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Hamideh Sedghi writes that in Iran, both "secular and religious states regulated women's lives and mobilized them in different ways for different ends" (p. 271). Gender was a central concern of both the state and its sometime collaborators, sometime enemies, the clergy. And in this dispute, women were not merely the objects of an argument but exercised their own agency in choosing paths, however constrained.
Sedghi uses the veil as both an actual and metaphoric representation of the three-cornered relationship of women, clergy, and the state in Iran during the periods of veiling at the end of the Qajar dynasty and the Constitutional Revolution, of unveiling after Reza Shah took power and began his project of authoritarian modernization, and of reveiling when the Pahlavi dynasty was overthrown and the Islamic Republic replaced the Shah.
Thus, in the constitutional period, Sedghi recounts the activities of secret societies of upper-class women and the schools and journals they established in their attempt to take advantage of the winds of change. Under the Pahlavis, women's responses to an autocratic state were to an extent preempted, and to a lesser extent facilitated, by state feminism, but once again, there was some success in gaining autonomy...