Iranian Women you Should Know: Mahnaz Afkhami

November 27, 2015

6 min read

Iranian Women you Should Know: Mahnaz Afkhami

For more than 30 years, Mahnaz Afkhami has been a women rights activist in Iran. She is also the second Iranian woman to become a cabinet minister. But everything changed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which put an end to her activities in Iran. She was instead forced to go abroad where she continues to champion for women rights in Iran and other parts of the world.

Mahnaz Afkhami was born in 1941 in the southeastern province of Kerman to a landowning family. Her mother Ferdows Nafisi was one of the first three women to study at the University of Tehran. When she was 11, her parents divorced and her mother moved to the United States. A year later, she joined her mother in Seattle where she went to high school. Later, she studied psychology at the University of San Francisco and then English literature at the University of Colorado in Boulder, which she was able to pay for because she had saved up money through her teenage years working.

By the age of 17, she had already joined a trade union and successfully challenged an employer for temporarily firing and then rehiring her to avoid paying her for her holiday time. “The experience strengthened her belief in the importance of speaking up for one’s rights, accepting the possible consequences, and working in solidarity with others,” her website says.

Mahnaz met her husband Gholamreza Afkhami in the US. In 1967, the couple went back to Iran where they both began teaching at the National University of Iran. She was a professor of English literature, which is what sparked her passion for supporting women’s rights, while her husband taught Economics.

During her lectures, she discussed and debated the works of Western writers with her students. Her female students were interested in the freedoms enjoyed by Western women and eager to experience it for themselves. Often, the discussions continued after class was over.

In 1969, two years after returning to Iran, Mahnaz Afkhami founded the Association of Female University Students and became active in the Iranian women's movement. “My grandmother was my inspiration,” she says. “She was an independent woman who had lost her husband but she started a sewing shop in the closed and traditional society of Kerman. She had female employees, provided for her family and encouraged her daughter to get an education.”

In 1970, Mahnaz was appointed as secretary-general of the Women's Organization of Iran (WOI), a governmental organization that was founded in 1966. Before she joined the organization, the WOI was mostly concerned with women’s welfare. However, she expanded its line of work to include research about other issues affecting women and to fight against sexual discrimination.

In 1975, she was appointed as the Minister of Women's Affairs, making her only the second Iranian woman to achieve ministerial rank after Education Minister Farokhru Parsa - the Islamic Republic hanged Parsa in 1980. As a minister, she succeeded in lobbying for laws to be passed that granted women equal divorce rights, raised the minimum age of marriage for girls and gave women better maternity leave and childcare provisions. But after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many of these laws were nullified.

Afkhami remained in cabinet until the revolution started. When it happened, she was in New York negotiating with the United Nations to establish the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) in Iran. The new regime charged her with "corruption on earth” and “warring against God,” which carries a death sentence in the Islamic Republic. Therefore, she did not go back to Iran. She continues her work as a women’s rights activist abroad.

“Iranian women have been courageous and steadfast in their struggle to regain their rights and to achieve full equality,” she said in an interview with the American Public Broadcasting System (PBS). “Achievement of rights for them would require fundamental changes in the legal infrastructure of the country, including the constitution of the Islamic Republic. They are struggling to achieve these changes peacefully. I am confident that they will succeed.”

Throughout her career, Mahnaz has served on a number of boards, including Human Rights Watch’s Women's Rights Division, the International Museum of Women (since 2000), the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy (1999-2010), the International League for Human Rights (2000-2006), the Global Fund for Women (1998-2007) and Gender At Work (2003-2008).

She is also the founder and president of the Women's Learning Partnership (WLP), an international organization that endeavors to train women in over 40 countries to become leaders by seeking out and taking on decision-making roles in politics, business, and civil society.

“Fundamentalisms of all kinds are growing across the world, in both developed and developing countries, turning religion into regressive ideology,” she wrote in 2004. “Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly violent reaction to poverty, dictatorship, and despair. God is turned into an avenger in whose name all manners of atrocity are committed. Religious zeal makes democracy problematic because it turns every attempt at understanding and compromise—the hallmarks of democracy—into an evidentiary test of religious righteousness. In Muslim societies, women are particularly targeted because there is no better proof of return to a golden past than pushing women back onto their ‘natural’ place. Thus women’s position becomes the yardstick, the measure, for the success of the fundamentalist agenda.”

Mahnaz has also authored many essays and books on the subject of women, including the 2001 “Leading to Choices: A Leadership Training Handbook for Women,” which has been translated into 20 languages. In 1994, she also wrote “Women in Exile,” a portrait of 13 women who escaped oppression. Her other works include “Women in Iran from 1800 to the Islamic Republic” and “Women, State, and Society in Iran, 1963-1978.”

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