On March 8, it was once again an international day whose demands are spreading to all corners of the world, achieving, by leaps and bounds, what our mothers and grandmothers even dared to dream of. In Iran —our country of origin— there has been an outbreak the first feminist revolution in the entire Orient —not only from the Islamic world.
Along with the fight against climate change, feminism is and will continue to be, for a long time, the main engine of social transformation for future generations. It is not by chance that it arose in the contemporary era. It is not only because this is the era of equality and human rights. There is a more compelling reason: “Gone are,” writes Shoghi Effendi, “the long periods of infancy and childhood through which the human race has passed. Mankind is now experiencing the shocks associated with the most turbulent stage of its evolution, the stage of adolescence, when the impetuosity of youth and its vehemence reach their climax. taking this simile that compares the collective history with the biographical evolution of the person, we can affirm that feminism is a phenomenon that has arisen when humanity has come of age and is now going through its youth.
Feminism is a phenomenon that has emerged when humanity has come of age and is now going through its youth.
Indeed, for a century and a half, having reached our collective majority, we have been discovering, gradually and not without irregularities, an anthropological truth: the human spirit is a universal quality of the species, and it does not vary in degree depending on whether it concerns some subgroups or others. The irrevocable demonstration of this philosophical truth came, as always, from the hand of science: on the brink of the turn of the millennium, the human genome was sequenced and this fact was verified.
It is certainly this incontrovertible truth that makes the feminism the most strategic movement of the next decades. It will be the engine of the democratization of all societies of the planet; those that still do not have democratic experience and those that, having consolidated it, suffer, at times, from a certain regression or deficit in their democracies.
feminism It’s not just a movement for equity and restorative justice. of a tragic injury that has been perpetuated since the dawn of time. It certainly is. But It constitutes, above all, the great key, the master key, for open the main floodgates to the suppression of all other irrational asymmetries; not just gender. It is the driving force to hatch, in all places and all cultures, the abolition of any type of inequality that exists between different human groups due to traits or characteristics not chosen: ethnic group, mother tongue, nation or country. gender.
And it is that it is simply unfeasible to claim —much less, to internalize in the mentalities— the irrationality of a supremacy (be it national, linguistic, political or class) if it is not conquered and consolidated, firstthe suppression of the most important supremacy of all those that have occurred: the one that refers to the gender difference. Indeed, it is the hegemony and dissymmetry with the greatest impact in any collective or human group for three reasons. First of all, for an obvious biological reason: the female sex is not an accessory or second order element; it is the existential foundation of the species. Secondly, due to the magnitude of the inequality in question: affects one in two members of any society. And, thirdly, because economists like Augusto López-Claros have empirically demonstrated, from the World Bank, that discrimination —no matter how subtle or tenuous— of women It prevents the progress and prosperity of society and of any economic organization.
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Alejandro Requeijo Photographs: Ana Beltrán
We were both born into families full of women and men who actively defended gender equality. Some of our ancestors were tortured and sentenced to death for it. The most recent is our aunt Tuba: a passionate and vocational high school teacher, a staunch defender of women’s priority in the education, who encouraged and helped her students not to abandon their studies, even at the cost of paying for them, sometimes, out of her own pocket. She was hanged for this reason in Shiraz in 1983. Perhaps this gives us some legitimacy to claim that a cause as noble as feminism should not be trivialized —as some current political groups do— nor should it be ideologised. Canadian philosopher William Hatcher defines ideology as any kind of thought or movement that places an end—no matter how laudable—above human value and dignity. Many forms of feminism are becoming ideology. Having forgotten his noble origin and lofty purposes, they are radicalizing, leaving instrumentalize in a partisan way and supporter.
On March 8, it was once again an international day whose demands are spreading to all corners of the world, achieving, by leaps and bounds, what our mothers and grandmothers even dared to dream of. In Iran —our country of origin— there has been an outbreak the first feminist revolution in the entire Orient —not only from the Islamic world.
