Haleh Esfandiari Calls Iran's Women's Movement 'Strong'

How a 67-year-old grandmother, committed to pilates and the global foreign policy peace initiatives of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East program, came to spend four months in Iran’s much-feared Evin Prison is the subject of Haleh Esfandiari’s new book My Prison, My Home.

Esfandiari talks in depth with Double X about her prison experience and also about herself, what she learned about the business of surviving on a day by day basis.

More importantly, the thoughtful grandmother shares some sisterly facts, talking about Iran’s women’s movement: 

The government is very concerned and very scared of the women’s movement. The women’s movement has been the only movement that has stood up in the last 30 years to the government. Three days ago, they celebrated the anniversary of the campaign to collect a million signatures for equal rights between men and women. Three years ago, a group of women and men got together and decided to wage a campaign for equal rights in Iran, and they started going from province to province, from city to city, from village to village and collecting signatures. At the first anniversary of the campaign, the organizers of the campaign gathered in a park in Tehran and they were dispersed, and a number of these women were arrested and put in jail. This happened the following year, too. So when I was in prison, I heard that some of these women were brought in. But they were quite feisty and they knew how to handle their interrogators, they knew how to handle their jailers, and they were doing everything within the law.

Updated Dec. 3, 2009: 

Vogue Magazine has a short interview with Haleh Esfandiari