Women's Center

The Women’s Center promotes women’s studies and women’s human rights in the context of Iranian contemporary history and politics. The center has a library, a resource and data bank, films, audiocassettes, oral histories, slides and biographies of Iranian artists, and a collection of primary sources. To facilitate and encourage research on the past, present and future of Iranian women, we have compiled a rich collection of material, including interviews with women from many walks of life.

The Women’s Center organizes seminars and conferences on women's issues and provides outlets for scholars and feminists to publish their research on Iranian women.

Goals

A goal of the Center is to help further the development of theoretical and practical knowledge that will lead to a better understanding of the condition of women in Iran and other Muslim societies. The Center organized a conference on women in contemporary Iran, which led to the publication of In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Postrevolutionary Iran, a collection of scholarly articles edited by Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl (Syracuse University Press, 1994). In the same year, the Center published Women and the Law in Iran (1967-1978), and began preparing an anthology of classic feminist writings in Persian. See Excerpts.

Another focus of the Center is to extend contact with women in Iran in order to expand its communication base, collect material for its research base and to disseminate its publications. This effort has been largely successful with the Center’s increasing involvement in bringing women from Iran to speak on women’s issues particularly human rights.

Partnerships

The Women's Center is closely cooperating with the Women’s Learning Partnership for Right, Development and Peace, an international women's rights organization, of which Mahnaz Afkhami, Women’s Center’s director, is president. The Center cooperates also with a variety of institutions interested in women’s issues to promote women’s human rights in Iran, including women’s studies departments in the US and elsewhere, and women NGOs in US, most Muslim countries, and several non-Muslim countries. For example, on May 11, 2000, the Women's Center the Women's Learning Partnership in cooperation with the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress presented "Life Lines: The Literature of Women's Human Rights." The program, featuring Mahnaz Afkhami (Iran), Marjorie Agosin (Chile), Samar Attar (Syria), Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana), Carolyn Forche (El Salvador), and Grace Paley (USA), was held at the James Madison Memorial Building of the Library of Congress.