Iranian women quietly triumph

For 3 decades they navigate restraints to bolster status

Community activist Nazanin Gohari has turned her living room in Tehran into a library for women. (Newsha Tavakolian/Polaris for The Los Angeles Times)

TEHRAN - In her eyes, they are all daughters and sisters.

The waifish 18-year-old, already married and a mother, but with a hunger to learn. The pair of shy high school students, nervous at first, but soon browsing eagerly through the bookshelves. The matronly homemaker, unsure and uneducated, but discovering the world beyond the slums of southern Tehran by reading Feodor Dostoevsky and Jean-Paul Sartre.

For the women in her neighborhood, Nazanin Gohari has become a savior of minds.

A few years back, the part-time hairdresser-turned-community activist transformed her shabby apartment into a library for women, collecting secondhand books to fill the makeshift shelves in her living room.

First she stocked them with trashy novels, poetry, and how-to and self-help titles. But the demand for cookbooks and sewing patterns eventually gave way to requests for college-preparation books and literature. The girls leafing through illustrated children's books bloomed into strong-willed women eager to pursue higher education.

Gohari remembers one girl, a 17-year-old named Sedigheh, who came to her crying, distraught that her parents couldn't afford the study materials for college entrance exams. Scoring high would place the bright teenager on the fast track to a potentially glorious future, maybe even medical school. Not taking the test would mean a life more ordinary, perhaps married to a man twice her age, tending to babies and home.

For Gohari, helping the teen became a mission, one of many. She scoured the city for the study books, relatively inexpensive by Western standards but a fortune for Iran's poor.

"She was ashamed because she couldn't afford the books," Gohari said.

The older woman put her hand out to the girl. "I said, `Study here.' "

Gohari, a bespectacled woman in her late 50s, delights in the women in her impoverished district, recounting the details of their triumphs and ordeals.

She sprinkles her sentences with folksy praises of God as she speaks excitedly about her adventures as a grass-roots activist, filling a social and even political vacuum created by Iran's rapid transition from a largely rural nation where people tended to neighbors' needs to today's impersonal urban society where most fend for themselves.

Obscured from public view, Iran's women have quietly navigated restrictions of politics, religion, and tradition over the last three decades to bolster their status and take positions of power.

Although the conservative clerics who took over the country after the 1979 ouster of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi hoped to ossify women's traditional roles, they set in place dynamics that liberated them. As the clerics launched literacy drives and built hundreds of colleges around the country, Iran's literacy rate rose from less than 50 percent in the 1970s to 85 percent today.

Instead of creating a powerful new Islamic generation, they pushed the country into the modern age, raising the ambitions and savvy of young Iranians, half of them women, who began to question society's rules and strictures.

"It's one of the ironies of the revolution that women's sense of self has become much stronger," said Pardis Mahdavi, an Iranian-American anthropologist who teaches at Pomona College in Southern California.

Thanks to Gohari's help, Sedigheh, the promising student who couldn't afford college study guides, was accepted at Tehran's Payame Noor University, among the 60 percent of college students in Iran who are women. In 2007, she finished her studies in psychology and was hired as a social worker.

"When I see this girl," Gohari said, "I get strength."