Politics
In 1967, Pahlavi worked with the United Nations as the Iranian delegate to the Commission on Human Rights as well as the Economic and Social Council.
Ashraf was a strong supporter of women's rights in Iran and the world during her brother's reign. In 1975, she was heavily involved with the International Women's Year, addressing the United Nations. Though an instrumental force in legitimizing gender reforms, her philosophy on gender was not particularly introspective: "I confess that even though since childhood I had paid a price for being a woman, in terms of education and personal freedom, I had not given much thought to specific ways in which women in general were more oppressed than men." By her own account, she was a strong supporter of the rights of women to basic life necessities such as “food, education, and health” and was not a radical reformist. She cited “chronic apathy” from many governments as the underlying issue that prevented women’s rights reforms from being implemented around the world. In 1934, Princess Ashraf and her sister, Princess Shams, were two of the first Iranian women to discard the veil typically worn by women in their home country.
Despite her involvement in 1975’s International Women’s Year, Pahlavi’s women’s rights stances were called into question after the publication of her 1976 New York Times Op-Ed piece, “And Thus Passeth International Women’s Year.” In a March 1976 article in The Nation, writer Kay Boyle criticized Ashraf for her touting of International Women’s Year as succeeding in widening the global vision of sisterhood, while approximately 4,000 of the Princess’s own “sisters” were political prisoners in Iran with virtually no hope of a military trial.
In her 1980 memoirs, Pahlavi acknowledges the poor conditions of women in Iran and expresses concern, as she writes, "…the news of what was happening to Iran’s women was extremely painful… were segregated and relegated to second-class status…many were imprisoned or exiled." Additionally, Pahlavi worked as an activist for human rights and equality, not only for women’s rights. She was an advocate for the international spread of literacy, especially in Iran, where her brother Mohammad Reza Shah was a major proponent of the anti-illiteracy movement. She served as a member on the International Consultative Liaison Committee for Literacy.
Ashraf was the target of a mysterious and unsuccessful assassination attempt in the summer of 1976 at her summer home on the French Riviera, during which fourteen bullets were fired into the side of her Rolls Royce. A passenger in her car was killed but Pahlavi left the scene unharmed.
After the 1979 revolution, Ashraf asked David Rockefeller to support Mohammad Reza's attempts to find asylum.
Read more about this topic: Princess Ashraf Pahlavi
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.”
—J.B.S. (John Burdon Sanderson)
“Of course, in the reality of history, the Machiavellian view which glorifies the principle of violence has been able to dominate. Not the compromising conciliatory politics of humaneness, not the Erasmian, but rather the politics of vested power which firmly exploits every opportunity, politics in the sense of the “Principe,” has determined the development of European history ever since.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)