Creating the modern Iranian woman: Popular culture between two revolutions

Within the dynamic context of Iran's shifting economic, cultural, and political changes in the decades between the 1963 'White Revolution' and the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought down the Pahlavi monarchy, Liora Hendelman-Baavur explores the interactions between global aspects of modernity and local notions of popular culture by focusing on the history of Iranian women's magazines and their formation of the modern woman. Arguing against the idea that weekly magazines intended for women were mere conveyors of state ideology and/or capitalist consumerism, this sustained examination of the complexities, contradictions, and ambivalence gleaned in the pages of these publications draws on the rich array of their textual and visual content to reveal how they were instead the very site of contestation for forming and articulating the idea of the modern Iranian woman. By offering this important new perspective on Iranian cultural history in the late Pahlavi era, Hendelman-Baavur also challenges the seemingly intractable dichotomy between high and low culture that has dominated scholarly studies of modern Iran.