Working for the Home and the World: Towards a Re-Evaluation of Gender, Labour, and Culture in Nineteenth Century Iran

Unlike work on contemporary Iran, historical treatments of work activities there are, for the most part, gender blind. The proper incorporation of gender into historical analysis requires [1] the recuperation of hitherto disregarded information and sources; [2] the reconfiguring of historical interpretations in the light of a changed body of knowledge; [3] reconceptualising underlying assumptions about, the past, as required by such interpretations. While there is some work which partially addresses the first element, there are very few historical studies which engage with the second and third, and most scholarship on labour, production, consumption and exchange during the nineteenth century offers no gender analysis at all. This paper will use empirical evidence and conceptual critiques to argue that proper gender analysis is crucial to an adequate understanding of material life and material change in Iran in that period. It aims to make a case for mainstreaming such an analysis, rather than relegating it to some marginalised ‘specialist’ sub-category of social and economic history. It will show that gender was a key constitutive material as well as cultural feature of labour relations and labour processes, playing a shaping role in the formation and maintenance of power relations, difference, inequity, and hierarchy
The paper will focus on three themes. Firstly it will offer a gendered analysis of material activities in nineteenth century Iran as the necessary foundation for interpreting production, reproduction, consumption and exchange, examining the multiple sites and forms of labour which sustained households, communities, and larger networks. Secondly it will develop a gendered reading of the impact of new global material forces and power relations on productive life in nineteenth century Iran, taking the example of carpet production. Thirdly it will explore the intersections of cultural and material agendas within the productive and reproductive lives and relationships of nineteenth century Iranians in households, agricultural settings, and urban workshops. In each case the paper will test out approaches and methods already developed for gendered analyses of labour in other societies for their relevance to the particular circumstances in Iran in that period. It will also present original material which provides empirical support for the centrality of gender to good historical analysis of work, and for the importance of intersections between cultural and material elements in working lives, structures and relationships