Liora Hendelman-Baavur's Creating the Modern Iranian Woman is a timely and original contribution that examines Iranian women's magazines published between the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century and the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Incorporating primary and secondary sources, the study focuses on two major magazines, Ettela'at-e Banuvan (Ladies News) and Zan-e Ruz (The Modern Woman). A systematic review of these two periodicals between 1957 and 1979 is accompanied by briefer explorations of other publications from the period, including Ettela'at-e Haftegi and Javanan-e Emruz, enabling the author to examine what it meant to be a “modern Iranian woman” during this tumultuous time. Hendelman-Baavur's study is further enriched by original interviews with many leading figures, including Iran's former queen, Farah Pahlavi, and journalists Haleh Esfandiari and Mansureh Pirnia.
Within the field of Iranian studies, a focus on establishing an elite canon has meant that few scholars have undertaken the daunting task of studying mass-produced materials such as popular fiction and journalism. Creating the Modern Iranian Woman not only addresses a notable gap in the scholarship by focusing on texts that have commonly been considered popular and so unworthy of critical attention, it also uncovers the complexities inherent in popular writing: Hendelman-Baavur interprets her material against the grain of readings that reduce women's magazines to mere vessels for state ideology, the doctrine of “Westoxification,” and patriarchal discourses. The book reveals that, in addition to their ideological alignments, such magazines also have social and cultural functions; they are “both products and agents” of social and technological change (85). Throughout her chapters, the author pays detailed attention to fully documenting this argument.
The book is divided into two parts; part 1, which encompasses three chapters, investigates the emergence and formation of the Iranian women's press in the early twentieth century. Part 2 critically analyzes the materials produced in the two above-mentioned magazines in four chapters that deconstruct the representation of womanhood in these two periodicals. It also includes a helpful introduction, a summarizing conclusion, and a wide-ranging bibliography. Through her discussion of the transformations captured by these Iranian women's periodicals, the author successfully demonstrates the many contradictions of this miscellaneous genre in which multiple subgenres and discourses coexist and compete, although the overarching focus of her analysis remains on the direct link between Iranian women's publications and the nation's progress toward modernization.
Chapter 1 provides a brief review of women's entrance into print media in the early twentieth century to illustrate the relationship between women, the press, and the state. This chapter also highlights a major shift in women's journalism at a time when the previously elitist media became increasingly oriented toward the masses. In their mission to “awaken” their underprivileged sisters, upper class women nevertheless remained faithful to the ideal of the modern woman as a devoted wife and mother. In contrast to the backward and ignorant woman, the new woman needed education to serve the patriotic goal of raising more enlightened future generations. Chapter 2 offers a critical evaluation of the continuities and shifts in the relationship between the state and the press. Under the guise of centralizing feminist activities, Iran's last royal dynasty, the Pahlavi family (1925–1979), took over the women's press and tied women's emancipation to modernization campaigns. Yet Hendelman-Baavur also demonstrates that factors such as high publication costs, low circulation rates, low literacy rates, and a shortage of female journalists combined with cultural habits such as collective reading in public spaces to negatively impact women's print media. These diverse micro- and macro-level dynamics make clear that the women's press was far more than the passive product of the authoritative regime. Chapter 3 further illustrates how these economical and professional impediments led to the predominance of borrowed and translated materials and influenced the development of the press market. In addition to these restrictions, cultural barriers—or what Hendelman-Baavur refers to as “patriarchal paternalism,” a term that encompasses both the patriarchal culture of the time and the dominance of male patronage and readership—defined trends and led to pervasive self-censorship among female journalists.
In part 2, Hendelman-Baavur explores how women's publications functioned as agents of cultural change by creating the modern Iranian woman, with all her contradictions and caprices. Chapter 4 reveals that this new woman's modernized femininity still served her familial and domestic devotions to form a “symbolic defence against perceived threats to older values” (119). Reflecting this, Iranian women's magazines from the 1960s onward promoted women's education, but not employment. When a working woman was depicted among the pages of these magazines, she was most often employed in traditionally feminine occupations such as nursing or teaching, with overt emphasis placed on her devotion to the home. To reveal how Pahlavi state policies affected the content of women's print media, Hendelman-Baavur showcases examples from the late 1960s onward, which show that Iranian women were no longer being encouraged to produce more citizens because the regime's policies had shifted to birth control in response to the population boom, as a result of which the High Council of Family Planning was established in 1966.
One of the major conflicts the modern Iranian woman of this period faced becomes the topic of chapter 5: although women were urged to represent determination and pursue educational success, at the same time there remained an excessive emphasis on their bodies, beauty, diet, exercise, and fashion. Despite the liberatory intentions of these publications, the modern Iranian woman as she appeared in print was often objectified to please the male gaze. Women of the lower strata were often left out of the picture entirely, with the ideal modern woman imagined as belonging to the upper middle class. Another inherent contradiction in this ideal, according to Hendelman-Baavur, was that although the modern Iranian woman challenged an Islamic femininity based on invisibility and immobility, she also demonstrated conservative ideals (backed by Islamic images)—and yet she also was Western (farangi) in appearance, identity, and role. Elaborating on this ambiguity, chapter 6 addresses the anxieties surrounding cultural assimilation and the divided national loyalties that arose from the fear that the Western woman might steal the heart of the modern Iranian man. This anxiety led to the production of a whole range of films and fictions featuring a model of Westernized womanhood that ultimately responded to the voyeuristic male gaze. She was beautiful, but she also was superficial, arrogant, and materialistic. In the words of Ali Shariati, she was a disease, to recover from which one had to return to the Iranian woman. In contrast to this Westoxified woman, Hendelman-Baavur reveals that there also was a parallel Western woman whose social achievements were a source of great admiration and aspiration. Queen Farah, as discussed in chapter 7, was represented as a compromise between these apparent opposites: as a devoted mother and wife and yet a socially active figure, she epitomized the perfect combination of the traditional and modern ideals of womanhood, or what the author refers to as “modernized patriarchy” (298).
In her introduction, Hendelman-Baavur promises to “explore Iranian women's magazines and their various functions from production to consumption” (19), and her tour through the prerevolutionary landscape of the modern media-politics of Iran does exactly that. Although there have been sporadic studies published on Iranian women's magazines and a wide range of feminist works on the modern Iranian woman, previous research has not often brought together the fields of journalism, feminism, sociology, and popular culture. In demonstrating how women's magazines acted as cultural sites where modern Iranian womanhood was constructed and promoted, the book sheds light on a previously neglected aspect of Iranian studies. By showing how the popular press functioned as the textual manifestation of the popular culture, Hendelman-Baavur lays bare the inconsistencies of the dominant, residual, and emergent ideologies of the period. Her meticulous consideration of primary materials, as well as her careful attention to relevant scholarship, enables Hendelman-Baavur to locate her research in its own sociopolitical, historical, and cultural context. Jargon and convoluted language are avoided, making the book accessible to a nonspecialist audience, and an array of helpful illustrations, figures, and footnotes clarify the major arguments and effectively connect readers to relevant scholarship. This informative book is mostly relevant to scholars of Iranian studies whose research particularly focuses on identity, gender, culture, and media, but it also will be of interest to scholars of comparative studies or those working at the intersection of feminism and the media in the broader Southwest Asian and North African region. Liora Hendelman-Baavur's Creating the Modern Iranian Woman is a welcome exploration of Iranian women's journalism, and one would only wish that its author will extend her research to magazines published after the 1979 revolution.
