Rewriting Cold War Women’s Histories: Iranian Feminist–Socialist Entanglements in Global Decolonial Struggles

Projektbeschreibung

Rivalitäten, Exil und feministische Politik im Iran zur Zeit des Kalten Krieges

Obgleich die jüngste Forschung die Rolle der Frauen in sozialistischen Bewegungen würdigt, lässt sie interne feministische Konflikte oft außer Acht. Im Iran entwickelte sich die feministische Politik im 19. Jahrhundert und verstärkte sich während des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Nach dem Staatsstreich von 1953 führte dies zu Spannungen und konkurrierenden Initiativen. Unterstützt über die Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Maßnahmen wird das Projekt Women-Socialist die Frauengeschichte des Kalten Krieges neu beleuchten. Zu diesem Zweck untersucht es die Rivalitäten und Konflikte, welche die Frauenbewegungen über geopolitische Blöcke hinweg geprägt haben. Indem es diese Geschichten rekonstruiert, wird das Projekt ein fehlendes Kapitel dieser Epoche aufdecken, den Aktivismus im Exil in der modernen iranischen Geschichte hervorheben und einen vergleichenden Rahmen für Frauenbewegungen jenseits der Ost-West- und Nord-Süd-Gefälle schaffen.

Ziel

This project reconfigures Cold War women’s history by examining a neglected dimension in dominant historiographies: the rivalries, conflicts, and contested visions that shaped women’s movements across geopolitical blocs. While recent scholarship has moved beyond Cold War liberal framings to recognize the agency of socialist and Global South women, it has largely emphasized solidarities, overlooking how fractures also generated new feminist discourses and practices. The Iranian case brings this dynamic into sharp relief. Since the nineteenth century, Iranian women developed a distinctive feminist politics, which expanded during WWII when Allied occupation of Iran in 1941 opened space for socialist and secular currents. The Women’s Democratic Organization of the Tudeh Party, founded in 1942, was a turning point: it institutionalized socialist-feminist activism, advanced labor, education, and legal reforms, and linked Iranian women to global communist networks. The 1953 coup, seen as a Western intervention, forced political repression and exile. The Tudeh party and its women organization, after a short stay in the USSR, reorganized in East Germany in 1957, integrating into Eastern bloc women’s networks. Meanwhile, from 1960, the Confederation of Iranian Students (CISNU) emerged in Western Europe, where women played leading roles, connecting with student, feminist, and decolonial movements across Europe, North America, and the Global South. By the 1960s, disputes between CISNU activists and Tudeh representatives— with the woman question as a site of conflict—fractured the movement, producing rival socialist-feminist projects that both reflected and reshaped Cold War divides. By reconstructing these histories and situating them within global debates, the project recovers a missing chapter of Cold War women history, embeds exile activism within modern Iranian history, and establishes a comparative framework for women’s movements beyond East/West and North/South binaries.