Iranian Women’s Journalism 1906-1928

Iranian Women’s Journalism 1906-1928: Motherhood and National Duty in the Early Women’s Press

Dr. Shadi Ghazimoradi

Abstract
This paper explores the ways that the early women’s journals of Constitutional Iran legitimized women’s rights to publication and eventually paved the way for women’s access to unprecedented educational and occupational opportunities by adopting elements of Iran’s nationalist discourse and emphasizing the role that women would play in the modernization of the nation and the rejuvenation of the Iranian people. The notion of educated motherhood allowed female journalists to create a narrative of women’s contributions to Iranian society at a critical moment in its history; by grounding their advocacy of women’s education in the argument that the advancement of the nation would only be possible under the care of capable mothers, early women’s journals opened the door for women to engage – albeit cautiously and in the guise of ‘female’ topics – in the sociopolitical conversations of the time.

Bio
Shadi Ghazimoradi completed her doctoral studies in English Literature at Queen’s University. Her doctoral dissertation, which she defended in September 2019, explores the role that discourses of nationalism and maternalism played in the formation of early women’s rights movements in Britain and Iran, and examines the ways that early twentieth-century Iranian women’s writing deployed and reshaped the life narrative form to suit the social milieu of the times.