A photo shows a woman cutting her own birthday cake in 1973 in Tehran, Iran.
The photo was taken in Tehran in 1971, not 1973. The woman Sima in her photo was recently hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and was cutting cakes for her colleague’s birthday party.
Twitter user @lostinhist0ry on June 14, 2022 murmured A photo with the caption “Woman cutting a birthday cake in Iran, 1973, five years before the Islamic Revolution.” I received an email from a reader asking if I could find any data that could confirm if this was true.
After this story was published, we got in touch with one of the women’s children in the photo.
Iranian women’s dress code
Ten days after the viral tweet went up, a Facebook user reposted the same photo with the caption, “This is an image of a woman cutting a birthday cake in Iran in 1973, five years before the Islamic revolution. How would things change if the government became religious?”
According to users who commented on the photo, the woman’s apparent happiness and freedom to wear the clothes she wore was in stark contrast to the country’s current reality.
The U.S. Institute for Peace has released information about how modern dress codes and other discriminatory guidelines specifically target Iranian women, especially since the Iranian revolution of 1979.For example, the Institute for Peace states that “all women [in Iran] From puberty onwards, they are expected to cover their hair and dress modestly. ”
helpful leads
According to TinEye’s reverse image search website, one of the earliest posts of a photo of a woman appears to be from June 24, 2018. Tehran, Iran, 1973.
After some more digging, I found a comment on another Reddit thread from 12/22/2020 that I thought was helpful. In a repost of r/OldSchoolCool, Reddit user notbob1959 commented with information about Pinterest boards.
The original source for this photo is a Pinterest board, where there are several other photos of this woman and her parents. The message board is titled “Iranian Mother – Inspirational Photos of Mother in the 60’s” and it doesn’t say that the photo posted is anything other than her birthday or her 60’s.
As noted in the Reddit comments, the Pinterest board was titled “My Mother in Iran.” We’ve reached out to Pinterest users to see if they can provide photo details.
her name is sima
After this story was published, a Pinterest user responded. Sogol Hariri said she was the daughter of the woman in the photo. She said her photo was taken in her 1971, not her 1973, shortly after her mother Sima, who was 18 at the time, was hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air. made it clear that She said Sima was cutting her photo cake for her colleague’s birthday, not for her own celebration.
In an email, Hariri said her mother remembered the photo moment “very vividly.”
Let me start by clarifying that the photo was taken in Tehran, Iran in 1971 and she is actually Iranian! My mother was born in Tehran in 1953 and this photo is from It was taken when I was just 18 years old. Her name is Sima, she lived and worked in Tehran, but she eventually got married and all three children were born in Tehran. We all live in Canada now.
She was recently hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and had just begun her training, so she remembers the context of the photo very vividly. One of her new colleagues at the airline invited her to a party to celebrate his birthday and she was honored to cut his cake for all the guests. It was during her Iran Air career that one of her colleagues recommended her to model. Therefore, she started her modeling career in Tehran, where she walked her many fashion runways. She attached a photo of her before the flight, as well as some photos of the model wearing various looks. She describes this period in her life as very exciting and fascinating!She loved looking at her pictures from the time, and she casually started posting them on Pinterest. I was. I originally commented that she was on Pinterest and that her photos were taken in the 1960s of her, but there was only one family photo taken of her at the time, the others were All of them were taken in her 1970s.
Hariri sent me some photos of her mother and her modeling career. She also included a high-res version of her original photo and another photo showing Hariri holding the original print of her mother cutting the cake.
sauce:
Affari, Janet. “Iran Revolution”. Britannicahttps://www.britannica.com/event/Iranian-Revolution.
Hannah, Andrew. “Part 3: Women’s Law in Iran” iran primer8 December 2020, https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2020/dec/08/part-3-iranian-laws-women.
Jared 18. “My mother in Iran” Pinterest8 June 2013, https://www.pinterest.ca/justjared18/my-mother-in-iran/.
notbob1959. “Original source….” Reddit via r/OldSchoolCool23 December 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/.
TinEye reverse image searchhttps://tineye.com/.
