Iranian Women you Should Know: Ms. Doctor Kahal

September 11, 2015

6 min read

The cover of Danesh, the first magazine for women in Iran

Global and Iranian history are both closely intertwined with the lives and destinies of prominent figures. Every one of them has laid a brick on history’s wall, sometimes paying the price with their lives, men and women alike. Women have been especially influential in the past 200 years, writing much of contemporary Iranian history.

In Iran, women have increased public awareness about gender discrimination, raised the profile of and improved women’s rights, fought for literacy among women, and promoted the social status of women by counteracting religious pressures, participating in scientific projects, being involved in politics, influencing music, cinema... And so the list goes on.

This series aims to celebrate these renowned and respected Iranian women. They are women who represent the millions of women that influence their families and societies on a daily basis. Not all of the people profiled in the series are endorsed by IranWire, but their influence and impact cannot be overlooked. The articles are biographical stories that consider the lives of influential women in Iran.

IranWire readers are invited to send in suggestions for how we might expand the series. Contact IranWire via email ([email protected]), on Facebook, or by tweeting us.

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An Iranian citizen journalist, who writes under a pseudonym to protect her identity, wrote the following article on the ground inside Iran.

She was the first Iranian female doctor and published the first magazine for women. She signed her name “Ms. Doctor Kahal.” But, surprisingly, very little is known about her life or identity — or even what her full name was. A faded photograph of her with her son offers a glimpse of her life.

Iranian Women you Should Know: Ms. Doctor Kahal

Dr Kahal was born during the reign of the 19th-century king Naser al-Din Shah Qajar. Her pioneering role was closely tied to the changes that were starting to take shape in Iran.

Naser al-Din Shah had more than 80 wives in his lifetime and frowned upon education for women. If a wife of his was able to read or write, she would carefully hide it from the king. But in the last years of his reign, the ground started to shift from beneath him. It started in 1890 when he granted a 50-year monopoly on tobacco trade to Great Britain. In a widespread protest movement supported by the religious leadership, people boycotted tobacco and even the king’s wives stopped smoking — the first time in recorded history that Iranian women played a prominent role in social change. Naser al-Din Shah surrendered and revoked the concession, to the detriment of his treasury.

Western ideas continued to infiltrate into Iran and the perception that the king and his government did not care about the Iranian people persisted and grew. In May 1896, Naser al-Din Shah was assassinated. The revolutionary who killed him later said, “I fired a shot heard by tyrants around the world.”

In 1905, Naser al-Din Shah’s ageing successor, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah, gave in to constitutional revolutionaries and allowed the first Iranian parliament to be established. Women played a role in the revolution, standing side by side with men, but they were denied the right to vote, even though Article 8 of the 1906 constitution declared that every Iranian was equal before the law.

By denying representation to half of the population, by leaving the traditional subservient role of women untouched and by refusing to address issues such as polygamy, the Constitutional Revolution planted the seeds of a distinctive women’s rights consciousness, if not a movement.

Ms. Doctor Kahal’s weekly, Danesh (“Knowledge”), first appeared in 1910, four years after the constitution was signed. Danesh was not a confrontational publication. Instead, it tried to appeal to reason and the better sides of men, who were the undisputed masters of society at the time. In its first editorial it argued that all human beings, whether boys or girls, are educated by their mothers in their formative years. If mothers are ignorant, it said, all children would suffer. The editorial promised that in each issue it would offer women readers articles that would expand their knowledge, know-how and virtue.

The weekly stayed away from political subjects or topics that might lead to strong reactions from traditionalists, although it published articles about abandoned children and children born out of wedlock, harassment of women in the street and the slave-like conditions for women after marriage. Its emphasis was on the health of women and children, in line with Dr Kahal’s profession as a doctor.

Kahal was the daughter of Mohammad Hakim-Bashi, a physician and a convert to Islam who lived in Hamedan, the ancient Ecbatana. It is not clear what religion he converted from, but Hamedan is home to the tomb of Esther and Mordechai and was home to a small Jewish community. Since a proportionally high number of Iranian Jews were physicians, it is very likely that he belonged to their community.

The family moved to Tehran and Kahal studied with Christian missionaries. It is likely the missionaries were American or English because Kahal later used English terms in her articles for the magazine, rather than French ones, at a time when French was the foreign language of choice for educated Iranians, especially for medical doctors. She also used Fahrenheit instead of centigrade when writing about and explaining incubators.

Until 1934 when Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi king, established the first modern medical school in Iran, the only way to become a medical doctor was the same as it had been for millennia: an apprenticeship with an established physician. This is what Kahal did. She studied with her father and later with her husband, who appears to have also supported her in her publishing venture. She chose to specialize as an eye doctor for women and read available Western medical journals extensively, as evidenced in her articles in Danesh.

The weekly, an eight-page magazine, was published for only 30 weeks. Like almost everything else about her, the reason for the short publication period is not known, but popular speculation is that it ran out of money. It was published at a time when most Iranian women, except the privileged ones, were not fully conversant with reading, when distribution channels for publications were inefficient or non-existent, and when printing was a costly enterprise. It was not for lack of trying, though: Danesh sold advertising space to fund itself, from adverts for medications and musical instruments to imported feminine products and the services of “a lady American doctor” who lived in Tehran and offered specialist expertise for her female patients.

In a society of women deprived from education, Ms. Doctor Kahal believed that education and knowledge were the best chance for women to overcome discrimination and to better their lot. Even when writing about medicine, she did not forget to remind her readers that women were equal to men. In an article about radiology, she emphasized that this modern wonder owed its existence to Madam Curie, “a French woman scientist” which proved that “women are capable of anything and everything.”

Tahereh Taslimi, Citizen Journalist

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