by AMY GUTTMAN
My guide Farah, a tall, slender woman in her late 30s, wears jeans and a simple manteau – the mandatory robe women must wear in public, covering neck to knee. Her long, straight black hair is tucked beneath her headscarf, but visible as it coils at her neck.
We’re heading to Tajrish Bazaar, in north Tehran, to explore 10 different kinds of dried plums, and other goodies. We choose the metro – Farah for its convenience, and I, for a chance to go underground in Tehran, because it provides a picture of the city most tourists never see.
It’s mid-morning. Women and men sit separately, but the rule relaxes during busy times, like now. We, along with a few other women, clasp our hands around a pole, standing next to men, young and old in the air-conditioned, modern carriage. Two stops later, and about 20 commuters fewer, segregation happens naturally – women at one end, men at the other, still within view, but separate.
A handful of fashionable girls admire their own reflections in the window. They wear tight leggings under their brightly coloured robes, pushing back headscarves and boundaries. We find seats next to a group of conservative women dressed in black cloaks called chador. They’re nothing like the other women I have met, a sisterhood of outspoken opinions, most of them liberal.
…
Farah talks of the major changes Iranian women have experienced in the last 30 years, while I imagine the morning commute back home… a sea of heads face-down in tablets, others dozing to iTunes lullabies. On Tehran’s metro, I’m getting a spontaneous, unprompted lesson about gender equality in Iran.
Farah tells me it all began, not with imports from the West, but with the 1979 revolution. A confluence of access, education and a bad economy created a society where women now have independence, careers and husbands happy to help around the house with chores and children.
The revolution, Farah says, was very good for women.
“The revolutionists supported women coming out of their homes to demonstrate. They used women to show their strength, but they never anticipated these women also believed in their right to exist outside the home,” Farah remembers.
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