Hairdressers behind closed doors – Public spaces and private enterprise in Tehran
By Naomi Conrad
21st October 2009
Tehran is a crowded city of carefully closed and locked doors. Doors act as a barrier, albeit one which is often fragile and offering little protection between the private and public space, closing off the oppressive outside world of dark veils and long tunics and silenced criticism. The public space is a restricted one, which women are forbidden occupy without a male guardian, either a relative or husband, lest they are stopped by the police and questioned.
Huge murals of the martyrs of the Iraq-Iran war stare down at the people in the bustling streets below, a constant, stark reminder of the human sacrifice the regime has demanded of its population. Black signs depicting women in hejab posted on restaurants and cafes serve as a bleak warning that indecently dressed women are not welcome and certainly not welcome alone in this regime. The constant battle with the authorities over what is considered indecent is waged in the public space, as many women test the imposed limits with brightly coloured headscarves and ever shorter tunics, venturing out alone or with male friends.
The theocratic regime controls and restricts its citizens’ public space, their freedom of speech and expression: many protesting students and political dissidents suddenly and silently disappear behind the gates of an infamous prison outside of Tehran and many demonstrations are ruthlessly silenced.
Behind the locked doors, the private space is carefully guarded. When the door of a private house opens, it lets the female visitor enter the private space, take off her veil and breathe, talk, laugh. One of these secure spaces is a spacious living room in a flat on the 10th floor of a grey apartment building in a middle-class area, turned into a private beauty parlour. A middle-aged woman cuts and dyes hair, epilates, applies manicures and sells imported make-up.
In a society in which female hairdressers and beauticians are given no space to exercise their trade in public, the female entrepreneur must turn her home into her place of work and open her house to her clients. However, she can only do this if her husband or male relatives do not object to her work. The hairdresser’s husband and two sons have left the flat to give her and her clients the space they need.
The women’s hair is washed in the bathroom over the sink and legs epilated and eyebrows plucked on an armchair next to the huge TV which is playing Iranian pop music broadcast from Miami and illegally received via the satellite dish on the roof. While the women wait for the nail varnish to dry they sit on the large sofa reading magazines and chatting, eating sweets and drinking tea. Behind them posters of European film stars depict women with long flowing hair and short dresses, who are free to wear and say what they like in public.
A young Iranian student, who is drinking black tea while her hair is drying on rollers, talks of Moscow: a Russian scholarship will soon take her there and where she will be able to share a flat with other students, or even live alone. She talks of student life in Tehran, of student informers and compulsory political education and of the student parties for which red wine, smuggled in by Lufthansa stewardesses, is bought for extortionate prices on the black market. The older women nod when she explains the constant fear that the police might brutally storm the flat in which the party is being hosted, shattering any remaining illusion of the safety of the private space.
When it gets dark, the women pay and begin to leave. At the door they pull on their headscarves and veils, pulling them over their newly died and cut hair, before they venture out once more into the world beyond the closed door.