First Woman Driver
My mother was the first woman driver in Iran, and for about a decade, she was the only licensed one. In the family, we knew that, since driving with her always attracted immense attention, but my mother got confirmation of that fact. Women started getting licenses and driving in Iran in moderate numbers in the mid-1970s, and harassing them was great sport for the resentful men who thought women had no business driving. My mother’s purse was stolen some time in the 1970s along with her driver’s license, and she went to get a replacement. She was always assiduous about memorizing her license number and the license plate number of our car. She gave the clerk at the licensing office the number of her driver’s license and he went to look for it. He returned to tell her there was no such license number. She repeated the number and assured him it was hers. He responded that only men had numbers with that prefix (the licenses were segregated by gender for fear of cross contamination, one assumes). She told him that she had been driving for decades and to please check again. He came back, this time looking astonished and sheepish. He had found her number among the men’s licenses and told her she was, indeed the first woman to drive in Iran.
My mother drove us to school and my father to work. She drove in the evenings in summer, gathering other family members and driving us to Shemron, in the foothills of the Elborz Mountains where it was cooler than in the heart of Tehran. Usually, we collected an aunt and cousins, and lingered in Shemron, sitting on the hood of the car, eating ice cream or roasted corn on the cob, playing, until it cooled off in town, and we could return to sleep on balconies or the roofs of houses.
My father was in the import-export business, though it really amounted only to importing, since there was little to export from Iran. In the early 1950s, oil was still under the control of foreigners, primarily the British, and there was little wealth for imported goods, but since there was also little local industry, goods had to be imported. In the early 1950s, my father imported textiles, tea, and whatever other items the government allowed at any given time. After oil reverted to Iran’s control, he imported big items such as brick-making equipment and represented international steel companies , but in the 1940s and 1950s, imports were more modest and basic. Many of the firms that my father represented in Iran sent employees to visit, and my mother also chauffeured them around the sights and entertained them. A woman driving European-looking men around caused a frenzy, especially in the bazaar area of Tehran where these visitors generally wanted to go. This created a double spectacle —a woman driver and Europeans, both improbable sights in the bazaar.
One time during a holiday, we had Hungarian visitors and we all went to see the light displays on public buildings—Iranians loved to light public buildings for holidays. This was in an area of town that we didn’t venture into at night, a public square surrounded by government buildings. There were people in the streets celebrating. When they noticed us, suddenly the car was surrounded by a mob, and all my mother could do was inch forward. Even though the government of Iran was officially looking West towards progress, the population was still largely illiterate, conservative, and traditionally Moslem, and a woman driver was anathema to their values. We shut all the windows, because at first we couldn’t tell if they were merely curious or hostile, but eventually there was a lot of spitting at the car, and a handful of men started to rock it back and forth. My mother maintained her cool, and continued creeping forward. Finally we left the plaza area and sped down some side streets out of there.
My mother always behaved like it was her right to drive and never made much of a fuss about it. She loved driving. My uncle had taught her to drive in the late 1940s, and she didn’t seem to consider it a risk or something she should relinquish because the mob didn’t approve. I think driving gave her a feeling of freedom she wouldn’t have felt in any other way, and she was, in her own fashion, a fiercely independent woman.
She was also a force on the side of right and the downtrodden. In the 1950s in Iran, running a household was labor intensive. There were no vacuum cleaners, so sweeping was done daily, with a broom. Mopping the floors entailed getting down on all fours, and scrubbing the terrazzo tile frequently, because in the dry desert of Tehran, dust settled on everything. With limited refrigeration, food was bought daily, and meals depended on what was in the market that day. We carried groceries up three flights to our flat, and often made several trips down to the car to unload everything. So, like most middle class families, we employed help, usually a maid who cleaned and cooked.
One time, our maid came to my mother with a wretched story about a girl from her village whose mother had died. Her father had remarried, and the stepmother was extremely cruel to the girl. If the maid thought her treatment was cruel, then it had to be extreme—this was a country where casual cruelty was unremarkable. There was deprivation everywhere and people commonly preyed on each other in order to preserve themselves and their families. One frequently saw acts of unkindness--children being beaten, husbands beating wives, public humiliation, and harshness of every sort. Desperate parents even mutilated their children in order to use them to beg, hoping it would be more profitable. So if the maid thought this stepmother was cruel, what was going on in her village was clearly beyond the usual level of abuse.
My mother never told us the details of what was happening to the girl, but she agreed to take her in. In most houses, servants were treated like slaves. They had separate meager meals, were beaten if they didn’t perform, lived in barely habitable conditions, and were generally made to obey any member of the family. My mother didn’t allow us, as children, to demand anything of our maid—she was our elder and deserved respect. The maid ate what we ate, and my mother paid her better than a Moslem household would have paid her. Moslems maids didn’t want to work in a Jewish household because their mullahs would terrorize them about what Jews would do to them and teach them that they could steal and lie to non-Moslems. The ignorance in the Iranian society extended to and was perpetrated by the religious class, which could read and write at a rudimentary level, but was woefully benighted. But because they could read and write, they were considered educated and held great power in their communities.
The girl arrived, a 10 or 11 year-old, bruised and scabby, in tattered, filthy clothing, and crawling with lice. My mother immediately took her to the public baths and got her clean clothes and shoes. She had never had shoes on before, and she could shuffle along in them on flat surfaces but couldn’t manage the stairs, so she would take them off and carry them up and down. She had never slept in a bed and kept falling off, so she slept on a mattress on the floor in the room my sisters and I shared. Everything in the city was a wonder to her, including riding a car. And everything she had experienced in her village was a wonder to us, as she regaled us with fantastical stories about village life—sheep with two heads, fairies that came in the night, and tales she heard around her village.
At that time, we lived in a flat just below the only movie studio in Iran. The building was owned by two refugee Armenian brothers, one of whom lived downstairs from us, and the other, who ran the studio upstairs and made films. It wasn’t much of a studio, another flat the size of ours that had been gutted and adapted for film-making. The brothers also owned the movie theater next door, called Cinema Diana, where they showed mostly American or Hindi movies, and also their own films when they completed one. When one of these films was shown, the movie theater was mobbed, because, of course, most people didn’t speak English or Hindi. Foreign films would run for a few minutes, and then would be cut to insert a written translation of the dialogue (dubbing of films came many years later). Since most Iranians at that time couldn’t read, they would usually come in groups with at least one literate person, and that person would read the translation to his group, creating quite a buzz in the theater between scenes, as groups were brought up to date on the action. A movie in Farsi meant anyone could go without the need for a reader, so they were very popular.
The girl had never seen a movie, so when one of the Farsi movies was showing, we took her. It was a melodrama about a man who gets tuberculosis and dies. A few days after we went to see the film, we ran into the actor entering the building on his way up to the studio. The girl started screaming hysterically. When we calmed her down, we understood that she thought she had seen a ghost because that dead man was now walking around. We explained to her that the movies were not real, that there was something called acting, and that he was just an actor pretending to die, but she was shaken and didn’t understand how that was possible. Every time she saw that actor, she would run and hide.
My mother kept the girl with us until her father arranged a marriage for her a couple of years later, and she left us. I’m certain she returned to her village to a life of meanness and spite. A father who would not prevent his new wife from abusing his daughter would not have taken great pains in choosing a husband for her. I always hoped that the years she spent as our playmate were a comfort to her. Looking back on it, I appreciate my mother’s compassion in taking her in.
My mother was constantly trying to educate and teach our maids. She tried to teach them to read numbers so they could ride the bus and recognize currency by the denomination, not just the color. One maid had three children and was pregnant again, and quite upset at the prospect of another mouth to feed. After the birth of her child, my mother tried to get her to use birth control pills, but because she couldn’t keep track of the 20-day cycle on the pill dispenser, she invariably missed some days. Then my mother tried to talk her into using condoms, but the husband refused. My mother would sometimes despair and say that to save on the use of a candle, they went to bed and created another child they couldn’t afford.
It was in this harsh and unforgiving atmosphere that my mother drove her car and carried on her life with no thought, it seemed, to the futility of trying to progress past the ignorance and ubiquitous meanness of much of life in Iran. She embraced the foreign elements of life in Iran and partook of all that was available culturally and socially. She joined the Iran American Society, an American agency that disseminated U.S. culture and held events like square dancing and showing documentaries about America. She volunteered with Jewish organizations that tried to provide young people with a skill that would earn them a living. On Thursdays, the start of the Moslem weekend, she picked us up from school, and we usually drove to a movie, preferably an American musical. Even though she was an outsider in Iran, she worked at making friends, integrating into the society and making the most of her life there. She appreciated that Iran had taken in our stateless family and offered us a haven, while most countries in the 1940s were turning away refugees, especially Jews, and in her small way, she wanted to prod the people in her circle towards a better life.
When I was in my twenties, my mother came to visit me in New York where I was living and working. She met me and some of my work mates for lunch one day, other women about my age. As we were talking, she wistfully said, “I always wanted to work.” We treated this comment as a joke—like we would have preferred not to have to work, and how tough was her non-working life. Even as I joked about it, I knew what she meant. Working meant freedom. If you earn your living, you aren’t beholden to someone else; you can have some say in how you lead your life that doesn’t require permission from the earner you’re dependent on. More than that, you were part of a world whose ideas weren’t proscribed by gender, a world where one can think beyond the grocery list and the meals for the day. Driving was one way to escape those strictures, and working would have been too. Yet her life had an impact on many more people than my working life ever would have. She affected so many who couldn’t help themselves, and she did it without any expectation of praise or recognition. She just did it.
My mother drove us to school and my father to work. She drove in the evenings in summer, gathering other family members and driving us to Shemron, in the foothills of the Elborz Mountains where it was cooler than in the heart of Tehran. Usually, we collected an aunt and cousins, and lingered in Shemron, sitting on the hood of the car, eating ice cream or roasted corn on the cob, playing, until it cooled off in town, and we could return to sleep on balconies or the roofs of houses.
My father was in the import-export business, though it really amounted only to importing, since there was little to export from Iran. In the early 1950s, oil was still under the control of foreigners, primarily the British, and there was little wealth for imported goods, but since there was also little local industry, goods had to be imported. In the early 1950s, my father imported textiles, tea, and whatever other items the government allowed at any given time. After oil reverted to Iran’s control, he imported big items such as brick-making equipment and represented international steel companies , but in the 1940s and 1950s, imports were more modest and basic. Many of the firms that my father represented in Iran sent employees to visit, and my mother also chauffeured them around the sights and entertained them. A woman driving European-looking men around caused a frenzy, especially in the bazaar area of Tehran where these visitors generally wanted to go. This created a double spectacle —a woman driver and Europeans, both improbable sights in the bazaar.
One time during a holiday, we had Hungarian visitors and we all went to see the light displays on public buildings—Iranians loved to light public buildings for holidays. This was in an area of town that we didn’t venture into at night, a public square surrounded by government buildings. There were people in the streets celebrating. When they noticed us, suddenly the car was surrounded by a mob, and all my mother could do was inch forward. Even though the government of Iran was officially looking West towards progress, the population was still largely illiterate, conservative, and traditionally Moslem, and a woman driver was anathema to their values. We shut all the windows, because at first we couldn’t tell if they were merely curious or hostile, but eventually there was a lot of spitting at the car, and a handful of men started to rock it back and forth. My mother maintained her cool, and continued creeping forward. Finally we left the plaza area and sped down some side streets out of there.
My mother always behaved like it was her right to drive and never made much of a fuss about it. She loved driving. My uncle had taught her to drive in the late 1940s, and she didn’t seem to consider it a risk or something she should relinquish because the mob didn’t approve. I think driving gave her a feeling of freedom she wouldn’t have felt in any other way, and she was, in her own fashion, a fiercely independent woman.
She was also a force on the side of right and the downtrodden. In the 1950s in Iran, running a household was labor intensive. There were no vacuum cleaners, so sweeping was done daily, with a broom. Mopping the floors entailed getting down on all fours, and scrubbing the terrazzo tile frequently, because in the dry desert of Tehran, dust settled on everything. With limited refrigeration, food was bought daily, and meals depended on what was in the market that day. We carried groceries up three flights to our flat, and often made several trips down to the car to unload everything. So, like most middle class families, we employed help, usually a maid who cleaned and cooked.
One time, our maid came to my mother with a wretched story about a girl from her village whose mother had died. Her father had remarried, and the stepmother was extremely cruel to the girl. If the maid thought her treatment was cruel, then it had to be extreme—this was a country where casual cruelty was unremarkable. There was deprivation everywhere and people commonly preyed on each other in order to preserve themselves and their families. One frequently saw acts of unkindness--children being beaten, husbands beating wives, public humiliation, and harshness of every sort. Desperate parents even mutilated their children in order to use them to beg, hoping it would be more profitable. So if the maid thought this stepmother was cruel, what was going on in her village was clearly beyond the usual level of abuse.
My mother never told us the details of what was happening to the girl, but she agreed to take her in. In most houses, servants were treated like slaves. They had separate meager meals, were beaten if they didn’t perform, lived in barely habitable conditions, and were generally made to obey any member of the family. My mother didn’t allow us, as children, to demand anything of our maid—she was our elder and deserved respect. The maid ate what we ate, and my mother paid her better than a Moslem household would have paid her. Moslems maids didn’t want to work in a Jewish household because their mullahs would terrorize them about what Jews would do to them and teach them that they could steal and lie to non-Moslems. The ignorance in the Iranian society extended to and was perpetrated by the religious class, which could read and write at a rudimentary level, but was woefully benighted. But because they could read and write, they were considered educated and held great power in their communities.
The girl arrived, a 10 or 11 year-old, bruised and scabby, in tattered, filthy clothing, and crawling with lice. My mother immediately took her to the public baths and got her clean clothes and shoes. She had never had shoes on before, and she could shuffle along in them on flat surfaces but couldn’t manage the stairs, so she would take them off and carry them up and down. She had never slept in a bed and kept falling off, so she slept on a mattress on the floor in the room my sisters and I shared. Everything in the city was a wonder to her, including riding a car. And everything she had experienced in her village was a wonder to us, as she regaled us with fantastical stories about village life—sheep with two heads, fairies that came in the night, and tales she heard around her village.
At that time, we lived in a flat just below the only movie studio in Iran. The building was owned by two refugee Armenian brothers, one of whom lived downstairs from us, and the other, who ran the studio upstairs and made films. It wasn’t much of a studio, another flat the size of ours that had been gutted and adapted for film-making. The brothers also owned the movie theater next door, called Cinema Diana, where they showed mostly American or Hindi movies, and also their own films when they completed one. When one of these films was shown, the movie theater was mobbed, because, of course, most people didn’t speak English or Hindi. Foreign films would run for a few minutes, and then would be cut to insert a written translation of the dialogue (dubbing of films came many years later). Since most Iranians at that time couldn’t read, they would usually come in groups with at least one literate person, and that person would read the translation to his group, creating quite a buzz in the theater between scenes, as groups were brought up to date on the action. A movie in Farsi meant anyone could go without the need for a reader, so they were very popular.
The girl had never seen a movie, so when one of the Farsi movies was showing, we took her. It was a melodrama about a man who gets tuberculosis and dies. A few days after we went to see the film, we ran into the actor entering the building on his way up to the studio. The girl started screaming hysterically. When we calmed her down, we understood that she thought she had seen a ghost because that dead man was now walking around. We explained to her that the movies were not real, that there was something called acting, and that he was just an actor pretending to die, but she was shaken and didn’t understand how that was possible. Every time she saw that actor, she would run and hide.
My mother kept the girl with us until her father arranged a marriage for her a couple of years later, and she left us. I’m certain she returned to her village to a life of meanness and spite. A father who would not prevent his new wife from abusing his daughter would not have taken great pains in choosing a husband for her. I always hoped that the years she spent as our playmate were a comfort to her. Looking back on it, I appreciate my mother’s compassion in taking her in.
My mother was constantly trying to educate and teach our maids. She tried to teach them to read numbers so they could ride the bus and recognize currency by the denomination, not just the color. One maid had three children and was pregnant again, and quite upset at the prospect of another mouth to feed. After the birth of her child, my mother tried to get her to use birth control pills, but because she couldn’t keep track of the 20-day cycle on the pill dispenser, she invariably missed some days. Then my mother tried to talk her into using condoms, but the husband refused. My mother would sometimes despair and say that to save on the use of a candle, they went to bed and created another child they couldn’t afford.
It was in this harsh and unforgiving atmosphere that my mother drove her car and carried on her life with no thought, it seemed, to the futility of trying to progress past the ignorance and ubiquitous meanness of much of life in Iran. She embraced the foreign elements of life in Iran and partook of all that was available culturally and socially. She joined the Iran American Society, an American agency that disseminated U.S. culture and held events like square dancing and showing documentaries about America. She volunteered with Jewish organizations that tried to provide young people with a skill that would earn them a living. On Thursdays, the start of the Moslem weekend, she picked us up from school, and we usually drove to a movie, preferably an American musical. Even though she was an outsider in Iran, she worked at making friends, integrating into the society and making the most of her life there. She appreciated that Iran had taken in our stateless family and offered us a haven, while most countries in the 1940s were turning away refugees, especially Jews, and in her small way, she wanted to prod the people in her circle towards a better life.
When I was in my twenties, my mother came to visit me in New York where I was living and working. She met me and some of my work mates for lunch one day, other women about my age. As we were talking, she wistfully said, “I always wanted to work.” We treated this comment as a joke—like we would have preferred not to have to work, and how tough was her non-working life. Even as I joked about it, I knew what she meant. Working meant freedom. If you earn your living, you aren’t beholden to someone else; you can have some say in how you lead your life that doesn’t require permission from the earner you’re dependent on. More than that, you were part of a world whose ideas weren’t proscribed by gender, a world where one can think beyond the grocery list and the meals for the day. Driving was one way to escape those strictures, and working would have been too. Yet her life had an impact on many more people than my working life ever would have. She affected so many who couldn’t help themselves, and she did it without any expectation of praise or recognition. She just did it.
This is fascinating, Nora. I had no idea what your childhood and your family's life in Iran was really like. I look forward to more of your stories.
ReplyDeleteThat was a real tribute to your mother. I wish she had lived to read it. She was a woman ahead of her time! I th8nk you take after her!
ReplyDeleteThanks Judy. I would like to think I got some of her qualities!
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