Coming Soon: The Ladies’ Secret Society: History of the Courageous Women of Iran by Manda Zand Ervin

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was an unmitigated disaster for the women of Iran. That fact is well known. What is less well-known and what Manda Zand Ervin brings to light in her remarkable book, is the long history of struggle against clerical domination in which the women of Iran have been engaged for centuries.

Rooted in the proud history of ancient Persia where once Mother-Gods were worshipped, the Ladies' Secret Society, founded in the early decades of the 20th Century, was at once the inheritor of this proud history and the progenitor of the women of today who are enduring 25-year prison sentences for the defiant, yet innocent, act of removing their hijabs in public.

Ervin tells the stories and records the accomplishments of generations of individual women activists who have risked everything to educate their daughters even when held in thrall to the harem system of the Qajar era.

These women refused to be victims. They fought like lionesses for every scrap of freedom gained from the time of the Arab conquest to the era of the Shah, only to see all their hard-won rights destroyed with the coming of Khomeini s Islamic Revolution.

Yet, despite the extreme cruelty of the clergy and the imminent danger they face, the women of Iran are undeterred. Ervin pays loving tribute to them all as she relates the stories of their remarkable achievements in the face of overwhelming oppression.

Thanks to Manda Zand Ervin and her extraordinary book, we know their names and we will not forget their courageous lives.


Paperback: 340 pages
Publisher: New English Review Press (January 27, 2020)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1943003335
ISBN-13: 978-1943003334

Pre-order here!

Manda Zand Ervin is the founder and president of the Alliance of Iranian Women, an organization that brings the voices of Iranian women living under the Khomeinist regime to the West.
Born in Iran, and educated in the United States, Ervin was the managing director of the department of statistics and international affairs at the Customs Administration of Iran prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 1980, Zand Ervin came to the United States as a political refugee and became a US citizen three years later.

As a women’s rights activist and leading expert on Iranian affairs, she is frequently consulted by Members of Congress, and she has testified at Congressional briefings, the Helsinki Commission, and the United Nations.
In February 2008, Zand Ervin was appointed as the United States’ Delegate to the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women. She was also the featured speaker at the G8 Summit in Rome, on Violence Against Women in 2009. In 2012, she received the EMET Speaker of the Truth award.

Zand Ervin speaks on TV and radio programs, nationally and internationally, including CNN, FOX, BBC, Radio France, VOA, and cable television stations that broadcast into Iran from California. She also speaks at universities and conferences on the history of American/Iranian relations, European/Middle Eastern history, and human rights.

Like the book's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/theladiessecretsociety/