The history of Persian women in Iran cannot be reduced to a single arc of advancement or fall. It is instead a multifaceted political history shaped by monarchy, modernization, revolution, conflict, religion, and state formation. The 1979 Islamic Revolution did not occur in a vacuum; it intervened in a society that was already negotiating the contradictions between Western-style change and profoundly ingrained patriarchal practices. To understand what the revolution "led" to for women, we must look at the lengthy history of female political participation in Iran, as well as how gender became important to the post-revolutionary state's ideology....