I am proud and honored to accept this award on behalf of the Iranian Women’s Movement. It is a special honor to receive the award from the right honorable Kim Campbell whose life’s work and her personal conduct represent all that I and scores of others around the world aspire to. I am thankful to…
Tag: Iranian Revolution
Learning Center Conducts Workshops on Empowerment of Women
VOA news interviews Mahnaz Afkhami on her work empowering women to be leaders through the Women’s Learning Partnership. In the article, Afkhami discusses the transnational nature of the partnership, the importance of horizontal leadership, and the need to provide women with a comprehensive set of skills to succeed.
A Beaten Path
At the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iran was a society organized on precepts that for centuries has defined the subordinate position of women as the natural order of things. The nascent civil society faced the issue of women mostly as a problem between traditionalism and modernism. But as the moderns grew in…
‘I Was Iran’s Last Woman Minister’
In an interview with the BBC World Service, Mahnaz Afkhami discusses her role as Minister of Women’s Affairs in Iran, Farrokhroo Parsa, and the future of women in Iran. “I have no doubt that women are going to win…history is moving in a different direction,” says Afkhami.
Women, Rights, and Security in Iran
Women in Iran must be free to choose what to think, what to say, what to do, and, of course, how to relate, or not to relate, to God In the past, human security was defined mainly in terms of state security. A half-century of international dialogue on rights, development, and peace, however, has led…
VOA Roundtable: Discriminatory Laws against Women in Iran (in Persian)
Following a violent crackdown of women’s peaceful protests in Tehran, VOA Persian aired a program on discriminatory laws against women under the Islamic Republic regime, including a Q and A with callers from all over the world with Mahnaz Afkhami as its guest. Afkhami pointed out that Iranian women had never faced such violence or…
Searching for the Sources of the Self
In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1989) Charles Taylor introduces the concept of identity as follows: “…the question is often spontaneously phrased by people in the form: Who am I? But this can’t necessarily be answered by giving name and genealogy. What does answer this question for us…
At the Crossroads of Tradition & Modernity: Personal Reflection
I have spent most of my adult life defending and promoting women’s human rights. I came to this field through English literature, largely innocent of theories of feminism. By the time I encountered these theories formally in the 1970s as secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI), I had already experienced their essence…