“Becoming Visible”: Civil Society of Modern Iran in the Focus of Gender Discussion

In this study the author examines the main stages and social characteristics of the women's rights movement in republican Iran, which has generated an active controversy between the authorities and the society over the last three decades. This polemic disagreement was triggered by the legal status of the Iranian woman enshrined in the Constitution. Human rights activists with significant religious and social status, insisting on the right of Muslim women to be represented in the highest echelons of state power, were the first to join the debate. At the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, this initiative was taken up by secular activists advocating civil and individual rights for Iranian women. All have made extensive use of a specialised, women-oriented press and, since the early 2000s, the Internet and social media, as well as NPOs/NGOs existing in different regions of the country, in their struggle. Acting along the same lines of the women's rights movement, secular and religious activists represent autonomous segments of civil society. The content of the print and electronic media, television programmes and literary works, used for the first time as a source for the study, forms the basis of the research.