Iranian Women's Encounter with the Dichotomy between Nature and Culture from the Constitutional Revolution to the End of Qajar Period

This article aims to shed light on one of the main conceptual frameworks of women's historiography, namely, the dichotomy between Nature and Culture and to examine how women encountered this dichotomy in the years between the constitutional revolution till the end of the Qajar period. Although the theory coordinated to the above mentioned dichotomy was only originated approximately half a century ago, its connotations and / or implications can easily be explored from the history of women in many countries including Iran long before the invention of the theory itself. Taking the aforementioned theory and its correlated historical fact into consideration simultaneously, the main question which has been addressed in this paper is that to what extent Iranian women in the Era of Constitutional Revolution have encountered with elements of the dichotomy between nature and culture? To scrutinize this question, I have organized this paper into three interrelated sections, all based on primary sources such as women's writings and letters in the newspapers and Journals of the Constitutional period. I draw from women’s writings, in the first section of this paper, to explore the most important characteristics of the essence of their theoretical criticism of the dichotomy between Nature and Culture which they had done by means of rejecting the masculine exclusive possession of culture. The second section has been devoted to “challenging men’s unjust activities” and “turning down the masculine values made by men” in order to earn their own lost cultural rights. I try to show, in the third and the last section of this paper, that women’s activities have not been exclusive to criticizing and/or challenging masculine values theoretically and practically, but they have also tried their best to display an affirmative proposal in order to establish their own cultural rights to a level which is profoundly concerned with ethics and humanity. The conclusion summarizes the major themes articulated in these discussions, and suggests further directions towards a just conceptualization of the dichotomy.