Women's Organization of Iran

[3] The branch members were generally middle-class women in their late twenties or early thirties, often teachers or civil servants.

[7] During the 1960s, women in Iran, regardless of class and geographic location, were dealing with issues of freedom, equality, security, recognition and control, and were feeling torn between tradition and modernity, between what they aspired to and what their environment enforced.

[9] Originally, the WOI reflected the commonly held view of the complementary of the sexes; and women's rights were requested for the stated purpose of improving their capacity as mothers and wives.

Yet women were reluctant to train for many traditionally masculine fields, such as carpentry or plumbing, on the grounds that it would hurt their chance of marriage.

[15] When the goals of the WOI coincided with the modernization of the country, it was able to make progress; however when it fought in the areas of family and social gender behavior, it often failed.

A quota in technical and engineering fields was easily achieved, whereas the ability for women to obtain a passport without their husband's permission did not, and cost them the resignation of female senator Mehrangiz Manouchehrian as well as much negative publicity.

Local women were included in deciding what those services would be – typically classes, childcare, consciousness-raising, legal counseling and health care.

Schooling was kept at a minimum so that ties between the young women and their home network and lifestyle would not be permanently altered by long stays in Tehran.

[19] In the area of women's legal rights within the family, the Iran's Family Protection Law, as revised in 1975, gave women the right to ask for divorce on the same grounds and conditions as men, left decisions regarding child custody and alimony up to a special family court, recognized the mother as the legal guardian of her child in case of the father's death, practically eliminated polygyny by stipulating exceptional conditions and, limited legal marriages to a second wife only with the permission of the first, and increased the minimum age of marriage to eighteen for women and twenty-one for men.

Some of the more influential studies of the research center include : The WOI worked upstream of the UN's First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975.

To achieve a consensus on the National Plan for Action, more than seven hundred panels, organized and financed locally by the WOI chapters between 1976 and 1977, debated relevant issues.

Subsequently, the WOI took it back to Iran as a basis for preparing a National Plan of Action to improve the status of women in the country, and as a way of pressuring the government for resources.

The queen Farah Pahlavi became a feminist in the early 1970s, and her support was sought on certain issues, such as eliminating sexist images from elementary-school textbooks.

[25] The King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is partly remembered for his legacy for women's rights, however, the demands of the WOI were more radical than the reforms that the state was willing to make.

The Ministry of Labor agreed to supply equipment and teachers as they determined it was preferable for Iranian women to take on jobs that would otherwise fall to foreign workers.

Ironically, the WOI's activities in the late 1960s and 1970s contributed much to women's sense of agency, their awareness of their collective political power, and their belief that they should mobilize and assert their demands.