Iranian Women 'infected' with western ideas, demand rights.

Cartoon; Islamic vision of Adam and Eve.

I have always maintained that the biggest threat the free world had to offer to the authoritarian one was ideas. One of the hallmarks of tyranny over the years has been the need for vast propaganda efforts to convince their own people that the West was degenerate, greedy, etc with downtrodden masses yearning for the joys of liberation. Such regimes always understood that they had to keep their people from ever gaining a concept of real liberty.

The main threat to free societies is that most politicians have delusions of relevance and believe that government has a bigger role to play in the day to day lives of the citizenry, than administering those few matters that the people allow them.

It now appears that Iranian women are getting over exposed to the degenerate rights of their counterparts over in the land of the great Satan and are getting stroppy at their lack of any form of equality.

Women’s rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years.

And it is not just women from the wealthy, Westernized elites. The family court building in Vanak Square here is filled with women, like Ms. Qassemi, who are not privileged. Women from lower classes and even the religious are among those marching up and down the stairs to fight for divorces and custody of their children.

Increasing educational levels and the information revolution have contributed to creating a generation of women determined to gain more control over their lives, rights advocates say.

Confronted with new cultural and legal restrictions after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, some young women turned to higher education as a way to get away from home, postpone marriage and earn social respect, advocates say. Religious women, who had refused to sit in classes with men, returned to universities after they were resegregated.

Today, more than 60 percent of university students are women, compared with just over 30 percent in 1982, even though classes are no longer segregated. ….

Iranian women are showing growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim country.