This project is complete. The results were published in:

Charles Kurzman, "A Feminist Generation in Iran?" Iranian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, June 2008, pp. 297-321.  (Abstract.)

The dataset has been deposited with the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for other researchers to analyze. Click here to access the dataset.

This project received funding from the Carolina Population Center and the Mellon Foundation to carry out a nationally representative survey of adults age 18 and older in Iran, focusing on the question: has increased education for girls and women created a “feminist” generation in Iran, that is, a large number of women whose expectations of egalitarian marriage and career fulfillment are greater than older women’s or young men’s expectations? The survey was carried out in 2003.

What follows is a report on the pilot study conducted in Tehran in Summer 2001, reprinted from Global View (University Center for International Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spring 2002, pp. 4-5):

In 1999, I was asked to start a mail-order bride business. The brides asked me. I was at a conference in Tehran, Iran, being interviewed by a group of journalists, half of them women. An American in Tehran is news, and one who speaks bad Persian is apparently particularly newsworthy. As the interview ended, one of the women asked if I was married. In case my wife is reading this, I want everyone to know that I instantly answered, in broken Persian, "Yes! Thanks be to God!" and showed her my wedding ring. I then asked if she was married, and she answered, "No! Thanks be to God!"

She went on to explain that she was eager to pursue her career in journalism, and that virtually all of the Iranian men she knew, including educated men who valued education in a mate, do not permit their wives to be career women. The issue, she said, was not being barred from working, since many Iranian women are in the paid labor force. Rather, the problem lay in priorities: husbands expected themselves to be the wife's first priority, the husband's families to be second, and the wife's job to be third or lower. The trick, in her view, was to hustle in her career to make a name for herself in her profession, so that she could coast somewhat if she married. The risk in the plan, she noted, was that many eligible men of her generation will already have married by that age.

She had heard that educated men in America and Europe encouraged their wives to succeed in their careers, and joked that since educated Iranian women were in over-supply on the Iranian marriage market, I should start a dating service to introduce them overseas. By now a group of women journalists had drifted back and gathered around us, nodding in agreement and laughing.

I started to wonder. Not about the dating service, but about the macro-social implications of educated Iranian women's abstention from marriage. You know you're a social scientist at heart when a business opportunity presents itself and you can only think of macro-social implications.

I started to pursue these implications in Summer 2001 with a seed grant from the UNC Middle East Population Studies Project, funded by the Mellon Foundation through the Population Council and administered by UCIS in conjunction with the Carolina Population Center. The grant paid for a research assistant in Iran, an educated woman herself, who interviewed 100 young women in Tehran, half of them college-educated and half of them not. The questionnaire, combining open-ended and multiple-choice questions, sought to find out how representative the journalists I spoke with were, and what sort of effect these attitudes might be having on marriage and fertility.

The context for this investigation is the tremendous increase in women's higher education in Iran over the past two decades. Americans may be surprised by this development, since we generally imagine the Islamic Republic of Iran to be a terribly backward place where women are walled off behind the veil. Yes, women in Iran must wear a headscarf and a long shapeless overcoat. But they are hardly invisible. Women work in many professions, including newscasting and parliament. The highest parliamentary vote-getter several years ago was a woman. There is a female cabinet member, and there are women in working in virtually every government office (though more likely as secretary than boss, the same as in other countries). In part because the universities were purged and declared "Islamic" in the early 1980s, more conservative families allow their daughters to go to college now than under the Pahlavi monarchy, which fell in 1979. In addition, the higher education system has greatly expanded under the Islamic Republic. Huge "Free Universities" have tens of thousands of commuter students taking advantage of the relatively low tuition and flexible class schedules -- and many of these students were women.

The result is an unprecedented generation of educated women. These women can be quite high-profile within Iran -- as the stars and subjects of movies, as journalists and political activists, and so on. So the marriage and fertility choices that these women make may have consequences for the entire society.

And these choices are quite radical. As the accompanying table shows, educated women in Tehran are marrying later, having fewer children, and planning to have fewer children than their less-educated sisters. They are more likely to consider themselves feminists, to identify problems with Iranian marital customs, and to blame these problems on gender inequality. The sample size is too small to extrapolate to all Iranians, but the study generated plenty of food for thought.

"Man are too self-centered. They don't want to understand their wives," a 25-year-old college student told the interviewer. "Marriage prevents progress in Iran," said a 28-year-old university-educated teacher. "Men are selfish and rude. They think that they have the right to do anything, and society has recognized this right for them," said a 29-year-old dentist. "Because of patriarchal culture, women have to forbear and restrict their liberty in order to keep order in the family," said a 22-year-old graduate student. "Educated women who are independent financially are not acceptable to men," said a 25-year-old college student.

Other women pointed to family pressure, particularly pressure from more traditional older generations. The generation gap is glaring: very few of the respondents' mothers had college educations -- only 6 percent of the college-educated respondents, and 2 percent of the others -- and only 15 percent of the respondents' mothers worked in the paid labor force. The respondents said their family wanted them to get married younger (by an average of two years below their own ideal age of marriage), and almost half of the respondents agreed that family intervention in the mate-selection process was one of the reasons that many marriages fail in Iran.

Indeed, some of these attitudes are reaching less-educated women as well. The ideal number of children, for example, is below 2 for both educated and less-educated women, suggesting that Iranian population control efforts have seeped into popular consciousness. In the first decade after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the country's birth-rate soared and the population doubled. The government began to identify this as a problem in the late 1980s, and has pursued population policies that even the West considers to be unusually progressive, including the establishment of local family-planning clinics and subsidized distribution of contraceptives. The population growth rate in Iran dropped by a half between 1986 and 1996.

But if the Islamic Republic of Iran has succeeded in educating women and reducing population growth, an unintended consequence is the emergence of a generation of well-educated, strong-willed women who do not accept traditional justifications for gender inequality. According to numerous observers, women have disproportionately supported the political-reform movement in Iran. Perhaps there is a social-reform movement brewing as well.

Table 1. Results of Survey of 100 Iranian Women, Ages 18-30, Summer 2001