Kaveh Farrokh reviews The Ladies’ Secret Society

Kaveh Farrokh writes: 

Manda Ervin Zand has published the textbook entitled:

The Ladies’ Secret Society: History of the Courageous Women of Iran

(Order from Amazon here …)

This riveting and remarkable book reveals, in print for the first time, the long history of struggle against clerical domination partaken by Iranian women across the centuries. Rooted in the long-standing and distinguished history of ancient Iran across the millennia, where Mother-Gods were once revered, the Ladies’ Secret Society, an organization founded in 1909, was both the inheritor of this proud history, and the progenitor of the contemporary women’s rights campaign of Iranian women (inside Iran and the diaspora) today.

Iranian women from Malayer (near Hamedan in the northwest) engaged in target practice in the Malayer city limits in the late 1950s.  The association between weapons and women is nothing new in Iran; Roman references for example note of Iranian women armed as regular troops in the armies of the Sassanians (224-651 CE).

Zand Ervin relates the stories and records the accomplishments of generations of individual women activists, who fought for every iota of freedom they gained, only to witness their hard-won rights virtually stripped overnight after the arrival of the pan-Islamic establishment into Iran in 1979. During the early days of the establishment of the pan-Islamic theocracy, Zand Ervin witnessed the execution of several innocent people, including her high school principal, who, as stated by Zand Ervin, was executed simply because she was a woman – and the Secretary of Education. She offers dramatic and compelling eyewitness testimonies of strong and emancipated women who were forced against their will to live under a pan-Islamist system. These same women, as Ervin Zand documents, have fought back often under near-impossible odds, and continue to fight for women’s rights inside Iran to this day. Manda Zand Ervin’s History of Iran (with its compulsory imposition of the veil upon women since 1979) offers insight and context into the distressing news of today dominating the headlines and the ensuing dangers of the clerical gender apartheid system.

The board of directors of “Jam’iat e nesvan e vatan-khah”, a women’s rights association in Tehran (1923-1933) (Source: Manda Zand-Ervin)

Born in Iran, and educated in the United States, Ervin was the managing director of the department of statistics and international affairs at the Customs Administration of Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 1980, Ms. Zand Ervin came to the United States as a political refugee and became a US citizen three years later. As a women’s rights activist and leading expert on Iranian affairs, she has been frequently consulted by Members of Congress and has testified at Congressional briefings, the Helsinki Commission, and the United Nations. In February 2008, Zand Ervin was appointed as the United States’ Delegate to the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women. She was also the featured speaker at the G8 Summit in Rome, on Violence against Women in 2009.  In 2012, she received the EMET Speaker of the Truth award.

Manda Zand Ervin is the founder and president of the Alliance of Iranian Women, an organization that brings the voices of Iranian women living under the gender apartheid policies of the pan-Islamic establishment’s Sharia Laws to the West. Her articles have appeared in; American Thinker, the Washington Times, PJ Media, Gate Stone Institute and many others. She has appeared on CNN, Fox News, BBC and regularly speaks on human rights, women’s rights and Middle East issues. Readers are encourage to consult her interviews on the Alliance of Iranian Women.com.