Bibi Khanom Astarabadi (1858–1921) was a pioneering figure in women’s rights movements. She was a major figure during the course of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran and a leading reformist in women’s and girl’s education. She was a well-known public intellectual whose critical articles were published in reformist periodicals and whose seminal book Ma’ayeb al-Rejal (Failings of men) (1895) was a response to a widely popular pamphlet Ta’dib al-Nisvan (Edification of women) by an anonymous author. Here the dialogical reasoning of Astarabadi against this misogynist pamphlet is the key character of her prose. Astarabadi opposes polygamy, criticizes men’s exclusive legal right to initiate divorce, advocates for education of women and girls, and argues for their equal rights before point-by-point responding to the misogynist calumnies of the anonymous author of the “Edification” pamphlet. She then launches into a scathing critique of men’s behavior, her prose and politics making it quite clear she is a member of the literary elite, well-versed in Persian prose and widely conscious of women’s rights movements around the world. Astarabadi’s mother was also an educator and her father a servant, both at the Qajar royal court. What we read in her politics is therefore the emerging liberal consciousness of an educated elite, dialogical in its encounter with the embedded patriarchy of their time. The prose of both the pamphlet and the response, for and against women, occasionally borders on cliché and generic satire, engaging in upstaging and finger pointing. The result, however, is emblematic evidence of the rising awareness of women of their inalienable rights, and even more importantly the authorial power of self-generation.
—The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi, pp. 246-7 (e-book), 2022
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