, took their place in history and participated in the global conflicts that men initiated.²⁶ Japanese women, who are remembered mostly for their role as comfort women during the Second World War, in fact volunteered their services behind the scenes as workers in essential factories, but for whatever reason history has focused on them as female helpers who sexually served fighters in their hours of respite and pleasure.

Women across the world continue to participate in conventional wars. American female soldiers in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq recently demonstrated a commitment and dedication to their nation equal to that of their male comrades in arms. The same can be said about the Kurdish and Yazidi women of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey²⁷ as well as about those from the United States and the United Kingdom who have served and fought in many roles in a variety of conflicts throughout the world.²⁸

When we look into the role Muslim women have played in various conflicts, we learn about Algerian women who took part directly in the struggle against French colonial rule and more specifically in the Battle of Algiers.²⁹ Iranian women, therefore, are and must be remembered as part of the greater participation of women in war, not as the exception. But what sets Iranian women apart in their Islamic context is how they clung to their Shiite ideology in the struggle against Iraq, another Muslim nation. The same ideological drive that sustained the war and the struggles that came after it also helped Iranian men. This was also the case when men of various ages and backgrounds volunteered in the war, hundreds of thousands of them perished or were injured, and tens of thousands of others were taken captive.³⁰

Sources

No single archive houses documents specific to the Iran-Iraq War. For various reasons, the Islamic Republic has not enabled a rich, all-inclusive depository of historical sources on the war. Hence, researching the conflict is challenging because primary sources documenting participation in the conflict must be collected through other means. Aside from the Ketab-Khaneh-ye Takhassosi-ye Jang (Specialized Library of War), which is part of Daftar-e Adabiyat va Honar-e Moqavemat (Bureau for the Literature and Art of Resistance) in the Sazman-e Tablighat-e Eslami (Organization for Islamic Propaganda), none of the organizations that took part in the war have established a center where researchers can conduct studies on the war.

According to some off-record estimates, there are some fifteen million pieces of historical sources on the war, including documents, film footage, live audio recordings, and other objects that are stored in different locations in Tehran alone. Were they available to researchers, they could be used to paint a clearer picture of the war, but for various reasons they are inaccessible. Branches of the Mouzeh-ye Shohada (Museum of Martyrs) in major cities house war artifacts that focus mainly on the ideological aspect of the conflict. However, they fall short of capturing the textual portion of the war, which leaves researchers mostly empty-handed.

The reason why the Islamic Republic has not created a central research depository on the Iran-Iraq War is that it still believes the enemy (the United States and its regional allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia specifically) continues to plan a repeat of the war through various means, and so it deems access to all war documents a threat to national security. Not all documents are sensitive, an official told me once, but interorganizational and intraorganizational factional rivalry has also played a big part in not allowing war sources to be collected under one roof.

We must not forget that in the confusing first few months and subsequent chaotic years of the war hardly anyone thought of a day when historical records of it would be needed or wanted. The public also unthinkingly disregarded or destroyed worthy material that could educate us about the war. Thus, official and public mismanagement played a big role in disregarding records. For these reasons and the scarcity of sources, inquiries into the war are very difficult. But the difficulty in finding sources that focus specifically on women has a great deal to do with the fact that because men managed the war, they paid little attention to their female comrades and thus neglected to record women’s participation for the sake of history.

Although the office of the Iranian president houses a bureau that addresses women and family issues as part of a center for veteran’s affairs, two heads of the bureau, Narges Karimi and later Shahin Molaverdi, were at one point critical of the lack of information about women’s participation in the war.³¹ My requests to interview the two women were never granted, though. Therefore, part of women’s history in the war must be extracted from official accounts and records that invariably have a male perspective. But women have told us about their experiences in other ways. They transmit the stories of their participation and gender challenges during the war in memoires, interviews, and newspaper and journal articles. What women have published still has its challenges because they don’t explain everything clearly, for political and cultural reasons. For example, a woman who might have been ideologically influenced by leftist ideas will not tell her story from that perspective, or a woman who may have been sexually assaulted during the conflict will find it difficult to discuss her experience without reservations and so remains silent about it.

What follows is the history of the various roles Iranian women played in the Iran-Iraq War, how these roles evolved and challenged traditional gender roles, and how women saw themselves as women, with one group accepting the theocratic definition of womanhood and another group challenging it altogether. The latter considered their status as females not as a hindrance to participation in sociopolitical activities but as a unique circumstance, as demonstrated in the war itself.

The amount of detailed information offered here might seem too burdensome, but one must consider what these stories convey. These personal writings and interviews are significant because they highlight the women’s values, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs while they engaged in something as violent as combat or something as easy as packaging nuts. Such details put the subject in the limelight of historical exploration, which wants to answer the question why women participated in the war the way they did. Simply taking a superficial look at their lives without the details could hurt the story that supports the history as it is written here. For example, it is important for the