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

Descripción del proyecto

Rivalidades, exilio y política feminista en Irán durante la Guerra Fría

En los estudios recientes se reconoce el papel de las mujeres en los movimientos socialistas, pero a menudo se pasan por alto los conflictos feministas internos. En Irán, la política feminista se desarrolló en el siglo XIX y se intensificó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, lo que dio lugar a tensiones e iniciativas contrapuestas tras el golpe de Estado de 1953. Con el apoyo de las Acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, el equipo del proyecto Women-Socialist redefinirá la historia de las mujeres durante la Guerra Fría al explorar las rivalidades y los conflictos que dieron forma a los movimientos de mujeres en los distintos bloques geopolíticos. Al reconstruir estas historias, en el proyecto se sacará a la luz un capítulo perdido de esta época, se pondrá de relieve el activismo en el exilio en la historia moderna de Irán y se establecerá un marco comparativo para los movimientos de mujeres más allá de las divisiones entre Oriente y Occidente y entre el Norte y el Sur.

Objetivo

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.