Sexism may be a fact of life in contemporary Iran, yet double standards do not always apply. As an Iranian-American journalist once observed, "[I]n cases of jailing, torture, and executions for political beliefs or on spurious charges, women and men have been treated with full equality.” Those words belong to Haleh Esfandiari, and she wrote them in these pages 22 years ago. The world now knows Esfandiari as a victim--an unlucky Washington-based scholar who had the misfortune to be visiting her ill, elderly mother in Iran at a time when Tehran’s rulers happened to be bent on sending a message to the West. But, before she was spirited away to Iran’s infamous Evin Prison, before she was charged with seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic, Esfandiari was a storyteller. Specifically, she used her skills as a journalist and intellectual to tell Western audiences the stories of Iranian women. Two years ago, in Foreign Policy, she wrote about an editor who managed to publish a feminist magazine, even as her offices were trashed and her writers imprisoned. In her 1997 collection of oral histories, Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution, she told of the small, cosmetic acts of resistance that carry so much risk for Iranian women: the physician who wore a turban that did not cover her neck; the woman who was beaten with a metal chain for allowing too much of her head to show. Her sober 1985 piece for The New Republic noted that women had played a key role in demonstrations that brought down the Shah, only to find themselves relegated to second-class status following the revolution. She explained how “courts allowed families dispensation to marry off daughters as young as ten years old” and how a “wisp of hair escaping from beneath the scarf has gotten women jailed as prostitutes.”
Now that Esfandiari has herself been jailed, Western leaders must do everything in their power to secure her release. Such efforts will not necessarily be futile: In the past, Tehran has proved susceptible to outside pressure where dissidents are concerned, agreeing to release jailed reformers like Akbar Ganji and Emadeddin Baghi.
But we must not stop there. It is not just Esfandiari’s plight, but the plight of all Iranian women that should be our concern. In the West, there is today lively disagreement about how best to support Iranian resisters, with some arguing for a subtle approach and others favoring an onslaught of aid and rhetorical backing. This is healthy: We can, and should, debate the proper means for aiding victims of brutal regimes. But, whatever means we choose, let us never lose sight of the ends: an Iran where human rights are respected, where political freedom is real--and where, someday, women like Haleh Esfandiari will not have to go to prison to be treated with full equality.
