Revolutionary Women and the Radical Left in Iran and Turkey during the Global Seventies

The 1970s marked the fading away of the spirit of the student movements and the flourishing of militant revolutionary activism throughout the world. Iran and Turkey, two Middle Eastern countries aligned with the United States during the Cold War, were not exceptions. In accordance with their Western alliances, in the earlier half of the postwar period the Iranian and Turkish regimes followed a policy of brutal suppression of all social movements with communist tendencies. Convinced that their governments were collaborating with the United States and a comprador bourgeoisie was ruling over their country, beginning in the 1970s numerous left-leaning men and women from Turkey and Iran adopted armed struggle as the only way to get rid of the regimes they were living under and eventually establish an egalitarian, independent, and prosperous society. Inspired by the victories of guerrilla struggles in Latin America and the so-called Cultural Revolution in China, the revolutionary leftist groups in Iran and Turkey adopted an eclectic mix of Maoist ideals and urban guerrilla warfare. In these unique conditions, the women among them had extraordinary experiences that challenged traditional gender relations in their societies and help overturn older tropes about a neatly divided binary Cold War world order. In this paper, I examine what sorts of challenges and opportunities women were presented with while pursuing radical leftist activism, especially in the safe houses of their revolutionary organizations. Through oral history interviews I have conducted with various former revolutionary women, I focus on their everyday lives, which included organizational activities, daily chores, and responsibilities for disguising the safe houses, analyzing gender roles and relations between men and women. Oral histories of these women shed light on the consequences of global politics on women’s history, and ways in which ideas and practices migrated across national and systemic borders during the global Cold War.