Social Science Research Council

"Exporting the American Dream: The United States and the Making of the Modern Iranian Home"

Postwar American domesticity is much studied, but we know little about how its exportation has altered other nations’ cultures and built environments. Iran is a perfect locus for examining this process because nowhere in the Middle East did the U.S. push more persistently for modernization after WWII than in Iran, and nowhere did America’s intention ultimately backfire so significantly. During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941-1979), Iran underwent a profound economic and social transformation, buoyed by its oil resources and American economic support. President Truman’s Point IV Program for Iran (1946-1967) established several home economics programs, housing developments and shopping centers directed and designed by American specialists. American aid pushed Iranians into a new space, in both a concrete and abstract sense. This new space housed cultural conversions, including new notions of taste, beauty and consumption. “What is going on in Iran,” said President Johnson in 1964, “is about the best thing going on anywhere in the world,” and his ambassador to Tehran added, the “Shah is making Iran [a] showcase of modernization in this part of the world.” Forty years later, Iran is perceived in a radically different way.

Through archival research and fieldwork in Iran and the United States, this dissertation illuminates a neglected aspect of these changes by examining the culture of the Shah’s era as it manifested itself within the home. Although I will situate this “reforming” of Iranian domesticity within the post-WWII period and the Cold War context, I will also examine earlier American missionary activities that coincided with societal changes underway long before 1945. The driving impulses of American-promoted transformations can be traced back to the arrival of missionaries in the nineteenth century, whose records indicate that improvement in housing practices was a high priority. I will look at how conservative and revolutionary forces, such as the religious group Fadaian-i Islam and the Marxist Tudeh party, contested concepts of gender, class, consumption and religious and national identity as they took shape within the home. Finally, I will explore how changes brought about by the U.S. and its allies inadvertently fueled new religiously-motivated efforts to return Iranian home life to its “traditional” roots. My dissertation is a contribution to the substantial historiographies of modernization in the Third World in the era of decolonization. Considered in the context of current international tensions, it also sheds light on the ways in which Muslims today view the role of the U.S. in the Middle East.