SELLING AND SAVING “MOTHER IRAN”: GENDER AND THE IRANIAN PRESS IN THE 1940S

The sensational nature of the Iranian press in the 1940s has been largely understood in political terms. In September 1941, occupying Allied armies forced Reza Shah Pahlavi (1879–1944, r. 1925–41) into exile, ending his tyrannical “twenty years” and unleashing a variety of political forces which vied with each other for public support in the press.3 The presence of Allied censors notwithstanding, so the argument goes, the Iranian press was momentarily free from effective government censorship—though not from the recurring cycle of censorship that has dominated scholarly interest in the Iranian press.4 But a closer look at the often violent and sexual political discourse in the Iranian press raises questions less about Iran's political history than about its cultural and economic history. Why was the content of the press so graphic in the 1940s? What economic and cultural trends sustained such content once it had been provoked by political events? How much did the overt sexuality of political discourse confirm or modify notions of gender in Iranian culture?