21 June :With all the attention that the Iranian election protests are getting, some focus is being drawn to an incredibly important issue: women’s rights .Right now, women in Iran are legally second-class citizens. An NPR segment talking about recent women’s protests said that women are considered one-half of men. A woman’s life is valued at half of a man’s and her testimony in court is only worth half of what a man’s is.
This also means that women have less say in cases of inheritance, divorce and custody.But Iranian women are sick of the inequality and they have been demonstrating. A few days before the election hundreds of women marched through Tehran protesting gender discrimination. Ever since the contest, women have been marching alongside men in droves to protest the results.
The feminist movement is nothing new, says journalist Roya Hakakian in an interview with Forbes. She left the country at 18 and hasn’t been back, but remembers the revolution of the late 1970s, and watched the women’s movement grow from afar through the 1990s. Hakakian said that Zahra Rahnavard, wife of the (allegedly) defeated presidential challenger Mir Hossein Moussavi, has been instrumental in rallying the most recent activity of Iranian feminists. CNN identified Rahnavard as ‘much-admired academic’ who wants to reform civil and family laws.
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