Iran & Women

 

I read the book “Not Without My Daughter” many years ago.  It is about an American mother who was stuck along with her daughter in the county Iran with an abusive husband.  It is her story of trying to escape to return to America.  There were a lot of things in this book that were really hard to stomach involving cleanliness (or lack thereof) and food standards and practices.  It described a culture that was very different from American culture.   I read this book in early 1991 when I was in the first trimester of pregnancy with my first child and I was suffering from all day morning sickness, because I am just brilliant like that. 🤢  I didn’t know what the descriptions of life in Iran would be like until I was reading the book.  The only things that I have ever learned or know about the country of Iran, I learned from reading this book.  Above all I learned that it was very difficult to be a woman in Iran particularly for an American woman who was not indigenous to this culture.  I know I know, my thinking is ethnocentric and my opinion might be very different from that of Iranian women who are a part of the Iranian culture.  I don’t understand their point of view and their culture.  I can hear this correction in my head.  My perception is the only one that I have to rely on though and my perception from reading this book was that women at the time were not treated very well in Iran. 

I have no idea what the country of Iran is like now in the year 2026.  I have no idea how things may have evolved or changed over time.  I wonder what it is like now to be a woman in Iran?