The Feminist Was a Spy

It wasn’t a constitutional monarchy at the time, there were reformers pushing in that direction but the constitution put very few limits on the Shah. The Majlis wasn’t popularly elected then either.

Concrete example: I'm Bangladeshi, and our society has strict gender roles. When you visit a Bangladeshi household, the women will spend all the time in the kitchen cooking elaborate meals, while the men are socializing. This is rooted deeply in tradition, religion, etc., and even extends to Bangladeshis who live in western countries. It's how Bangladeshis show hospitality, caring for family, etc.

How do you approach this from a feminist perspective?

1) If you're a western cultural chauvinist, like my mom and me, you'd say that Bangladeshi culture is backwards and the goal should be to be more like say Scandinavians where society doesn't impose this burden to cook elaborate meals on women.

2) If you're a cultural relativist, like most 20th century liberals, you'd say gender roles are arbitrary social constructs, and it's not our place to impose what we perceive as more advanced views of gender roles on other cultures.

3) If you're an anti-colonial feminist, you've got a tension. Unlike a cultural relativist, you cannot accept the Bangladeshi practice. But unlike a cultural chauvinist, you can't say that your own society's view of gender roles is superior. So you have to reframe gender roles as being a matter of women's rights, and therefore outside of culture. You put it in the same bucket as other social practices that we're willing to condemn as being outside the realm of legitimate cultural practices.

Note that the first and second groups accept the premise that gender role are cultural. The third must construct a second category of social practices outside the boundaries of culture in which to place practices that they condemn. But this distinction between what's "culture" and what's “not culture" is arbitrary. The collective imposing social rules on individuals to allocate work, achieve desirable ends, etc., is what culture is. What the anti-colonial feminist has done is just whittled down the box labeled "culture" to include only the aspects of society--food, clothing, etc.--that they don't have strong feelings about either way. It's the "Disney's It's a Small World" version of culture, where everyone is just a Western European wearing different different clothes and eating different food.[1]

This is particularly relevant in the context of this discussion about Steinem and the CIA. The CIA people of the 1950s were in bucket (1)--they thought that Anglo-American culture was superior in its substantive aspects over other cultures. All of those peoples' kids became post-Christian liberals, but their fundamental view of the world isn't actually all that different. (3) is just (1) with more steps and more hiding the ball about the very significant cultural differences that actually exist in society.

[1] More sophisticated intersectionalists will frame this in terms of "choice," but that steals the base. The notion that society can't prescribe social roles to people without their affirmative consent is itself an outgrowth of western individualism. From India to China to Africa to the Middle East, prior to western influence, everyone agreed that society can impose roles and obligations and burdens on individuals based on who they are.

> allowing it to be imposed on foreign societies without accusations of cultural imperialism.

I don't actually know if this is an accurate representation of 21st century feminist thought. If anything, I think they just take an inevitableist view and say every country must be allowed to have its feminist revolution in its own time.