What I learned while writing my research paper....

I will start out with what I learned in “book” knowledge while writing my research paper.  I chose the topic of women’s rights in Iran.  Through my research, I learned a ton about the struggles women have had in Iran.  Most surprisingly, I learned about how things were really progressing quite well for women from the 40’s to the 70’s.  Women received the right to vote and to be appointed to Parliament in 1963.  Educational opportunities were good which also meant better jobs for women.  They were also given more rights in family courts regarding divorce and child custody and the legal age of marriage for women at one point had increased to eighteen.  Learning about this made me realize more how difficult things were for the women to accept in Reading Lolita in Tehran.  I didn’t realize that the women had as many rights as they did prior to the Revolution of 1979. 

After the Ayatollah Khomeini came into power, women lost most of the rights that they had fought so long and hard for.  I can’t even imagine the discouragement and frustration they must have felt.  Some of the rights that the Ayatollah immediately took away from women were to remove female judges claiming that they did not have the capacity to interpret Islamic law, he changed the legal age of marriage for women back to 9 years old, women could no longer initiate a divorce, women were prohibited from serving in the army, government-employed women were required to wear the veil to work, and women were banned from participating in sports. 

Things got somewhat better for women from 1997 to 2005 while Mohammad Khatami was the President but have degraded again since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president.  Some of the conditions that women currently live with are that they are not free to choose what they want to study, because of the young age of legal marriage many girls drop out of school to care for their husband and family, women are not allowed to inherit more than a quarter of her husband’s estate, only fathers can pass along citizenship to their children, a woman’s testimony is only worth half that of a man’s, women are not allowed to interact with men who are not family members making it difficult to work outside the home, etc. Even when it comes to stoning, men are buried up to their waist but women are buried up to their shoulders making it next to impossible to unbury themselves if they survive the stoning.  The inequality between men and women is unfathomable to me.

I also learned an incredible amount about writing during the preparation of my research paper as well as during the writing of our other papers.  As I have stated before, I had never heard of MLA format before taking this class so I had everything to learn about it!  I have learned something new about MLA in each one of our papers.  For this paper I learned about block quotes and more about the works cited format. I certainly had my fears about how to use quotes and paraphrasing so as not to plagiarize.  After reading comments from SmartThinking and meeting with Jennifer, I feel more comfortable with that aspect.  I had way too many quotes in my paper and as Jennifer put it “you need to put more Teri in your paper”.   I still have some editing to do before my final submission but I’m getting there.  Overall, this class has helped me to become more comfortable with writing.