About Women's World (Iranian magazine)

Women's World (Iranian magazine)

Women's World, in Persian Jahan-e Zanan, meaning Women's World, was a Persian-language women's magazine dedicated to women's rights and education. It was first published in Mashhad in 1920 by FakhrAfagh Parsa and her husband Farrokhdin Parsa, and later continued in Tehran, with its recorded run extending into 1921 in the Encyclopaedia Iranica account and to 1922-1923 in other listings. Despite an intentionally moderate tone on women's education, the magazine provoked fierce opposition after editorials on equal rights and the veil: FakhrAfagh Parsa's house was attacked, the magazine was banned or cancelled, and the Parsa family was exiled, in her case to Qom. Its brief, embattled history made Jahan-e Zanan a landmark of the early Iranian women's movement.

Foundation in Mashhad

Women's World was first published in 1920 with the aim of understanding the need for women's education and familiarising women with their rights, by Farrokhdin Parsa and his wife FakhrAfagh Parsa in Mashhad. The Encyclopaedia Iranica gives the precise Mashhad run: four issues, from 4 February to 26 April 1921 in the Gregorian rendering it provides, printed first at the Tus Printing House and then at Khorasan Printers. The magazine, which was first published every two weeks, became monthly after the second issue according to Iranica. Its Mashhad issues ran to 28 to 32 two-column pages of 13.5 by 22 centimetres, and the annual subscription was 30 qerans. In Mashhad the journal dealt with topics such as the necessity of education for women, cooking recipes, child rearing and notices about famous women.

FakhrAfagh Parsa

FakhrAfagh Parsa, born in Tehran in 1898, was a journalist during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution period and a member of the women's movement in Iran. She managed Women's World in Mashhad, where she was a teacher by profession, and later, in Tehran, functioned as its chief editor; her husband Farrokhdin Parsa was a civil servant who also worked for a number of newspapers, journals and magazines as editor, columnist and correspondent. She was the mother of Farrokhroo Parsa, who became the first female minister in the cabinet of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda. FakhrAfagh Parsa is remembered as the first female journalist in Iranian history to be exiled, a distinction earned directly through the publication of Women's World.

Aims: education and rights

The magazine's founding aims joined two claims that its opponents treated very differently. The first, understanding the need for women's education, could be presented moderately, and the first edition published under FakhrAfagh Parsa's management had a moderate tone about women's education and the need for women to be educated. The second, familiarising women with their rights, led the magazine toward subjects related to the freedom of women in European style and the equality of rights. In the fourth issue, according to the biographical account of FakhrAfagh Parsa, she wrote two articles that created a great deal of trouble: The Necessity of Girls' Education and Women's Spiritual Tolerance and the Need for Revision of the Marriage Law. Together they moved the journal from schooling into the legal and religious terms of marriage itself.

Opposition, attack and exile

After publishing an editorial about the equal rights of women and men, a number of men came up against FakhrAfagh Parsa, and thugs looted her house in support of those who had condemned her in religious terms. Accounts of the magazine summarise the sequence starkly: after the editor's letter about the discovery, or removal, of the veil and equal rights was published and circulated in a number of magazines, the author was disgraced and condemned, Afagh Parsa was eventually exiled to Qom, and the evaluation, or licence, of Women's World was cancelled. Biographical accounts state that she was exiled for two years and that, when she returned, she joined the Jamiyat-e Nesvan-e Vatankhah, the Association of Patriotic Women. The violence against her house and the exile of the editor mark Women's World as one of the most directly persecuted of the early Iranian women's magazines.

The Tehran issue and the ban

The Encyclopaedia Iranica distinguishes the Mashhad and Tehran phases carefully. After a lapse of about five months, Jahan-e Zanan appeared in Tehran in one issue only, in September 1921, printed at the Baqerzada Brothers Press. In that only Tehran issue it printed an article titled Az hala, From now on, that advocated education for women and called for their active involvement in society. This article created a great deal of angry protest in Tehran by conservative clergy and led to the banning of the magazine and the banishment of its founder, Farrokhdin Parsa, and his family. The Iranica account thus attributes the final ban to the Tehran issue and names the founder and his family as banished, while the magazine summaries centre FakhrAfagh Parsa's exile to Qom; read together, they record a family punished for the publication and a journal that could not continue.

Dates, frequency and the surviving record

Catalogue information for Women's World is not uniform. The magazine listing gives its founding as 1920, a first issue in 1922 in one field, a final issue in 1923, weekly frequency, and bases in both Mashhad and Tehran, while the narrative accounts and Iranica place the actual issues in Mashhad in early 1921 and Tehran in September 1921. The discrepancies reflect the difficulty of cataloguing a short, interrupted journal whose start is often dated to its 1920 Mashhad launch. What is consistent is the sequence: a fortnightly, then monthly, start in Mashhad under FakhrAfagh Parsa's management, a move or continuation in Tehran, and a forced end amid protests. Complete sets survive at the Central Library of Tehran University and at the Ebn Meskuya Library in Isfahan, and a single issue is kept at the Astan-e Qods Library in Mashhad, according to Iranica.

Reputation among women's magazines

Scholarship on the Qajar-era women's press singles Women's World out from its contemporaries. One study of women's publications and citizenship states that Fakhr Afaq Parsa's Jahan-e Zanan, published in Mashhad in 1920, is superior to other Iranian women's magazines because it is the forerunner of public struggles with religious fanatics, sectarians and opponents of women's freedom in Iranian society. The oldest specialised magazine for women, Danesh of 1910, had deliberately avoided politics and concentrated on morals, health and rights in a domestic frame. Women's World, by contrast, published on equal rights and the veil, was answered with looting and exile, and is therefore treated in the literature as the point at which the women's press entered open confrontation with organised religious opposition.

After exile: the Patriotic Women

FakhrAfagh Parsa's public life did not end with the magazine. Exiled for two years, she returned and joined the Jamiyat-e Nesvan-e Vatankhah, the Association of Patriotic Women, which operated in Tehran from 1922 to 1932; a board photograph of the association shows her seated among its governors. The continuity matters for understanding Women's World: its editor carried the same commitments to women's education and rights into the main women's organisation of the following decade. Her daughter Farrokhroo Parsa's later career as Iran's first woman cabinet minister extended the family's public significance into the Pahlavi state, a connection frequently noted in accounts of both women.

Context of the early 1920s women's press

Women's World appeared in a dense moment of women's publishing. Nameye Banovan under Shahnaz Azad began in Tehran in July 1920, Alam-e Nesvan followed in 1920, and Jahan-e Zanan was published in the same year in Mashhad, before the Patriotic Women's journal of 1923. Women's magazines of the period discussed health, children's education, comparisons between Iranian women and women in developed countries, and women's news from the world. Women's World participated in that shared programme of education and comparison, but its editorial line on equal rights, marriage law revision and the veil, and the severity of the reaction it provoked, gave it a distinct profile. Iran Chamber Society's history of the women's movement likewise notes that the magazine was published in Mashhad, was violently opposed by religious groups, and that Mrs Parsa was forced into exile and had to run for her life.

Legacy

Women's World published only a handful of issues, four in Mashhad and one in Tehran on the most precise account, yet it remains one of the best-known early Iranian women's magazines because of what its history demonstrates. A teacher-editor and her journalist husband set out to explain why women needed education and to familiarise women with their rights; within a few issues, arguments about girls' schooling, marriage law and the veil brought condemnation, the looting of the editor's house, a ban and exile. The survival of complete sets in Tehran and Isfahan libraries has allowed Iranica and later scholars to reconstruct its pages and its fate. Jahan-e Zanan stands as the clearest early case of an Iranian women's magazine suppressed for the content of its feminism, and of an editor who returned from exile to continue organised women's work.