Conclusion and Summary

Summary

The emergence of women’s press in Iran and the implications of the magazines Ettela’at-e Banuvan and Zan-e Ruz in the creation of the modern Iranian women of the late Pahlavi era have been the focus of this study. Most importantly, it was demonstrated that Iranian women’s magazines were complex, evolving enterprises to suggest they performed different social functions alongside their ideological effort, while forming main forum of negotiation over what being modern was all about. The upshot of this proposition is twofold. First, it questions a conventional tendency to disregard the historical importance of Iranian women’s magazines and dismiss them as semiofficial publications of the Pahlavi state, quintessence of westoxication, and lowbrow genre. Second, a more holistic investigation challenges the propensity in existing literature to separate the contemporary public and intellectual discourses of the late Pahlavi era from the output of the local media, and ultimately deflect the latter’s role in the cultural politics that shaped two of the most dramatic decades in Iran’s modern history.