Hamideh Sedghi writes that in Iran, both “secular and religious states regulated women's lives and mobilized them in different ways for different ends” (p. 271). Gender was a central concern of both the state and its sometime collaborators, sometime enemies, the clergy. And in this dispute, women were not merely the objects of an argument but exercised their own agency in choosing paths, however constrained.

Sedghi uses the veil as both an actual and metaphoric representation of the three-cornered relationship of women, clergy, and the state in Iran during the periods of veiling at the end of the Qajar dynasty and the Constitutional Revolution, of unveiling after Reza Shah took power and began his project of authoritarian modernization, and of reveiling when the Pahlavi dynasty was overthrown and the Islamic Republic replaced the Shah.

Thus, in the constitutional period, Sedghi recounts the activities of secret societies of upper-class women and the schools and journals they established in their attempt to take advantage of the winds of change. Under the Pahlavis, women's responses to an autocratic state were to an extent preempted, and to a lesser extent facilitated, by state feminism, but once again, there was some success in gaining autonomy for women's groups, particularly prior to the Anglo-American coup against Mohammad Mossadegh. And in the Islamic Republic, while there has been a schism between upper-class feminists and what Sedghi calls oppositional women—who may be left, secular, or Islamist—over their stance with respect to the state, there is no question that women progressed in taking up roles in public life far beyond what had been previously known in Iran. Thus, while the schism continues, women “continue to maintain a dynamic presence in the Islamic state” (p. 3).

As might be inferred from the above, Sedghi is scrupulous in insisting on differentiating among Iranian women in terms of class and location. She acknowledges that she is focusing on urban women but makes clear that there are significant continuing and influential differences among upper-class women, who benefited from state feminism under the Shah, and the larger group of women of the popular classes, whose political agency was summoned into existence only with the Iranian Revolution.

The author acknowledges the importance of the Pahlavi father and son's introduction of educational and political opportunities for women and the basis they provided for the later broadening of the availability of both schooling and franchise to many more women under the Islamic Republic, but she notes the advances in the postrevolutionary period, writing, for example, that “[w]omen's educational progress has been unprecedented in the nation's history” (p. 235).

Sedghi also avoids the all-too-common trap of identifying the Islamic Republic's law of marriage and divorce entirely with traditional Islamic law, rejecting the notion that gender-relevant law is necessarily ideological. Instead, she writes on page 135 that “[l]aw is politics by another name,” recognizing the success of Iranian women in moderating the harsh strictures of tradition. Thus, she acknowledges women's role in achieving the legal reforms that have given them additional economic rights on divorce, including wages for housework, entitlement to half the property of the marriage, and rights to constrain polygamy by their husbands.

My one criticism of Sedghi is directed at her continual conflation of agency and resistance in a fashion that I think Saba Mahmood and others have been teaching us to avoid (see Mahmood, The Politics of Piety, 2005). Thus, in a chapter entitled “Politics and Women's Resistance,” Sedghi includes women who are proponents of Islamism among women who resist the regime of the Islamic Republic. In my view, they would be better described as political actors within the regime who are seeking benefits for their constituency, as other groups do. It has been the insistence of Islamist women that their religion is attuned to, rather than in conflict with, the needs of women that has led to what Sedghi acknowledges is Iranian women's improved situation with respect to education, reproductive control, labor force participation, and political participation.

Women and Politics in Iran is built around the central argument that the state can, through its control of political institutions, restructure gender relations and women's lives, but that “women's response and resistance … constrain and subvert the state's behavior” (p. 154). As a study of this dialectic in what may be its most pronounced form—that is, the twentieth-century political history of Iran—this book is an important contribution. It will prove a resource both for the scholar and the student, filled as it is both with data and references, on the one hand, and with engaging, well-written accounts of a turbulent period of history, on the other. It is both jargon free and condescension free and will, I believe, find a place on many reading lists and in many bibliographies.