Social Movements of Women's Legal Empowerment in Contemporary Iran

In the contemporary world, issues related to women, including efforts to empower them, have always been an important and influential part of most human societies. In contemporary Iran, and especially since the constitutional era, there have been numerous social movements, which have been the main concern of all women. Thus, the main issue of the research is the interpretation of legal empowerment by Iranian women's social movements in different periods and the extent to which the movements have achieved their goals. Bisley's "typology" was chosen as the theoretical framework and "genealogy" as the research method in this study. The findings of the study show that: The goals of women's social movements in Iran to empower them in different periods have been interpreted differently. These movements in the constitutional era saw the demand for the legal equality of men and women as their primary goal. The aim of these movements in the first Pahlavi era was to attempt to bring women into society and in the second Pahlavi era to fight against the exploitation of women in factories and to pay them equality. During the Islamic Revolution, the provision of a community activity space for women to be more in line with Iranian and Sharia-based elements of the social movement was identified as the goal of women's social movements, and thus led to a discourse in which women's social and political participation was considered natural. In the light of Bessel's typology, therefore, women's social movements in the four aforementioned periods can be assessed in terms of liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, and postmodern feminism, respectively.