As a result of her sustained fight over many years for human rights and democracy in Iran, Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003. Focusing on the legal status of women and children, Ebadi, a Muslim, was the first Iranian to receive it.
The Iranian press noted that she accepted the prize without wearing the chador, the traditional head scarf, and disapprovingly mentioned that Ebadi shook hands with a man after a BBC interview. Her stand—to reject the veil and to embrace human rights for women and children—stood in sharp contrast to my family's experience in Iran.
My mother often told us of the time when women were forced to drop their chadors in Iran. The ruler, Reza Shah, saw the veil as hindrance to the country's progress. Reza Shah's soldiers actually came up behind women and grabbed the chadors off their heads.
So while I was growing up in Iran, very few women wore the chador. Women wore the latest fashions. Women were thought to be emancipated and modern; in fact it was quite the opposite. The veil that was forced off women's heads was only superficial; Reza Shah's action had done nothing to emancipate them mentally. Family cultures and traditions gave women little freedom and enforced a mental veil of oppression. We accepted this prison sentence for ourselves.
Now things are changing fast for women in Iran. They are throwing the veils off their lives and standing for what they believe is their right. And Shirin Ebadi is one of those leading the way.
Another woman well ahead of her time even by today's standard is Mary Baker Eddy. She struggled to have her ideas accepted in the male-dominated world of the late-19th century. Her life can serve as a model for all women, because through her discovery of Christian Science, she has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of women and what they can achieve. She provided a healing system based on applied spirituality in her premier work Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She wrote: "Is it too much to say that this book is leavening the whole lump of human thought? You can trace its teachings in each step of mental and spiritual progress, from pulpit and press, in religion and ethics, and find these progressive steps either written or indicated in the book." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 114.
Her book set me free. I was brought up in a family with extreme male domination, the myth that women are lesser creatures, weak, vulnerable, powerless, and not worthy. My idea of God as a Father made me fear God as I did all men in my family. As a woman I saw no design for me in God's kingdom. I believed I was born the wrong gender to be of any use to God.
Mrs. Eddy's book showed me that the one God has no gender. Up until then, the divinity in my experience was always referred to as "He." I discovered that God is also "She"—both Father and Mother. So I no longer needed to strive for equality, because this understanding of God made it a reality for me.
I had always longed to be worthy of acceptance, opportunity, and respect, and to be able to serve God. Now I realized that I just needed to change my position. I had to accept the emancipation that came from recognizing my own Christlike individuality. I was ready to yield my old ideas and surrender them to the Christ, my spiritual nature, within. It is the Christ that lifts off the old views of life and transforms us.
The light of freedom that I gained from reading Science and Health tore away the dark veil of limitation, failure, heaviness, and discouragement. I was able to experience the nowness of what it means to be the child of God, born free of Spirit.
Dear reader, you can be free too. Whatever the veil over your eyes or thoughts may be, the Science in this book can remove it. And in the articles that follow, you will find more examples of how God's truth really does make people free.
Marta Greenwood is a Christian Science practitioner in London, England.
