An intellectual makeover for Iran women

For the women in her neighborhood, Nazanin Gohari has become a savior of minds.

A few years back, the part-time hairdresser turned community activist transformed her shabby apartment into a library for women, collecting secondhand books to fill the makeshift bookshelves in her living room.

First, she stocked them with trashy novels, poetry, and how-to and self-help titles. But demand for cookbooks and sewing patterns eventually gave way to requests for college preparation books and literature. The girls leafing through illustrated children's books bloomed into strong-willed women eager to pursue higher education.

She remembers one girl, a 17-year-old named Sedigheh, who came to her crying, distraught that her parents couldn't afford the study materials for college entrance exams. Scoring high would place the bright teenager on the fast track to a potentially glorious future, maybe even including medical school. Not taking the test would mean a life more ordinary, perhaps married to a man twice her age, tending to babies and home.

For Gohari, helping the teen became a mission, one of many. She scoured the city for the study books, relatively cheap by Western standards but a fortune for Iran's poor.

"She was ashamed because she couldn't afford the books," Gohari said.

The older woman put her hand out to the girl. "I said, 'Study here.' " And then Gohari handed her the books.

A plump bespectacled woman now in her late 50s, Gohari delights in the women in her impoverished district, recounting the details of their triumphs and ordeals. She sprinkles her sentences with folksy praises of God as she speaks excitedly about her adventures as a grass-roots activist, filling a social and even political vacuum created by Iran's rapid transition from a largely rural nation where folks tended to neighbors' needs to today's impersonal urban society where most fend for themselves.