Remembering Mahsa Shekarloo, Iran's Internet Pioneer and Women’s Rights Activist

[theHandpuppet]

Global Voices
Remembering Mahsa Shekarloo, Iran's Internet Pioneer and Women’s Rights Activist
10 October 2014

Mahsa Shekarloo, women’s rights activist, writer, editor, translator and founder of the online feminist journal Bad Jens, died Friday September 5, 2014, surrounded by her family. She had been stricken with an aggressive form of cancer. In this post, Tori Egherman from Arseh Sevom, an organisation that promotes openness and human rights in peaceful Persian-speaking communities, joins others around the world in mourning her loss and celebrating her life.

Mahsa was thoughtful, skeptical, and insightful. In life she would not have wanted to be the center of so much attention. Her passion and work were not done to fulfill a personal ambition or to place her front and center in the public spotlight. She worked because of her great curiosity, her dedication to human rights and the women’s movement, and her belief in the possibility of change.

Mahsa was born in Tehran but spent most of her childhood in Chicago. She moved back to Iran in the early 2000s right after graduating from college. It was there that she discovered a place she could love and a society she could contribute to. In an article about Mahsa, The Feminist School wrote [fa]:

She was part of a group of people from the Iranian diaspora who returned to Iran to employ their cultural capital and experience and contribute to the culture. She joined a group of Iranian women who were taking advantage of that moment when there was a small opening in the political system to expand the women’s movement and the discussion of equality of men and women in the culture.....

MORE at http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/10/10/remembering-mahsa-shekarloo-the-womens-rights-activist-and-internet-pioneer-born-in-iran/

[shenmue]

1. ...