"The grim truth is that women who are struggling to advance human rights and create secular, pluralistic, democratic societies, face grave challenges rooted in tradition and history. Traditional social and cultural norms have relegated Middle Eastern women and girls to a private space, and they often lack the social, economic, and political power they need to overcome antagonistic groups and regressive policy," Afkhami stated as a witness testifying at the hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operation and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women’s Issues and Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Central Asia Affairs spotlighting Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
Over the past two months protest movements have transformed the face of governments across the Middle East and North Africa. As the upheaval continues, we examine the role of women in these demonstrations, and how new regimes will affect women's rights throughout the region. Will they bring greater freedoms, or impose further constraints?
NPR KQED Radio / By Michael Krasny / Listen
New America Media / By Sandip Roy / Listen
A year after the controversial elections in Iran, what is the status of the opposition movement? Mahnaz Afkahmi speaks of the women who were at the forefront of protests, and of the regime's attempt to behead the democratic movement. Indeed almost all activists from the June 2009 protests have been imprisoned, harassed, or tortured. Those who were released from prison and allowed to travel were then often tried in absentia and heavily sentenced, effectively condemning them to exile.
VOA News / By Judith Latham / Listen
One way the One Million Signatures Campaign has overcome those barriers is by reaching out to women through “one-on-one” contact. Afkhami said women in the campaign, who go into private homes as well as to places where women gather, try to get other women to sign on to the petition for change. “But if they don’t, they leave the information with them because the aim is to get one million activists, not so much one million signatures,” she said.
PRI's The World / By Marco Werman / Listen
Iran’s authorities recently confiscated Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel Peace prize medal. Activists say the move against the Iranian human rights lawyer exemplifies Tehran’s hostility toward women. Mahnaz Afkhami was the Minister for Women’s Affairs in Iran before the 1979 revolution. She now lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Afkhami wrote the foreword to a new book called Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality. Anchor Marco Werman talks with Afkhami about the women’s movement in Iran and the ‘One Million Signatures’ campaign.
Washington TV / By Amir Irani-Tehrani
Democracy Digest / By David Lowe
The volume is the second in a series of translations brought forth by the Women’s Learning Partnership (WLP), an international organization that actively promotes the rights of women in developing societies. As the WLP’s founder and president Mahnaz Afkhami notes, “In the end, the simple courage and perseverance of women whose peaceful signature-gathering is condemned as a crime against the state reminds us that ideas and beliefs cannot be silenced.”
In Iranian Women's One Million Signatures: Campaign for Equality The Inside Story by Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani / Women's Learning Partnership Translation Series
Iran's One Million Signatures Campaign for the Reform of Discriminatory Laws is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is democratic, nonhierarchical, open, and evolving in a polity that is none of those things. The campaign brings to mind the image of raindrops falling, forming rivulets, and then converging on an ever-larger scale until they become a river. The genius of the movement lies in its capacity to connect its members’ thoughts and deeds in ways that adapt and change as conditions require. The context is on the one hand the clash between an Iranian civil society with a century-old record of growing sophistication and important roles for women, and on the other an archaic legal...
The Historian / Book Review by Jonathan G. Katz
The ten chapters of this book, a sequel to the editors' Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800, reflect several disciplinary approaches. Historians Guity Nashat and Shireen Mahdavi deal with royal marriage and European contacts during the Qajar period. Mansoureh Ettehadieh discusses the participation of women in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the faltering gains made during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Mahnaz Afkhami, a former secretary-general of the Women's Organization of Iran, outlines the work of the semiofficial social service agency during the last decade of the Pahlavi period. Haleh Esfandiari examines the role of women parliamentarians both before and after the Islamic revolution.
گفتگو با مهناز افخمی بمناسبت درگذشت بتی فريدن، فعال حقوق زنان آمريک (VOA Persian)
On the passing of Betty Friedan, Mahnaz Afkhami looks back on Betty Friedan's visit to Iran in 1974, and their subsequent work together in the United States.
Wednesday, November 2, 2011