Haleh Esfandiari is consulting director of the Middle East Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From 1980 to 1994, she taught Persian language and literature at Princeton University. Prior to that, she had served as deputy secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran and worked as a journalist in Iran. She is the author of Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution (1997), written in part while she was a visiting fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies in 1995. This essay draws upon remarks that she presented on March 8 at a symposium sponsored by the Wilson Center and the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation.
