The ‘New Woman’ of Weimar Germany in the imaginations of young Iranian intellectuals

Abstract

ABSTRACT By examining the writings of young Iranian students in Berlin, this paper argues that the ‘New Woman’ of Weimar Germany was a transnational creation, imagined as the personification of modernity, and who served as a discursive trope for the aspirations and anxieties of interwar intellectuals in a rapidly changing global order. A key aim of this article is to highlight the simultaneity of changing perspectives toward women among both European and Middle Eastern intellectuals during the interwar period, and to frame their understanding of modernity within discourses of youth and generational conflict. In their push for reform in Iranian society, Iranian intellectuals transformed the Weimar ‘New Woman’ into a symbol for European modernity as a whole. This constructed, archetypal personification of modernity was decontextualized from the contested and politically charged debates in Germany on the rights and roles of women in society.