A RESPONSE TO FIROOZEH KASHANI-SABET'S REVIEW OF THE MAKING OF THE MODERN IRANIAN WOMAN: GENDER, STATE POLICY, AND POPULAR CULTURE, 1865–1946 (IJMES 38 [2006]: 142–44)

Although I am grateful for Professor Kashani-Sabet's conclusion that my efforts are a "noteworthy addition to the literature on women in modern Iran," I believe that her specific dissents from my argument are problematic because at no point does she articulate the thesis of the book: that the "women's awakening" policies of the Pahlavi state from 1936 to 1941 were informed conceptually by decades of public discussion regarding the "woman question" (which are well-recorded in the press). Furthermore, by stretching the definition of male guardianship, the "women's awakening" project helped to set the conceptual stage for the emergence of equal-rights feminism in Iranian public discourse in the 1940s. She argues that my analysis is not sufficiently tethered to "official nationalism" or "other monumental cultural shifts." This is a strange way to characterize a study that locates a state feminism project in broader cultural trends. Indeed, such an assertion is only possible if one neglects mention of my discussion of "modern Iranian womanhood" as a cultural idea--before, during, and after the nahzat-i banuvan of 1936-41. The nationalist aspect of "the woman question" flowed quite organically from the sources, and my treatment of nationalism in the book reflects that. Thus, nationalism is most visible in discussions of marriage, education, the veil, and women's suffrage and other issues as they were engaged in the course of the period under study. I stand by that analytical choice and look forward to seeing how others may make use of the results in theorizing about the development of nationalism (Professor Kashani-Sabet's own work on Iranian frontiers and Afsaneh Najmabadi's work on the "erotic va[tdotu ]an" come to mind as points of departure). [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]