Whenever my mother would talk to me about her thirty-five years of marriage to my father, she’d end on a familiar refrain: “I was always my own woman. And I was always my own man too. You see, I had to carry my own weight every day of every year, and I mean every bit of it.”
I understand what my mother says. Iran: it’s the country I was born in, went to school in, and have worked as a professional journalist in for twenty years; a country where authority, religion, and fate would have it so that even someone like my mother had to pull a permanent double shift as both a woman and a man throughout her entire adult life. I can’t say if, as a country, Iran is unique in this way, but I do know it is one place on earth that is emphatically this way—a place where women are in every measure equal to men, and in every measure not.
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