Creating the Modern Iranian Woman by Liora Hendelman-Baavur, is an addition to the steady scholarly interest in the history of women in Iran in the 19th and the 20th centuries throughout the past three decades (See for example, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens, 2011; Janet Afary, Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, 2009; Afsaneh Najmabadi, The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, 1998; Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran, 1997). The book mainly offers a discourse analysis of the two imminently popular women's magazines Etelaʿat-i Banuvan and Zan-i Ruz, while also investigating the history of the emergence and establishment of commercial presses in the late Pahlavi era. It does so with the backdrop of a “proliferation of mass media and education, urbanization, industrialization, and consumerism” (p. 15). In a nutshell, the book demonstrates how commercial print at once creates and reflects dominant culture, the silhouette of which is drawn by the ideology of “glocal” market and politics—a term the author uses in the introduction to delineate the hybridity of cultural productions in the commercial press at the intersection of “global features of modernity” and “local notions of identity” (p. 6). The book aspires to critically engage with postcolonial theories and methods of analysis, as well as with bottom-up approaches to the history of women and women's movements to revise the predominantly statist historiography of Iran in the 20th century. It engages with two understudied women's magazines that can offer a glimpse into the complex discursive production of ideal femininities in Iran in the second Pahlavi period. That said, however, from the title of the book to the content, Creating the Modern Iranian Woman re-inscribes the preceding historiographical narratives that it sets out to challenge while also being bound by an Orientalist undertone.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part—consisting of the first three chapters—begins with an inquiry into the history of the women's press from the early 20th century—relying heavily on secondary sources—and ends with the story of its commercialization in the late Pahlavi era. Part 2 investigates the “contested” and multiple constructions of the modern woman during the second Pahlavi period. Chapters are similar in terms of the archival body with which they engage—magazines, literary productions, and a couple of interviews—as well as the secondary sources with which they converse. In both parts, the author reads the history of women's magazines in conjunction with women's movements as well as the history of the press as an industry that had to survive the market while also navigating state restrictions and censorship. Together they demonstrate how the apolitical tone of these magazines contributed to their commercial success, while also allowing them to escape state scrutiny. This apolitical tone in fact helped establish the popular sovereignty of the state through turning the royal family into celebrities. The author, however, argues that in the late 1970s and following growing political discontent with the regime, these very platforms of state ideology transformed into public venues for critiquing the state.
As exciting as it may be to read the magazines against the grain of their dominant ideology, the examples employed by the author hardly support the claim. It seems, rather, that any form of visibility in the years before the 1979 revolution could invite further critique to the royal family. For instance, while Chapter 7 successfully exhibits how Farah becomes hyper-visible in the two magazines through capitalizing on her image as the mother of the nation, it is unclear how the magazines actually challenge her popularity. For instance, the one published interview with Farah that the author unpacks does not really give us any sense of Farah being critiqued or challenged by the journalist. This is but one example of analyses in the book that could further benefit from employing a comparative framework to address broader critical questions regarding the relation between monarchical figures and popular culture.
One of the most exciting insights of the book is to demonstrate how women's magazines in this period capitalized on elements of intimate, familial life that resonated with women's daily realities. Thus, Chapter 4 demonstrates how advice columns functioned as a sort of “surrogate family,” for the readership who could consult the “experts” on issues including child rearing, marriage problems, housekeeping, sex, beauty, and family troubles. Sections such as “Your Page,” in Zan-e Ruz where readers’ were encouraged to congratulate their loved ones or ask for caring assistance—all free of charge—facilitated “an alternative support system for functions previously performed by kinship networks” (p. 124). As such, commercial magazines served as a public sphere, albeit a domesticated one, where ideas and ideals of modern Iranian femininities were produced and contested.
Part 2 of the book unpacks the crafting of four different types of femininities including the housewife, the young bi-hijab (non-veiled) girl, the Western woman, and finally the royal queen. It is in this part of the book that we start seeing connections between the global and the local forces that outline Iranian culture. For instance, Chapter 4 demonstrates how the ideal figure of the consumerist, scientific, nationalistic housewife that emerged in these magazines was at once a product of American driven consumerism, the White Revolution's policies regarding economic development, and patriarchal nationalist visions (p. 140). This part successfully demonstrates how the magazines reflected the ambivalence of society toward new ideas about femininity.
The book however misses the opportunity to adopt an analytical approach to concepts such as “freedom,” “agency,” or even “voice” that are essential to the framing of the project of retrieving the above in the history of women's movements and their relation to the commercial press. Perhaps any study of women in the Middle East today needs to scrutinize the colonial underpinnings of the very project of recovering “voices of Iranian magazine readers” (p. 4). The colonial legacy of “uncovering” the women of the Orient is well documented by scholars such as Leila Abu-Lughod. The shadow of the colonial gaze still haunts studies that aspire to “reveal” the Iranian woman's life, aspirations, and resistance against the “conservative backward Oriental male counterpart.” The lack of engagement with these broad problematics, has thus compromised the book's initial postcolonial aspirations. Finally, the rather descriptive analysis of the process of the cultural production of ideal commercialized femininities mostly confirms previous historiographical studies of women's history in Iran, leaving the reader wondering about the critical possibilities that the “glocal” framework could offer if themes such as “translation” were to be approached as analytical tools. The described steady contestation between “traditional” ideas of femininity and “progressive modern” ones together with the uncritical offhand use of terms such as “conservative Muslim male-dominated society” (p. 271) versus “liberal” to refer to different cultural fronts, have simplified an analysis that initially set out to break away from essentialist West–East dichotomous understandings of modernity and modern cultural productions. As such, the book ultimately ends up re-inscribing the very colonial narratives that it aims to challenge. In the end we are left with a press that in effect was subordinated to the global capitalist consumerist market, survived on the objectification of women and commercialization of femininity, and experimented with ideas of modern womanhood within the cultural imperialist global discourse and the local maternalistic ideology of the state.
