In a challenging and authoritative analysis, Parvin Paidar considers how Iranian women have been affected, and their position redefined, by the political transformations of twentieth-century Iran.

In a challenging and authoritative analysis of the role of Iranian women in the political process, Parvin Paidar considers the ways they have been affected by the evolutionary and revolutionary transformations of twentieth-century Iran. In so doing, she demonstrates how political reorganisation has of necessity redefined the position of women, and that, contrary to the view of conventional scholarship, gender issues are fundamental to the political process in contemporary Iran. The implications of the study bear on the broader issues of women in the Middle East and the developing countries generally.

Introduction: Marginalisation of gender and approaches to women in Middle Eastern studies
Part I. The Discourse of Modernity: 1. Social diversity on women's issues in nineteenth-century Iran
2. Women and the ear of constitutionalism
3. Women and the era of nation building
4. Women and the era of nationalism
5. Women and the era of modernisation
Part II. The Discourse of Revolution: 6. Gender as a revolutionary discourse
7. Women and the political transition from modernisation to Islamisation
Part III. The Discourse of Islamisation: 8. The Islamic construction of family
9. Women and national participation in the Islamic Republic
10. Policing the family
Conclusion.