Influential Iranian Women: Pari Mohammad-Zadeh Omid (1939-1996)

Her name was Pari and she was born in the holy city of Mashhad in northeastern Iran. She showed little interest in school – instead she fantasised of becoming a pilot. Fate led her to the road instead: she became the first Iranian woman to receive a license to drive heavy goods vehicles and to make her living driving these trucks across the country.

Pari Mohammad-Zadeh, known as “Ms. Pari,” remained the only Iranian woman with such a license for some time.

Pari was born on August 7, 1939, to a middle-class family in central Mashhad. Her father Hasan was an electrician and her mother Fatemeh a homemaker. They encouraged Pari to get an education; but, it wasn’t for her. Pari dropped out of high school after squeezing through the third year with low grades.

Girls married young in those days. Pari married Nasser Khoshdel Nezamian, an electrician and driver, after she left school in 1954 at the age of 15. Nasser, born in 1932, also in Mashhad, was seven years her senior. He had spent some school years in Tehran but also dropped out to begin working. He met and married Pari during his military service. The couple had had three boys and three girls.

When Nasser learned of Ms. Pari’s interest in driving, he supported her goal of getting a license. Ms. Pari had small children to care for but she also often accompanied her husband, during his work as an electrician, learning from him and helping him.

“Before I became a truck driver, I was a homemaker and my husband wired buildings for electricity,” she once said in an interview. “Sometimes I wore a work outfit and helped him in his electrical work. I was never quite happy with being a homemaker and always thought that, besides housekeeping and raising children, I could also have a job outside my home and use my abilities for the benefit of society and the family finances. I believe that confining women to the home is a traditional constraint that belongs to a hundred years ago. In today’s and tomorrow’s society, it seems that a stay-at-home woman is not faithful to all her social obligations.”

The family later moved to Khorramshahr in the southwest province of Khuzestan. Iran’s imports were  increasing and the couple learned that, as a result the shortage of heavy truck drivers in Iran, the authorities planned to bring qualified drivers from Turkey, South Korea and the Philippines. Ms. Pari and her husband decided to join this essential workforce.

Ms. Pari and her husband registered with the Khorramshahr traffic police and each took a driving test. “When my husband and I registered to receive the heavy goods vehicle license, little by little, I came to believe that it was really happening,” she said in the interview. “We practiced. My husband was my real teacher and he taught me all the skills and techniques. We went to take our tests together. I went first; and at first, the traffic police officer couldn’t believe it, but I passed the test. More than anything else, I was happy to see that a woman could drive a truck in the desert. I don’t believe that there is any job in the world that a woman cannot do.”

“Then it was my husband’s turn to take the test,” Ms. Pari added. “He was so excited that I had passed that he rushed through his own test and forgot to show he could use the emergency brake. He failed the test and had to take it again a month later to get his license. I am his senior by one month!”

The couple then got their own trailer. “After I got my license, I decided to benefit from it by any means I could,” Ms. Pari said. “A few months later, we used our little savings and borrowed from our friends, to buy an eighteen-wheel trailer for 550,000 tomans. We started working and we paid instalments of 11,000 tomans a month for the trailer. My husband and I are colleagues, friends and partners. We share both our lives and our truck.”

Ms. Pari’s wish to become a pilot never went away. But she worked as a truck driver for the rest of her life. She would sometimes drive for 12 straight hours, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of her husband. For a long time she remained Iran’s only female truck driver.

On one occasion, when Ms. Pari had stopped to fuel the truck, two men who saw her said she was probably not Iranian because Iranian women were not “brave enough” to drive trucks across the country. “I am an Iranian woman,” she told them. “Brothers: Do you think Iranian women are less sensible, courageous and capable than European women?”

Ms. Pari and her husband, Nasser, wanted to expand their business with a second trailer. But the accidents of life had something else in store. One of these accidents happened in Salafchegan in Qom province, south of Tehran.

“We were coming from Qom, carrying steel beams. Mr. Nasser was ahead of me. I made a turn at high speed, 90 or 100 kilometers per hour, because I had suddenly seen a dark shape in the middle of the road. I switched on the high-beam lights: it was a truck with a burst tire and the driver had left the vehicle without turning on warning lights. I turned left and saw a minibus approaching fast. I blinked the lights but the driver didn’t see and kept coming. I turned right, to leave the road, but the roadside was too low. I was sure a steel beam would slide off my trailer and chop off my head. But I had no choice. God forbid, if I had locked horns with the minibus, 10 or 20 people would have died. I closed my eyes, appealed to Imam Ali, rammed the truck and lost consciousness.”

The truck was destroyed. Ms. Pari survived.

In the 1980s, she served Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. Ms. Pari and her husband carried equipment, supplies and even armaments to the war zone. “We have been to the front together 10 times. We worked amid bombs and bullets and rockets for months. We were together everywhere, in Khorramshahr, Hoveyzeh and other fronts. I was next to my compatriots on the frontlines many times. Being a man or a woman never made a difference in carrying supplies for the war.”

But despite her service, the Islamic Republic refused to give her the International Driving Permit needed to carry cargo across Iran’s borders. Ms. Pari’s request was filed by Iran Container Transportation Co. in 1986, but passport agency officials dragged their feet, saying, “In the Islamic Republic of Iran, higher-ups must allow a female driver to travel,” later adding the argument that Ms. Pari’s license was “not compatible with the principles of the Islamic Republic.”

Ms. Pari, the lone ranger of Iranian highways and byways, died from cancer on November 24, 1996, and was buried at Mashhad’s Khaj-e Rabi Cemetery. Born in one of Iran’s most religious and conservative cities, she paved the way for other Iranian women to show the ruling patriarchy that “there is nothing that an Iranian woman cannot do.”