The locals say that Parvin brings blessings to the rice paddies of the village, that when she touches a field, rice begins to sprout from the paddies.
Parvin is a seasonal agricultural worker in the village of Sasan Sara in Iran’s northern Gilan Province, a lush, subtropical land along the Caspian Sea. When working in the field, she wears rubber boots and sings to herself, the sad songs of a destitute rice planter — songs that even from far away would fill you with melancholy.
When the spring arrives, and while the locals are still exchanging visits to mark the Iranian new year, Parvin starts to soak the seeds, plow, harrow, till, and level the land before planting. She is experienced, and works the fields using various tools, from tillers to oxen-driven plows.
When the rice-planting season is over, she is sent to harvest tobacco leaves. She and other women have to go over the tobacco field multiple times to make sure that all leaves have been harvested. Parasitic thorny weeds regularly injure their limbs. Men are given the mechanized tools, but women must complete each step by hand, from planting to pulling out the leaves, curing and drying.
I tell Parvin that today, October 15, is the International Day of Rural Women. She laughs and says that peasant women don’t have a “day.” These things sound beautiful only on TV and in the newspapers. When women rice planters come down with rheumatism and arthritis, when they moan from the pain all through the night and, come morning, rap canvas around their tiny ankles and wear rubber boots to go back to work, such days are meaningless.
Parvin says the best news she received today was when the owner of the paddy told the workers they were allowed to wear rubber boots to the field. “Often the owners tells us not to wear rubbers or gloves because they can damage new sprouts,” she explains.
She has been working for 48 years. She started when she was seven. She was taken for “training” — unpaid work in the neighbor’s rice paddy. Seventeen years ago, her husband left her and their four children. Since then, she had been the sole breadwinner for her family.
“It’s a Woman’s Job!”
Parvin says since she began work at seven, she has never had a day of rest. Today she is 55. The pain from all her years of work prevents her from sleeping at nights. She has no insurance and owns no property. When her husband was still around, she did not even receive her own wages. “The first few days when the field was being prepared, he showed up,” she says. “Then he would lounge around the coffee shops in the village with his pals. He used to say that planting seedlings was a woman’s job, not a man’s.”
She says that even in the final months of her pregnancies she had to work. She both planted seedlings and weeded the fields. The weeding made her hands blister. She has suffered from fungus infection and field fever (leptospirosis) several times.
And working in the field is not all Parvin has to do. She wakes up at 5am, feeds the chickens, does the housework, cleans her children’s clothes, cooks lunch and sets out for the field at 7am. And when she returns she has more to do. She has to make dough and bake bread. She also picks fruit in the neighbor’s garden and must remember to milk the livestock on time.
Parvin worries about plans to modernize rice planting to expand production. “If I don’t work I die,” she says. “Even on holidays I work on my son’s land. He expects me to work for him without pay or compensation.”
Statistics show that 60 percent of planting and harvesting of rice in northern Iran is done by women, but their wages are much lower than that of men who do the same job. For example, for a 12-hour day (from 6am to 6pm), men earn between 50,000 and 60,000 toman ($14.64 to $17.57), depending on the generosity of the employer. But women earn 10,000 tomans ($2.93) less per day, or about 20 percent less. For the equivalent work, they are paid between $11.71 and $14.64.
I Weave Wind, Not Rugs
Touran lives in the village of Fordow — the village, near the city of Qom, was once in the news a lot because it was home to nuclear enrichment facilities. She knots colorful strands around warps to weave rugs and says that for years her fingertips have borne the indelible deep marks of the strands.
She is weaving an intricate hunting scene that will carry her spirit to a land far, far away. A wealthy Iranian merchant who lives in Germany orders the rugs and chooses the designs that will decorate the homes of the European rich. She lets them see the world through her eyes: arabesques, floral shapes, fantastic birds and animals, and geometrical patterns of color that evoke a paradise on earth.
Touran earns a wage, and gets no share of the profits made by the sale of her rugs. “To weave a rug I work days and nights for six to 10 months,” she says. “Sometimes I get the feeling that time is standing still. No matter how many knots I tie, the rug refuses to grow by even a centimeter. I get up early in the morning and work nonstop till midnight. My eyes have gone weak and my back bothers me. My mother was a rug-weaver, too, and she died of tuberculosis because of her work.”
She says that most of the women she knows suffer from complications as a result of weaving rugs. “My mother stood behind the rug scaffolding as long as she was able to tie knots, even when she had turned into a sack of bones,” she says. “Her skeleton became deformed and until the end she suffered from pelvic pains. Eventually the rugs killed her.”
Touran weaves rugs to pay her husband’s debts. He has a small local grocery store and his business account is in his wife’s name. Several times has been close to complete bankruptcy.
She does all the work — from setting up the scaffold, creating the framework of warps and wefts to tying the knots — by herself. She has gazed at the intricate patterns for so long that she cannot see anything, near or far, without the help of glasses.
“Uppity” Women
There is no future for her, Touran says. The deed to their little house — two rooms, a small yard and a tiny kitchen — is in her husband’s name. “They say women must not own land; otherwise they get uppity,” she says.
A few times she has complained about having to work so much, and her husband has told her that she can stop weaving rugs and go to prison instead because the checks given out to creditors are in her name and have her signature on them.
Touran’s husband gets 20 million tomans, or close to $5,900, for each rug that Touran makes. The Iranian merchant in Germany provides the raw material and, depending on the size and design of the rug, pays Touran’s wages. Her husband is kind to Touran for a few days after he receives the payment and spends money on her, buying her new dresses and a few kilos of meat and fruit. For this luxury, she has to work full-time on a rug for six to 10 months.
Touran is not insured. In early 2011, a mandatory social insurance program for rug weavers was introduced, but many women who work from home were not covered. The excuse was that these women do not work at licensed workshops with regular working hours. In spring 2017, however, the parliament ordered the government to take action and close this loophole so that these women can be insured.
In Iran between 10 and 12 million women live in rural areas; six million of them work directly in agriculture. Just one percent of them own any agricultural land [Persian link].
October 15 is the International Day of Rural Women. According to the UN, “women and girls in rural areas suffer disproportionately from multi-dimensional poverty.” This is true in many places in the world. And it is certainly true in Iran.
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