What We Can Learn from this Iranian Woman About Fighting Patriarchy
A friend invited me last week to see a documentary she worked on, the first-ever Oscar-nominated documentary to come out of Iran, called Cutting Through Rocks. I’ll admit – I was feeling overwhelmed by the heaviness of the news and have been burying myself in juicy fiction for the past few weeks. But when we started dropping bombs on Iran on Sunday, I decided I would go see it the next night.
Cutting Through Rocks is the story of Sara Shahverdi, a divorced, motorcycling-riding midwife, and who became the first woman elected to the governing council of her rural village in northwestern Iran. The film follows her fight on behalf of women in her village, a place where she was born and grew up, and where she helped to deliver over 400 babies.
An early scene shows her confronting one of her brothers, who has coerced her sisters into signing away the rights to their inheritance.
“What kind of brother would do this to his sisters?” she screams. She rips the agreement to shreds. This question animates so much of her work: How can you do this to women that you have known all your life?
Filmed over eight years, starting in 2017, Shahverdi lives in a prototypically patriarchal village: child marriage is still common, women have little access to land inheritance, and girls rarely continue to study past elementary school.
And while the level of overt repression is greater, and the cultural context is completely different, I couldn’t help recognize patterns of control that looked familiar enough.
As Kate Manne wrote this week, if we cared about girls, the world would be unimaginably different, including here in the U.S. “If we cared about girls, we would not have bombed a girls’ elementary school, murdering hundreds. If we cared about girls, Trump would not have declared war to distract us from the Epstein files and the missing documents containing evidence that he raped another thirteen year-old girl,” Manne writes.
And as Jessica Valenti wrote last month, the Heritage Foundation – the architects of Project 2025 – has a plan for the government to address the factors that “conspire” to create falling birth rates. “These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home.” Basically: every fundamental right women have fought for.
So all this is to say – while global patriarchy looks different in some places, I thought there was plenty in Sara Shahverdi’s story that we could take a few notes on here at home. That includes the simple idea that one person’s small scale actions can truly make a difference.
We watch as Shahverdi wins her council seat with the support of women and young people in the village, and then delivers on her campaign promises. She fights for a local playground to be built according to her speculations. She finds a way to bring more gas lines to the village, but she will only allow homes to get the benefit of gas lines if the men agree to sign over some property rights to their wives. (“It only took 10 cups of tea to get him to agree,” his wife wryly notes.)
She takes the power that she has, and uses to make sure that as many women as possible can benefit.
She visits the local girls’ school, where she asks the girls to sign a pledge to delay marriage and stay in school as long as possible. While all of them sign, only five girls remain unmarried by the end of the film. Still, she has shown them what another way might look like.
She allows one girl to live with her as the girl waits to be given permission to divorce a man who she was forced to marry at age 12, when he was twice her age.
“I want to be like you,” we hear girls in the village tell her over and over again.
Shahverdi told the filmmakers that she sees the obstacles of life as a mountain. If you keep cutting through the rock, one day, we will have a clear road.
That’s what fighting patriarchy is: cutting through rocks. It takes force, and persistence, and it can take a very long time.
There is a cost to her independence: Midway through the film, after Shahverdi wins her run for village council, local authorities take a year out of her life by questioning her gender and her sex. She is forced her to endure a series of humiliating tests to ascertain whether she is “really” a woman. (No real woman would be able to wield the power that she does, their argument goes.).
Body policing is a basic tool of patriarchy - one we know well here – and it’s part of the arsenal used against Shahverdi. “The body policing that happens everywhere, as women, we become aware of that regardless of where we live; it becomes part of our collective consciousness,” one of the filmmakers told Vanessa Hope, “To see it happen in such a dramatic way to her was really shocking, and she was equally surprised.”
Eventually, the investigation is dropped as quickly as it began, with no explanation. Still, Shahverdi wonders, “They closed the case, but who is going to heal my pain now?”
Shahverdi takes solace in the supportive relationship she had with her father, who taught her to ride a motorcycle when she was a little girl. She credits him for teaching her that she could find her own way in the world, that she could do things differently. When she’s enduring the pain of the “investigation” into her gender, she returns to the trees she helped her father plant, to take comfort in his memory.
She works in the service of women, but she does it by drawing on the close relationships she has with men in the village. When a man shows up to chastise his niece for riding a motorcycle in public, Shahverdi stops him from hitting the girl. You’ve known me since we were kids, she says to him. How can you hurt a child I am trying to help?
The filmmakers have said that one of the messages they took from Shahverdi’s political organizing is that transformation is most permanent when it emerges from within a community, and at its own pace. “I learned that change doesn’t happen overnight,” Shahverdi says in the film. “Sometimes a small step is enough.”
In the film’s closing scene, we see Shahverdi inviting the small group of five girls who have remained unmarried and stayed in school – along with their families – out to take a motorcycle ride. Sara had been the village’s only woman motorcycle rider, and now these girls’ families – including their fathers – have come out to encourage them to do it.
It’s a triumph. The screen is filled with the wide expanse of the landscape as the girls ride off: an image of hope, possibility and forward momentum. Four of those five girls have gone on to university, and the first girls’ high school is being built in the village.
How can we push back on patriarchy for the girls in our lives? Who are the people who have helped you do that?
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LOVE THIS. This part made me tear up a little: "Shahverdi told the filmmakers that she sees the obstacles of life as a mountain. If you keep cutting through the rock, one day, we will have a clear road.
That’s what fighting patriarchy is: cutting through rocks. It takes force, and persistence, and it can take a very long time."
Thanks for this little gem--perfectly timed.
Very powerful article. I hope the story of Sara’s father inspires me to lift up my daughter even more