Project description
Rivalries, exile, and feminist politics in Iran during the Cold War
Recent scholarship recognises the role of women in socialist movements but often ignores internal feminist conflicts. In Iran, feminist politics developed in the 19th century and intensified during World War Two, leading to tensions and competing initiatives after the 1953 coup. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the Women-Socialist project will reshape Cold War women’s history by exploring the rivalries and conflicts that shaped women’s movements across geopolitical blocs. By reconstructing these histories, the project will uncover a missing chapter of this era, highlight exile activism in modern Iranian history, and establish a comparative framework for women’s movements beyond East-West and North-South divides.
Objective
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.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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1202 Geneve
Switzerland
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