Farah

Abstract

Abstract The first years after Iran’s Revolution were years of terror, as it took Iranians and people around the world time to fully realize what the Revolution’s leaders had in mind: to govern not only people’s public lives but their private lives as well. The government was obsessed with women and their role in society. To the clerics, Farrokhroo Parsa, Minister of Education, represented the antithesis of a woman’s societal role; her trial gave the revolutionaries their first major opportunity to demonstrate their view of “good” and “evil” with regards to women. Arrested for “prostitution and warring with God,” the evidence against her consisted of school textbooks that presented a positive image of working women and a memo that freed teachers and students from covering their hair at school—projects she had worked on with the author. The revolutionary government executed Mrs. Parsa because her political role, by being public and visible, was the same as prostitution. The author learned that her sister Farah, still in Iran, was in hiding and needed to leave. The author arranged for her and her child to cross the border on horseback and come to the US. After a show trial, Farah’s husband was executed.