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Women Missing in Oral History of Revolution
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The role women played in the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution is largely overlooked by oral history researchers of the contemporary era. In 2006 “Imam Khomeini Works Preservation and Publication Institute” has undertaken an initiative to collect the stories of women who played a part in the revolution.
Historian Faezeh Tavakoli has presented a report over the project and its achievements since it was started in 2006. The following outlines Tavakoli's report:
The history of women in the Islamic Revolution has been neglected to a large extent and only a few works in this regard have been released with focus on a few major female activists and revolutionaries. In Iran, most of the historical reviews are focused on the leading classes of the society while in oral history, the focus is chiefly aimed at reviewing and recording the history of all social classes especially ordinary people and the masses including women, clerics and workers who would have otherwise no space for airing their stories.
The project has in fact opened up a new page in the historical studies of the revolution by putting women in the limelight. The project was meant to focus on women who were active prior to the victory of the revolution in 1979 in various areas of politics and society and those who did groundbreaking works in the years that followed the revolution.
In its first phase, over 30 women, including political detainees of the shah time, were interviewed for the purposes of the project. A book is now being published in 500 pages covering the interviews. In the second phase of the project, preservation and recording the stories was focused primarily.
One reason to the fact that the number of works published about female activists in the revolution is fewer than those published for men is that male figures outnumbered women in the revolution, however, at least 500 to 600 female figures have been identified to have played a direct and explicit role in the victory of the revolution whose roles are still to be fathomed out by oral history researchers. Just to name a few: Fatemeh Rakei (revolutionary poetess), Zahra Mirkhani (political detainee), Aktar Roudbari (political detainee), Zahra Jazayeri (political detainee), etc.
Translated by: Abbas Hajihashemi
Source:
http://www.mehrnews.com/news/2482046
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