Iranian Girls Win “Mini-skirt War”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31782, 12 September 1968, Page 20

Iranian Girls Win “Mini-skirt War”

(Specially written lor "The Press" bu

RALPH JOSEPH)

TEHERAN.

On a bus journey from Shiraz to Teheran recently, I thought myself lucky to have a pretty Iranian girl on the seat beside me, something which I could never even imagine in some of the countries further east. It was a night journey, and although Iranian buses are excellent by any standards, they do not yet have relaxing seats.

As a result, I was unable to sleep, but shortly after the journey began, I was not a little surprised to find the Iranian girl dozing peacefully on my shoulder.

Every little while she would awake with a jerk, look slightly embarrassed and try to incline herself to the corner a .ay from me. But minutes later she would plop right back on my shoulder again. She got off at Isfahan about five o’clock next morning, and I confess I felt something of a pang to see her go! Still Veiled

The point, however, is that I could think of few other Moslem countries where a girl would permit herself to sit beside a male who was a total stranger, let alone fall asleep on his shoulder. No suggestion here that this is an every-day occurrence, but Iranian girls today certainly do seem to have won considerable freedom since the day in 1935 when Shahenshah Reza Shah, the last monarch, ordered the removal of the veil.

True, he did not quite succeed in ending by decree a

habit of many hundreds of years, and today perhaps 50 per cent of Iranian women still do wear the “chadar,” or veil. But it is now somewhat carelessly worr, and in any event the “chadar” is just a large sort of shawl of light cotton material, often brown and polka dotted but sometimes black, which is thrown over the body and (quite seldom today) held up with the hand to cover half the face. But there are areas in Teheran where the veil is altogether absent and one could well think oneself to be in a European city. Dress, both male and female, is completely Westernised, and no-one can say those chic Iranian girls don’t know how to dress.

A boy and a girl walking hand in hand, or a man holding a girl romantically about the waist, are becoming increasingly common sights. And the mini-skirt seems to be the rule rather than the exception, albeit it did not quite have a red carpet welcome.

Iran, too, has had its “miniskirt war” over the last two years and a half. When the skirt first appeared in 1966, the Education Ministry promptly banned it and a Teheran community council condemned it as “totally foreign to Iranian society and its culture.” But the chic young women fought back with a tenacity that belied their fragile looks. Chief strategy: suicide. After one suicide attempt early in the fray an irate mother stoutly declared of her girl: “I would prefer her dead than see her wearing the mini-skirt!” But nost parents simply capitulated. They would rather see their daughters in a mini-skirt than in a shroud. Disinherited Some individual battles were, of course, lost. An 81-year-old woman called at the Teheran registrar’s office to disinherit her grandchildren because they had taken to the mini-skirt Hard on her heels came four modern misses, chastely wearing the “chadar,” to plead with her. They did talk her out of it. 3ut then one of them, holding the “chadar” in an unfamiliar manner, accidently dropped It. And 10, there stood a lady in a skirt several inches above the knees. That did it. “Fraud!” screamed Granny in a rage, and cut the lot of them off there and then! But a sure sign that “society” was losing the war came when, in the summer of 1967, a staggering number of girls dared to appear for the entrance examination to the Teheran University wearing the mini-skirt in spite of the Ministry ban. There were too many for the invigilators to take on, apparently, and were let in without a murmur.

A while later a peasant from Azarbaijan returned to his village gogling from what he had seen in Teheran. He ran screaming down the streets, climbed to a hilltop and declared in a loud voice that he had received a mandate from heaven to wipe the mini-skirt off the face of the earth. He was quietly removed to have his head examined. Later he was declared to be suffering from paranoic hallucination. Obviously the mini-skirt had won.

Social Changes Actually the mini-skirt story is only one aspect of a rather profound social metamorphosis taking place here, encouraged by the Royal family and given a positive fillip by the advances in women’s education. “Revolution” is the favourite word used to describe it But, whatever it is, in 1965 the first batch of 71 girls took training as air force officers, and by 1967 there were 81 in the police also. The numbers have gone up considerably since and there are reportedly around 400 girls in the police college now. By early this year a bill was going through Parliament providing for conscription for national service of girls between the ages of 18 and 25. The idea seems to be to push them, through the Army, into a special Health and Literacy Corps composed of educated girls. The first lot are due to be drafted in, this September.