“Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do”: Gender and the Affects of Solidarity in the U.S. Iranian Student Movement, 1961–1979

Abstract

����� ��� The gender politics of anticolonial revolutions, and the new nation-states that emerged in their wake, have been at the center of postcolonial and transnational feminist critiques of nationalism and patriarchy. While significant scholarship exists on women and the Iranian Revolution, scant attention has thus far been paid to the position of women in the diasporic wing of the revolutionary movement—whether to the prevailing theories of women’s oppression and liberation or to how those theories shaped the lived experiences of the women and men involved. From 1961 to 1979, while the United States flooded Iran with military and economic aid—and Iran became a stalwart defender of U.S. interests in the region—the Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU) organized thousands of Iranian foreign students throughout Europe and North America to undermine this “special relationship.” According to historian Afshin Matin-asgari, the Confederation was “the most active and persistent force of opposition to the Shah’s regime during the two decades prior to the 1978–79 Revolution” (2002, 1). CISNU’s U.S. affiliate, the Iranian Students Association (ISA), grew in tandem with the overall increase in the foreign student population, and anti-Shah sentiment became dominant even among those students who did not formally join the organization. 1 ISA chapters sprang up wherever Iranian students were enrolled, with the largest and most active located in northern and southern California, Texas/Oklahoma, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago. Several thousand students participated in ISA demonstrations and annual conventions, while hundreds devoted themselves “full time” to building the movement. 2 For