American Pastoral - The New York Review of Books

By Jonathan Raban

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

by Linda Gordon

Norton, 536 pp., $35.00

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field

by Anne Whiston Spirn

University of Chicago Press, 359 pp., $30.00 (paper)

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a "puzzling form" and a "queer business" in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied "a beautiful relation between the rich and poor" by making "simple people express strong feelings...in learned and fashionable language." From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare's complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.

'Migrant Mother,' Nipomo, California, 1936; photograph by Dorothea Lange. Her original caption for this photograph was 'Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936.' (Library of Congress)

Although shepherds and shepherdesses have been in short supply in the United States, versions of pastoral have flourished here. The cult of the Noble Red Man, or, as Mark Twain derisively labeled it, "The Fenimore Cooper Indian" (a type given to long speeches in mellifluous and extravagantly figurative English), is an obvious example. So is the heroizing of simple cowboys, farmers, and miners in the western stories of writers like Bret Harte, the movies of John Ford, and the art of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Maynard Dixon, and Thomas Hart Benton. Both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath might be read as pastorals in Empson's sense. The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

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Empson noted the connection between traditional pastoral and Soviet propaganda, with its elevation of the worker to a "mythical cult-figure," and something similar was going on during the New Deal when the Resettlement Administration (which later morphed into the Farm Security Administration) dispatched such figures from Manhattan's Upper Bohemia as Walker Evans and Marion Post to photograph rural poverty in the southern states. Like a Tudor court poet contemplating a shepherd, the owner of the camera was rich beyond the dreams of the people in the viewfinder, whose images were used by the government both to justify its Keynesian economic policy and to raise private funds for the relief of dispossessed flood victims, sharecroppers, and migrant farm workers. Some, though not all, of the photographers were, like Evans, conscious artists; their federal patrons, like Roy Stryker, head of the information division of the FSA, were unabashed propagandists who judged each picture by its immediate affective power and took a severely practical approach to human tragedy.

Of all the many thousands of photographs that came out of this government-sponsored enterprise, none was more instantly affecting or has remained more famous than Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. Taken in February 1936 at a pea pickers' camp near Nipomo, seventy miles northwest of Santa Barbara, it was published in the San Francisco News the following month, when it resulted in $200,000 in donations from appalled readers. In 1998, it became a 32¢ stamp in the Celebrate the Century series, with the caption "America Survives the Depression." For a long while now, I've tried to observe a self-imposed veto on the overworked words "icon" and "iconic," but in the exceptional case of Migrant Mother it's sorely tempting to lift it.

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one's made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female artist from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence. It's not the woman's plight one sees at first so much as her arresting handsomeness: her prominent, rather patrician nose; her full lips, firmly set; the long and slender fingers of her right hand; the enigmatic depth of feeling in her eyes.

Even after many viewings, it takes several moments for the rest of the picture to sink in: the pervasive dirt, the clothing gone to shreds and holes, the seams and furrows of worry on the woman's face and forehead, the skin eruptions around her lips and chin, the swaddled, filthy baby on her lap. As one can see from the other five pictures in the six-shot series, Lange posed two elder children, making them avert their faces from the camera and bury them in the shadows behind their mother, at once focusing our undistracted attention on her face and imprisoning her in her own maternity. It's a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one's first and last impressions are of the woman's resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

Against all odds, she's less a figure of pathos than of survival, as the inscription on the postage stamp accurately described her. In 1960, Lange said of the woman that she "seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it"—a nice instance of Empson's "beautiful relation between the rich and poor"—which was not at all how her subject remembered the occasion.

In 1958 the hitherto nameless woman surfaced as Florence Thompson, author of an angry letter, written in amateur legalese, to the magazine U.S. Camera, which had recently republished Migrant Mother:

...It was called to My attention...request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines...should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights...Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission...

Years later, Thompson's grandson, Roger Sprague, who maintains a Web site called migrantgrandson.com, described what he believed to be her version of the encounter with Lange:

Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) pulled into the entrance, stopped some twenty yards in front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a large camera. She started taking Florence's picture. With each picture the woman would step closer. Florence thought to herself, "Pay no mind. The woman thinks I'm quaint, and wants to take my picture." The woman took the last picture not four feet away then spoke to Florence: "Hello, I'm Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the migrant worker. The photos will never be published, I promise."

Some of these details ring false, and Sprague has his own interest in promoting a counternarrative, but the essence of the passage, with its insistence on the gulf of class and wealth between photographer and subject, sounds broadly right. "The woman thinks I'm quaint" might be the resentful observation of every goatherd, shepherd, and leech-gatherer faced with a well-heeled poet or documentarian on his or her turf.

It also emerged that Florence Thompson was not just a representative "Okie," as Lange had thought, but a Cherokee Indian, born on an Oklahoma reservation. So, in retrospect, Migrant Mother can be read as intertwining two "mythical cult-figures": that of the refugee sharecropper from the Dust Bowl (though Thompson had originally come to California with her first husband, a millworker, in 1924) and that of the Noble Red Man. There is a strikingly visible connection, however unnoticed by Lange, between her picture of Florence Thompson and Edward S. Curtis's elaborately staged sepia portraits of dignified Native American women in tribal regalia in his extensive collection The North American Indian (1900–1930), perhaps the single most ambitious—and contentious—work of American pastoral ever created by a visual artist.

Gordonton, Person County, North Carolina, July 9, 1939. Lange wrote in her caption for this photograph, 'Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon....Note the kerosene pump on the right and gasoline pump on the left. Brother of store owner stands in the doorway.' (Library of Congress)

Both Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look hew to the line that Lange suddenly became a documentary photographer in 1932, when she stepped out of her portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street in San Francisco's fashionable Union Square and took her Rolleiflex out onto the streets of the Mission District, three miles away, where she began to photograph men on the ever-lengthening breadlines in the last year of Hoover's presidency. But this is to underplay the importance of the pictures she took from 1920 onward when she accompanied her first husband, Maynard Dixon, on his months-long painting trips to Arizona and New Mexico.

Lange was twenty-four when they married in March 1920, Dixon twenty years older. She was still a relative newcomer to San Francisco, having arrived there from New York in 1918; marrying Dixon, she also embraced his nostalgic and curmudgeonly vision of the Old West. A born westerner, from Fresno, California, he stubbornly portrayed the region as it had been before it was "ruined" by railroads, highways, cities, Hollywood, and tourism. In his paintings, the horse was still the primary means of power and transportation in a land of sunbleached rock and sand, enormous skies, cholla, and saguaro cacti, with adobe as its only architecture and Indians and cowboys its only rightful inhabitants. Although Lange had already established herself as an up-and-coming portrait photographer in San Francisco, her pictures on these trips to the desert were so faithful to her husband's vision of the West that one might easily mistake many of them for Maynard Dixon paintings in black-and-white.

So she caught a group of Indian horsemen, seen from behind, riding close together across a sweep of empty tableland; a line of Hopi women and a boy, clad in traditional blankets, climbing a rough-hewn staircase trail through the pale rock of the mesa; a man teaching his son how to shoot a bow and arrow; families outside their adobe huts; and somber, unsmiling portraits of Indians whose faces show the same weary resignation to their fate as the faces that Lange would later photograph on the breadlines and in migrant labor camps. It was among the Hopi and the Navajo that she picked up the basic grammar of documentary, with its romantic alliance between the artist and the wretched of the earth.

One photograph stands out from her travels in the Southwest: a radically cropped print of the face of a Hopi man, in which much darkroom cookery clearly went into achieving Lange's desired effect. At first sight, it looks like a grotesque ebony mask, its features splashed with silver as if by moonlight. Its skin is deeply creased, its eyes inscrutable black sockets. In its sculptural immobility, it appears as likely to be the face of a corpse as of a living being.

Seeing the finished picture, no one would guess the raw material from which Lange made the image as she focused her enlarger in the dark. There's an uncropped photo of the same man, obviously shot within a minute or two of this one, to be seen in the Oakland Museum of California's vast online archive of Lange's work, in which he's wearing a striped shirt and a bead necklace strung with Christian crosses, and has his hair tied with a knotted scarf around his forehead. His face looks humorous and easygoing; he seems amused to be having his picture taken.

This is not the negative that Lange used for her print, but it's so close as to be very nearly identical. For the mask-like portrait, she moved her camera a few inches to her right, so that the razor-edged triangular shadow of the man's nose exactly meets the cleft of his upper lip, and lowered it to make him loom above the viewer. What is remarkable is how she transformed the merry fellow in high sunshine into the unsettling and deathly face of the print. It might be titled The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race. There is, alas, no record of what the subject thought of his metamorphosis into a gaunt symbol of extinction.

Linda Gordon's substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn's careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange's working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange's work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness. Roy Stryker of the FSA, who worked closely with Lange from 1935 through 1939, repeatedly sacking then rehiring her, vastly admired her photographs but found her maddening to deal with, and readers of Gordon and Spirn are likely to find themselves similarly conflicted.

Gordon, a social historian at NYU, whose faculty bio says that she specializes in "gender and family issues," is best at placing her subject within the context of the various milieus in which she moved. She is good on the artistic and photographic scene in New York in the Teens of the last century, where the young Lange discovered Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, and the luminaries of the Pleiades Club, and excellent on the rowdier bohemian coterie that she joined in San Francisco in the Twenties, where she met Dixon (in his customary urban uniform of Stetson and spurred cowboy boots), Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. Gordon is reliably lucid on the aesthetic and political movements of the time, though Lange herself too often remains more cipher than character in an otherwise vivid picture of her place and period.

It's in the gender and family issues department, her academic specialty, that Gordon is simultaneously confident and not entirely persuasive. Much is made of Lange's childhood polio, which left her with a crippled right foot and permanent limp. Gordon calls her "a polio"—a grating phrase, which, according to Google, is rare but not without precedent. Further hurt was inflicted on Lange when her father moved out of the Hoboken house when she was twelve; and in writing of her as a wife and mother, prone to "hubris," "irascibility," "rages," and "obsessive control," Gordon portrays her as a damaged woman.

Lange acquired a stepdaughter, Consie, when she married Dixon, with whom she had two children of her own, Dan and John. In her second marriage, to the Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, she added three more stepchildren to her brood, in an age when women were expected to do all the work of parenting. Like so many people of their class and generation, the Dixons and the Taylors were in the habit of boarding out their kids whenever they threatened to interfere with their demanding work schedules. Not surprisingly, the children came to remember Lange as a domestic tyrant who neglected their needs and scarred them for life.

Autres temps, autres moeurs. Artists and writers were especially culpable in this regard, taking the line that their unique talents entitled them to days of concentrated silence and bibulous, grown-up, social evenings, undistracted by the barbaric yawps of the nursery. (Chief among Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise was "the pram in the hall.") Lange's treatment of the children in her life was not egregiously different from that of others in her set in San Francisco and Taos, and Gordon's nagging concern over her deficiencies as a parent tends to unbalance her book.

Although Gordon speculates freely about Lange's thoughts and feelings, and surrounds her with an impressive mass of contingent details, one waits in vain to catch the pitch of her voice in conversation, her wit (did she have wit?), her personal demeanor and manners when at ease among friends. She emerges from the book more as a stack of interesting attributes than as a fully realized character in her own right.

Napa Valley, California, December 1938. Lange's caption: 'More than 25 years as a bindlestiff. Walks from the mines to the lumber camps to the farms. The type that formed the backbone of the IWW in California, before the war. Subject of Carleton Parker's studies on IWW.' (Library of Congress)

Where Gordon's Dorothea Lange and Spirn's Daring to Look coincide to happiest effect is on Lange's marriage to Paul Schuster Taylor and her on-again-off-again work for Stryker at the FSA. Taylor, described by Gordon as "a stiff and slightly ponderous suit-and-tie professor" (she's often sharper on her secondary characters than she is on her primary one), met Lange in 1934, shortly after her separation from Maynard Dixon, at an exhibition of her pictures of the San Francisco poor at a gallery in Oakland. Later that year, he hired her, at a typist's salary, as the official photographer for the California Division of Rural Rehabilitation, of which he'd just been appointed field director. From January 1935, they were traveling together across California, visiting enormous, featureless agribusiness farms, worked by mostly Mexican migrant laborers. Taylor, who'd learned Spanish for the purpose, conducted interviews while she took photos. She took to calling him Pablo, he called her mi chaparrito ("my little shorty"). They were married in December.

Much as she'd learned to see the uncultivated West through Maynard Dixon's eyes, and to frame her pictures like Dixon paintings, in Taylor's company she acquired the mental habits of a painstaking social anthropologist. Taylor taught economics at Berkeley, but his avidity for human data took him far outside the usual confines of his discipline and into the "field," where he transcribed the life stories of migrants. Lange copied him. A shy man, Taylor would introduce himself to groups of Mexicans by saying that he was lost and needed directions, a technique quickly adopted as her own by Lange. Soon after they'd met, she began to accompany her photographs with what she called "captions"—crisply detailed accounts, some running to essay length, of the circumstances that had led each subject to his or her present situation.

For Stryker at the FSA, the picture was the thing, and he spiked all, or nearly all, of her writing; in Daring to Look, Spirn reunites Lange's 1939 photos with their original texts in a long-overdue act of restoration. The captions are rich in themselves, full of the dollars and cents of anguished household accounting, stories of escape from starved-out Dustbowl farms in rattletrap Fords, and snatches of talk, for which Lange had a fine ear; as a North Carolina woman told her, "All the white folks think a heap of me. Mr. Blank wouldn't think about killing hogs unless I was there to help. You ought to see me killing hogs at Mr. Blank's!" She was a patient listener, and relentlessly inquisitive. Photographing tobacco farmers, for instance, she became expert on how the plant was cultivated, harvested, cured, and sold, and her captions describe with great precision what was meant by such terms as "topping," "worming," "sliding," "priming," "saving," "putting in," "yellowing," "killing out."

Gathering this sort of information from her subjects changed the way she photographed them. Before 1935 and her collaboration with Taylor, she was a fly-on-the-wall observer in her pictures of Native Americans and the unemployed. After 1935, her photographs reflect an increasingly intimate relationship between the woman behind the camera and the person in front of it. One sees a new candor and engagement in her subjects' faces, as if each shutter-click has momentarily interrupted an absorbing conversation. In this respect, Migrant Mother is quite atypical of Lange's FSA work: she spent only a few minutes with Florence Thompson, and her caption is unusually brief (according to Thompson's grandson, it was also riddled with errors of fact).

The deepening involvement in her subjects' lives seems all the more impressive when one follows the hectic itinerary of her own life in Daring to Look. Between January and October 1939 she traveled far and wide through the states of California, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, spending weeks at a time in her car, documenting the trudging "bindlestiffs" and homeless families on Highway 99, the labor camps and mile-wide fields of factory farms in the California valleys, tobacco in North Carolina, "stump farms" on logged-over forest in the Pacific Northwest, the newly irrigated orchards and farms of the Columbia basin. Wherever she went, she attached individual faces and stories to the desolate social geography of American agriculture from coast to coast. Spirn's book is redolent of the hot and dusty unpaved roads on which Lange drove by day, and of inadequately lit rooms in cheap motels, where she wrote up her captions in the evenings.

Bad as her relations with Stryker were, she made her best pictures for the FSA. The current of indignant political feeling that flows through her work was in tune with the agency's propagandist mission, and—more than Evans, Ben Shahn, Marion Post, and other FSA photographers—Lange had an increasingly deep knowledge and understanding of what she was seeing, as a result both of her own searching interviews with her subjects and of her husband's work on the inequities of the agricultural economy.^[*] Time and again, she struck a perfect balance between photographing a mass plight and honoring the dignity of each singular life—a balance she never quite recaptured again. Her 1942–1943 series on Japanese internment, for instance, has ample indignation, but lacks the active and visible rapport that she made with the farmworkers.

In 1954, Lange snagged a commission from Life magazine to do a photo-essay on Ireland, and around 2,500 negatives survive from this trip, which she made with her son Dan, then twenty-nine and an aspiring writer. Daniel Dixon was assigned the job of interviewing subjects and composing captions, leaving her free to concentrate entirely on photography. The results of this unwise division of labor are revealing.

County Clare, Ireland, 1954; photograph by Dorothea Lange (Oakland Museum of California)

In County Clare, Lange was an enchanted tourist. After the barbed wire and vast flat landscapes of Californian agribusiness, she reveled in the small, irregular, hillocky Irish fields, their rainwashed drystone walls and ancient hedges. Instead of improvised shack-towns and government-built camps, she focused on stone bothies overhung with thatch and streets of single-storey terraced cottages with rickety horse-drawn traps parked at their doors. She stopped to take shots of ruined churches; placid, grazing cows; horses and haywains; old men with scythes; shepherds tending their flocks in the fields and driving them down narrow lanes. In Lange's Ireland, almost everybody's smiling, and her photographs form an archive of 1950s toothless, gap-toothed, and prosthetic Irish grins. Yet there's little hint of two-way rapport in the faces of these people, who appear to be saying "Cheese" to deferentially oblige the lady-visitor from America, as she roamed the countryside picturing its happy peasantry.

She hardly seemed to notice that the clothes of her Irish subjects were as tattered and patched as those of the poorest Okies. If she questioned why the farms and fields were so small, or why there were so many horses and so few machines, it doesn't show in her photographs. She was here to discover Arcadia—a land of simple folk, content with their lot, going about their time-hallowed rustic occupations, equipped with the same rudimentary technology that had served them for centuries. In Ireland, Lange reverted to pastoral in its most naive and sentimental form. It's tantalizing to wonder how she would have handled this assignment had the commission come from a social activist like Stryker instead of Henry Luce's Life. Her photos were in perfect harmony with the conservative politics of the magazine: they extol the tranquillity of a society under the law of Nature, and of God.

The magazine savagely cut Lange's essay, rejected Daniel Dixon's captions, and supplied its own, including "serenely they live in age old patterns" and "THE QUIET LIFE RICH IN FAITH AND A BIT OF FUN."

In the last chapter of Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn drives along the routes taken by Lange in 1939. By 2005 the roads were generally improved but the housing and social conditions of agricultural workers on industrial farms were little changed, and Spirn found new rural slums on the sites of the old New Deal labor camps. A caption written by Lange in 1939 still holds broadly true:

The richer the district in agricultural production, the more it has drawn the distressed who build its shacktowns. From the Salt River valley of Arizona to the Yakima valley of Washington, the richest valleys are dotted with the biggest slums.

This is painfully evident in Washington state, where I live. Were Lange to return here with her camera seventy years on, it would not be a Rip Van Winkle experience so much as a numbing sense of déjà vu. The cities and suburbs would be unrecognizable to her, but the poverty in the countryside created by the corporate agricultural system would yield material for photographs identical to those she took in 1939. There are small, Spanish-speaking farm towns on the Columbia plateau where the average per capita income is still in the middling four figures.

In summer, migrant fruit pickers pile into the Columbia and Yakima valleys, living in camps little different, and hardly more affluent, than the one where Lange found Florence Thompson. And inventive new ways of being poor continue to emerge. In Forks, at the foot of the Olympic National Park, there are run-down trailer parks on the edges of the town, inhabited by "brushpickers," mostly Guatemalan, who make a tenuous living by scavenging in the woods for the moss, ferns, beargrass, and salal used by florists around the world to add greenery to bouquets.

Migrant Mother has become the symbol of a now-remote decade, to which the passage of years has lent a period glow. Yet across the rural West the Great Depression is less a historical event than a permanent condition, which existed before the 1930s and is still there now, though it shifts from place to place and fluctuates in its severity. The warning in the rearview mirror applies here: the lives in Lange's photographs for the FSA are closer than they may appear.

Notes

^[*]Taylor and Lange merged their talents in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, published in 1939. The couple assembled her photographs, his text, and their captions, working together, as they wrote, "in every aspect of the form as a whole to the least detail of arrangement or phrase."

In India, More Women Demand Toilets Before Marriage - washingtonpost.com

Image by batschmidt via Flickr

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, October 12, 2009

NILOKHERI, India -- An ideal groom in this dusty farming village is a vegetarian, does not drink, has good prospects for a stable job and promises his bride-to-be an amenity in high demand: a toilet.

In rural India, many young women are refusing to marry unless the suitor furnishes their future home with a bathroom, freeing them from the inconvenience and embarrassment of using community toilets or squatting in fields.

About 665 million people in India -- about half the population -- lack access to latrines. But since a "No Toilet, No Bride" campaign started about two years ago, 1.4 million toilets have been built here in the northern state of Haryana, some with government funds, according to the state's health department.

Women's rights activists call the program a revolution as it spreads across India's vast and largely impoverished rural areas.

"I won't let my daughter near a boy who doesn't have a latrine," said Usha Pagdi, who made sure that daughter Vimlas Sasva, 18, finished high school and took courses in electronics at a technical school.

"No loo? No 'I do,' " Vimlas said, laughing as she repeated a radio jingle.

"My father never even allowed me an education," Pagdi said, stroking her daughter's hair in their half-built shelter near a lagoon strewn with trash. "Every time I washed the floors, I thought about how I knew nothing. Now, young women have power. The men can't refuse us."

Indian girls are traditionally seen as a financial liability because of the wedding dowries -- often a life's savings -- their fathers often shell out to the groom's family. But that is slowly changing as women marry later and grow more financially self-reliant. More rural girls are enrolled in school than ever before.

A societal preference for boys here has become an unlikely source of power for Indian women. The abortion of female fetuses in favor of sons -- an illegal but widespread practice -- means there are more eligible bachelors than potential brides, allowing women and their parents to be more selective when arranging a match.

"I will have to work hard to afford a toilet. We won't get any bride if we don't have one now," said Harpal Sirshwa, 22, who is hoping to marry soon. Neem tree branches hung in the doorway of his parents' home, a sign of pride for a family with sons. "I won't be offended when the woman I like asks for a toilet."

Satellite television and the Internet are spreading images of rising prosperity and urban middle-class accouterments to rural areas, such as spacious apartments -- with bathrooms -- and women in silk saris rushing off to the office.

India's rapid urbanization has also contributed to rising aspirations in small towns and villages. On a crowded highway that runs into this village, about 170 miles north of New Delhi, young women, once seen clinging to the backs of motorbikes driven by their fathers or husbands, now drive their own scooters. One recent popular TV ad shows a rural girl sheepishly entering a scooter showroom, then beaming as she whizzes through the parking lot on her new moped.

With economic freedom, women are increasingly expecting more, and toilets are at the top of their list, they say.

The lack of sanitation is not only an inconvenience but also contributes to the spread of diseases such as diarrhea, typhoid and malaria.

"Women suffer the most since there are prying eyes everywhere," said Ashok Gera, a doctor who works in a one-room clinic here. "It's humiliating, harrowing and extremely unhealthy. I see so many young women who have prolonged urinary tract infections and kidney and liver problems because they don't have a safe place to go."

Previous attempts to bring toilets to poor Indian villages have mostly failed. A 2001 project sponsored by the World Bank never took off because many people used the latrines as storage facilities or took them apart to build lean-tos, said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi, who worked on the program.

But by linking toilets to courtship, "No Toilet, No Bride" has been the most successful effort so far. Walls in many villages are painted with slogans in Hindi, such as "I won't get my daughter married into a household which does not have a toilet." Even popular soap operas have featured dramatic plots involving the campaign.

"The 'No Toilet, No Bride' program is a bloodless coup," said Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, a social organization, and winner of this year's Stockholm Water Prize for developing inexpensive, eco-friendly toilets. "When I started, it was a cultural taboo to even talk about toilets. Now it's changing. My mother used to wake up at 4 a.m. to find someplace to go quietly. My wife wakes up at 7 a.m., and can go safely in her home."

Pathak runs a school and job-training center for women who once cleaned up human waste by hand. They are known as untouchables, the lowest caste in India's social order. As more toilets come to India, the women are less likely to have to do such jobs, Pathak said.

"I want so much for them to have skills and dignity," Pathak said. "I tell the government all the time: If India wants to be a superpower, first we need toilets. Maybe it will be our women who finally change that."

Flush With Cash and Fearing Tighter Rules, Major Carriers Shun Broadband Stimulus

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 14, 2009

The Obama administration made a national priority of spreading high-speed Internet access to every American home and offered stimulus money to help companies pay for it, but the biggest network operators are staying away from the program.

As the Aug. 20 deadline nears to apply for $4.7 billion in broadband grants, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast are unlikely to go for the stimulus money, sources close to the companies said.

Their reasons are varied. All three say they are flush with cash, enough to upgrade and expand their broadband networks on their own. Some say taking money could draw unwanted scrutiny of business practices and compensation, as seen with automakers and banks that have taken government bailouts. And privately, some companies are griping about conditions attached to the money, including a net-neutrality rule that they say would prevent them from managing traffic on their networks in the way they want.

"We are concerned that some new mandates seem to go well beyond current laws and [Federal Communications Commission] rules, and may lead to the kind of continuing uncertainty and delay that is antithetical to the president's primary goals of economic stimulus and job creation," said Walter B. McCormick Jr., president of USTelecom, a trade group that represents telecoms including AT&T and Verizon.

Yet those firms might be the best positioned to achieve the goal of spreading Internet access to underserved areas, some experts say.

"If you want to get broadband out, you have to do it with [those] who brought you to the dance in the first place, and in this case it is the incumbent cable and telephone carriers who have 85 percent of lines in the country," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington tech policy think tank. "This is not basket weaving. This is really complex and intensive technical stuff that takes a fair amount of sophistication and scale to be able to do right and to continue to upgrade."

Obama has pushed for universal access to broadband since his presidential campaign, saying it would underpin the country's economic future. The stimulus funds target homes and businesses in the hinterlands that have largely been overlooked by broadband providers because of the hefty costs to lay down fiber-optic and other broadband pipes to small communities.

At the same time, the government has promised more scrutiny of industry practices that seem to limit consumer access to services, such as Comcast blocking the peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent in 2007 and Apple's recent decision to block Google's voice service and the free Internet calling service Skype on the iPhone.

Those efforts have alarmed the major carriers. Specifically, some of the biggest firms fear that a clause in the stimulus plan that says recipients of the grants cannot "favor any lawful Internet applications and content over others" -- the concept known as net neutrality -- could lead to more rules down the road.

This condition goes beyond guidelines at the FCC that have been criticized by consumer advocacy groups as too vague. Carriers have pushed to keep current rules in place and see the condition on the stimulus grants as a potential precursor for additional rules at the FCC on how carriers can manage content over the Web.

The companies paint dire scenarios where new rules would lead to networks getting clogged with spam and too much video content, slowing down service for all users.

"It's not cost-effective for the big network operators to play in rural [markets] in the first place, and if they take federal money that comes with all these strings attached to it, they are opening themselves up to being regulated even further," said Roger Entner, head of communications research for Nielsen IAG.

McCormick said net-neutrality conditions on the grants are fuzzy and may give network operators pause before investing in long and expensive projects that could end up in a tangle of technical and legal hang-ups over how the firms oversee their networks.

"Clearly, it's causing potential applicants to reflect upon the uncertainties," McCormick said.

Verizon said it decided not to apply before conditions were announced. Comcast, which mainly serves urban and suburban areas, said it would also abstain. AT&T said that it likely would not apply but that it is open to partnership with state and local governments who win the grants.

Corporate officials have also said it would look bad for a company like AT&T or Comcast to come to the government with hat in hand when they are among the few companies in the economy flush with billions of dollars in cash reserves.

One official at a large network operator said on the condition of anonymity that once taken, government funds incite a "mob mentality" that could preclude sponsoring golf tournaments or giving executives bonuses, for fear of political backlash.

Some public advocates and analysts say the carriers never had a compelling reason to seek the grants.

"They weren't going to apply," said Ben Scott, head of policy at public advocacy group Free Press. "They are using this as an opportunity to grandstand against net neutrality."

Rebecca Arbogast, head of tech-policy research at Stifel Nicolaus, notes that the biggest carriers would be less inclined to deploy networks in rural areas because there is not enough demand to justify the ongoing financial investments. She said the companies should have expected stronger net-neutrality conditions because it was mandated by Congress in the stimulus act.

"With a few exceptions, the net-neutrality provisions were not a great departure from what I think was already out there and is consistent with the path that most recognize we were already headed down," Arbogast said.

The Commerce and Agriculture departments, which are handing out a total of $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus grants through 2011, say the plan to bring high-speed Internet to the hinterlands and urban poor can be accomplished without the big carriers. Companies like wireless broadband provider Clearwire and small cable and telecom operators may introduce more competition into the industry by using the funds to build networks that could compete with AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, analysts and government officials say.

"I think if the big carriers want to participate and play by the rules, great. If not, I'm not that concerned," said Mark Seifert, a senior adviser for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is overseeing grants for the Commerce Department.

Seifert said the rules for broadband grants were not written to favor any size or kind of network operator. Further, the $7.2 billion is not intended to complete Obama's goal of spreading broadband to every home; rather, it is a "down payment" on a larger plan being crafted by the FCC, he said.

Bangladesh: The Modern Face of Slavery | Economy Governance

DHAKA, 7 August 2009 (IRIN) - Tens of thousands of people are working as bonded labourers in rural Bangladesh, say activists. Even though it is illegal, entire families, including children, are bonded to their employers while they struggle to pay back loans.

"Thousands of children are being forced into bonded labour every day because of poverty and their parents' unemployment," Sumaiya Khair, a human rights activist and researcher into child labour in Dhaka, the capital, told IRIN.

"The biggest tragedy is that it all seems to go unnoticed," she said.

According to Anti-Slavery International, bonded labour - or debt bondage - is probably the least-known form of slavery and yet the most widely used method of enslaving people.

Although proscribed by international law, millions worldwide are affected, particularly in South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Nepal.

"Forced labour is the antithesis of decent work," ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said earlier this year. "It causes untold human suffering and steals from its victims. Modern forced labour can be eradicated, providing there is a sustained commitment by the international community, working together with government, employers, workers and civil society."

The face of slavery

Although rare in urban Bangladesh, bonded labour is common in rural areas.

Unlike in cities where workers are paid a daily or fixed wage, the rural workforce mostly has to make verbal arrangements for wages, which are often manipulated by unscrupulous landlords and loan sharks, known as Mahajan.

Still another way to become bonded is being forced to take out a loan due to a temporary financial crisis, often caused or aggravated by a poor harvest or family emergency.

Once bonded, the labourer is then forced to work long hours for little or no pay, often seven days a week.

Many, mostly women and children, end up as domestic servants, working in conditions that resemble servitude. Many suffer physical abuse, sometimes resulting in death, activists say.

"Domestic servants, especially the women and children, are often exposed to inhuman treatment. Few, if any, are concerned with this matter unless a tragedy like a death by torture becomes public," Nazma Ara Begum, director of the Family Planning Association of Bangladesh (FPAB), an NGO that also works with victims of domestic torture, told IRIN.

Legislation

In 1972, Bangladesh ratified both ILO Convention No. 29 (1930), the Forced Labour Convention and ILO Convention No. 105 (1957), the Abolition of Forced Labour Convention.

The law prohibits forced or bonded labour and the Factories Act and Shops and Establishments Act provide for inspection mechanisms to strengthen laws against forced labour.

"Forced labour has been present in Bangladesh for centuries. After the liberation of Bangladesh, it changed its form and has taken the new face of various 'contracts' associated with loans taken by poor farmers from the usurers," Mohamad Abul Quasem, founder of the human rights related NGO Uddyam and member of the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, said.

Human trafficking

Bangladesh prohibits trafficking in persons under the Repression of Women and Children Act of 2000 (amended in 2003); however, there is extensive trafficking in women and children, primarily to India, Pakistan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and within the country, mainly for prostitution and in some instances for labour servitude.

The exact number of women and children trafficked is unknown.

In 2008, the government created a 12-member anti-trafficking investigative unit that complements the existing anti-trafficking police unit.

Last year, 231 victims of trafficking were rescued and 34 offenders convicted, of whom 26 were sentenced to life imprisonment.

In addition, Bangladeshi men and women migrating to the Middle East and elsewhere for work often face bonded labour as a result of fraud or illegal fees demanded by recruitment agents.

"It is regrettable how crooked recruitment agencies often lure young men to their doom with false promises of jobs. The victims are often unable to contact their loved ones and remain stranded in foreign lands without decent payment and [in] inhuman living conditions. This is the modern face of slavery," Motasim Billah, a manpower consultant, told IRIN.

ao/ds/mw

On the Road in Iran

By Hooman Majd | NEWSWEEK

Published May 23, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jun 1, 2009

On a warm Friday in late April, as I rode back from prayers at the Molla Esmail Mosque in the dusty central Iranian town of Yazd, my companion was a loaded Kalashnikov rifle. The weapon belonged to the man who had just led the Friday prayers, as he does every week: Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Sadoughi, a kindly 60-year-old cleric who normally uses a cane but leans on the rifle when he delivers sermons. Sadoughi is the official representative of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution for Yazd province. This means that, in addition to leading Friday prayers, he plays host to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei whenever the Iranian leader visits Yazd, where his mother's family is from. This afternoon I too would be a guest at Sadoughi's sumptuously restored historic home in the ancient city center. While I have spent most of my life in the West, Yazd is my hometown as well, and whenever I visit Iran I return there to see relatives, one of whom (through marriage) is Sadoughi's wife, Maryam. Mrs. Sadoughi is a highly educated and erudite woman who, notwithstanding her black chador and obvious Islamic piety, holds reformist—even liberal—political views and is a strong supporter of her brother, the former president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami. So too is her husband, owner of the Kalashnikov that lay next to me.

The layers of contradiction that make up the modern Islamic Republic of Iran are both pervasive and confounding, and not any less so in Yazd. Set amid the blistering deserts of central Iran, the city is home to the kind of fierce religiosity bred in Islam's starker landscapes, and many of its sons were sacrificed to the bloody war with Iraq. Yet it is also a capital of pre-Islamic Persia, and is well known for its Zoroastrian temples and grave sites. (At one fire temple, priests continue to tend a flame that they claim has burned for more than 500 years.) It is the only city in the world that can boast two native sons, Khatami and Moshe Katsav, who simultaneously served as presidents of Iran and Israel. Even the mosque where Sadoughi leads prayers is named after a Jewish convert.

The sermon that Sadoughi had delivered that morning had been equally impossible to categorize. He defended the inflammatory speech that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had delivered earlier that week at a United Nations conference on racism, chiding Western nations who "allegedly are … defenders of free speech" for walking out. But he also criticized the government, in this case for failing to ensure that Iranian pilgrims traveling to Iraq were adequately protected, a large number of them having been killed the day before in a suicide bombing near Baghdad. And he conceded that the United States had elected a new president who had promised to change its relationship with Iran. He declared that Iranians were waiting to witness real deeds from Washington, not mere rhetoric. But at the end of his 30--minute sermon, unlike past Friday prayers and prayers that same day in Tehran, there were no chants of "Death to America" or "Death to Israel," not even halfhearted ones. Later that night in his office he repeated, wistfully, the same sentiment—that words alone were not enough from the United States, not for Iranians, who are master rhetoricians, and who well understand the many uses to which they can be put.

Anyone reading a translation of Sadoughi's sermon would quite likely miss the sincerity of his appeal, the doors it carefully left open. After 30 years of enmity, the United States and Iran have almost entirely lost the capacity to interpret such subtle signals. Very few serving U.S. officials have met their Iranian counterparts, and almost none have ever visited Iran. Yet such expertise is more critical than ever, as the administration of President Barack Obama prepares to embark on what could be months of difficult negotiations aimed at halting Iran's nuclear-enrichment program.

After Obama videotaped a Persian New Year's message for the Iranian people, reiterating his offer of unconditional talks, most Western commentators interpreted Khamenei's lengthy and defiant response as a slap in the face. But what would have been most significant to any Iranian listening was a passage at the very end of the speech, when Khamenei said, "If you change, our behavior will also change." Iran's supreme authority had never before used the word "change" in such a context, for up until now the Islamic Republic's position has been that there is nothing objectionable about its behavior. If the Obama administration truly wants to forge a new relationship with Iran, it will have to learn to hear the things Iranians are saying to them, whether it be the Supreme Leader or the rifle-toting Sadoughi.

I had come to Yazd to begin a road journey north, to Tehran. The route is a well--traveled one; it starts all the way in the south at the ports on the Persian Gulf, crosses deserts, and runs past cities such as Isfahan and Qum before entering the capital, a megalopolis that is home to 20 percent of Iran's population. While that 20 percent is of great significance in terms of what Iran is and how Iranians think, we, and even Iranians themselves, often forget or neglect the other 80 percent. Only by getting out of the confines of Tehran can one fully appreciate all the different, contradictory worlds that constitute modern Iran.

The drive from Yazd to Isfahan, along highways 71 and 62W through the vast desert, can be a colorless, mind-numbing journey, punctuated by occasional patches of green as one crosses villages and towns, and green highway signs every few miles praising Allah or offering a Shia exhortation. If one has any doubt that the common people of Iran are as pious as their government, one need only read the signs painted on virtually every private truck and bus traversing the highway, which all spell out the same messages. They often compete with absurd images of Mickey Mouse or misspelled English words like "rode warrier," and even Shia expressions written in the Latin alphabet.

Along the highway, I passed through two police checkpoints, one ostensibly to catch illegal immigrants (Afghans, mostly, who cross the border almost as frequently as Hispanics do the Mexican border with the United States), the other to catch smugglers (mostly opium and heroin, again from Afghanistan). The magnitude of Iran's drug problem—more than 1 million Iranians are estimated to be addicted to narcotics—was visible not just from the checkpoint but also at a teahouse I stopped at near Naien, where a young man in his 20s was dozing off on a bench by the door. Every few minutes he would open his eyes and stare absent-mindedly into the distance, ignoring my driver and me, and then nod off again. When the proprietor brought out our tea, he looked at me apologetically and gestured to a third cup on his tray. "When they smoke a pipe, they get sleepy," he said, shaking his head as he placed the cup in front of the young man and exhorted him to drink.

Built by the 16th-century Safavid dynasty (which first declared Shia Islam the national religion) as its capital, Isfahan is perhaps Iran's most beautiful city. Famous for its large town square and the mosques and palaces that surround it, the city is also known for its bazaar and for the business acumen of its citizens, some of whom trade in the exquisite Persian carpets that, along with its stunning architecture, make Isfahan world-renowned (or at least that's what the Isfahanis think). Isfahanis seem to other Iranians the way Iranians often seem to the rest of the world: they can be a prickly lot and fiercely chauvinistic, not least because they view their city as the epitome of culture, and have, for as long as can be remembered, referred to Isfahan as "nesf-e-jahan," or "half the world." This self-regard is evident almost from the moment one enters the city, as first my Yazdi driver asking directions complains about the surly reaction from locals, and then the clerk at my hotel, after having a few words in English with an irate European tourist, turns to me and says, in Farsi, "They ride us over there and want to ride us here too."

Our image of a bazaar—a maze of tiny shops and shopkeepers hawking inferior goods or preying on unsuspecting and often lost customers—is only partially accurate. Isfahan's bazaar houses not just hundreds of stalls but offices, often hidden away, where the real business is done: the coppersmith hammering pots and pans may be working for a man engaged in the wholesale trade of copper wire and piping. When the bazaar goes on strike (as it did during the revolution, contributing greatly to the fall of the shah) or threatens to do so (as it did more recently, in reaction to a planned new tax) it's not just shoppers who are inconvenienced; the entire economy of the country can grind to a halt.

At one dark shop selling shoes, not too far from the bazaar's grand entrance, I noticed some traditional slippers interspersed among cheap Iranian- and -Chinese-made shoes. They are hard to come by, since most Iranians prefer Western styles, and I engaged the shopkeeper, asking him which style he thought was best. This threw him for a moment. He sized me up, wondering if I might be a tougher negotiator than he'd imagined. "Who do you want them for?" he asked. "Yourself?" I told him I was just wondering, and he then listed the relative advantages of each style, told me which city they were from and why each of them might be best suited to my ambiguous purpose. He guided me to one pair that I'd paid a little more attention to than the others, rather nice, and told me they were particularly fine, and only $40. I picked up the pair next to it, identical to the ones the doormen at my hotel wore, and he launched into a sermon on how they were the finest shoes, completely handmade and indestructible. They happened to cost only $60, he said, but I knew they could be had for less than $40 in Tehran. I also knew, of course, that I could bargain him down to $40, but I thanked him and left.

Contrary to the perception that bazaar merchants will follow a customer out of the store, as some do in tourist-heavy Arab countries such as Morocco, in Iran a bazaari would consider that kind of behavior beneath his dignity and a sign of weakness and desperation. The shoe salesman knew two things: one, that if I really wanted a pair of Persian slippers I would be back, and two, if I came back he'd negotiate in earnest and make a sale. He did not need to waste time with someone he wasn't sure was serious, and he would not enter into negotiations unless he felt both he and the customer could and would deliver, and part satisfied with the transaction. Negotiating, in the bazaar or elsewhere, is a practical matter for Iranians. As Ali Larijani, Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator and now speaker of Parliament, said when asked if he'd been moved by Obama's video message: "Our problems with America are not emotional."

The highlight of the drive from Isfahan to Qum, at least for someone from the West, has to be the Natanz nuclear-enrichment facility, located outside a once unremarkable town and conveniently right alongside the highway. It is easy to miss, but few drivers resist the temptation to point it out, especially to foreigners. What is visible in the distance are a number of buildings, which can also be seen on Google Earth, but it is up to one's imagination to picture the now thousands of centrifuges spinning tens or hundreds of meters below ground, depending on whom one believes. Stopping by the side of the road will invite a swift response by the Revolutionary Guards. Still, the facility's presence right there for all to see on one of the more heavily traveled highways in Iran naturally raises the question of whether Iran's nuclear program has been worth the cost. The answer is yes, according to the vast majority of Iranians, even though some may disagree with their government on almost any other matter.

Ever since Iran's enrichment program was revealed, the government has done a much better job of justifying it to its own people than to the outside world. Iranians know well that before the Islamic revolution, their country suffered at the hands of the great powers—Great Britain, Russia and the United States—whether through cripplingly one-sided tobacco and oil concessions, land grabs or outright regime change. Framing the nuclear issue as one of the rights, or haq, of the Iranian people that the same powers now want to deny them was a brilliant move. It ensured support for the government's insistence on taking full advantage of every right afforded it under the Nuclear Non--Proliferation Treaty, whether absolutely necessary or not. The United States has questioned Iran's need to make its own fuel for reactors not yet built. But to Iranians, the idea that their nation should be dependent on outside sources for fuel when the reactors finally are built is anathema. If President Obama would like to liberate America from dependence on foreign oil suppliers, many Iranians argue, then why should Iran be forced to depend on foreign sources for its energy?

That doesn't mean every Iranian agrees with the Ahmadinejad style of negotiating the nuclear issue, in which he's conflated defending Iran's rights with denying the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist. But Iranians do agree with the fundamental principle, one that the more genteel Khatami government also adhered to—i.e., that Iran will not give up its haq simply because greater powers say it should.

My driver on the road to Qum—an off-duty Isfahan policeman who much to my alarm could barely keep his eyes open at the beginning of our journey, thankfully due to a sleepless night of crimefighting rather than a heavy dose of morning opium—was no exception. I wondered, given that he admitted he couldn't make ends meet on his policeman's salary of $300 a month and was forced to drive a car two or three days a week, whether he might still be as enamored of President Ahmadinejad as he was when he voted for him four years ago. "He's done many good things," he said to me, "and he works really hard for the people." Patrolman Ali was unconcerned with Israel, and granted that better relations with the United States could improve the deteriorating economic situation in the country. But he felt that he should leave the big political issues to the experts, for he had only a high-school diploma. That Iranian scientists have mastered enrichment technology at Natanz is not only a source of pride for Isfahani policemen, but also for almost all Iranians, who place a premium on scientific study and who rigorously apply an honorific—"Mohandes"—to anyone who has a degree in engineering.

Qum, Iran's religious capital, holds a special place in the hearts of the pious, though my driver was not starry-eyed about its virtues. "Blessed as this place is," he said as we entered the city, "it is cursed by its hot weather and salty water. God gives and he takes." I mentioned that the birthplace of Islam in Arabia was also no paradise in terms of ab o' hava ("water and weather," a favorite expression and obsession of -Iranians), and although the thought hadn't occurred to a native of Shiraz who lived in Isfahan, two cities known for good ab o' hava, it only confirmed to him that Allah works in mysterious ways.

Qum is home to a major pilgrimage site—the grave of Fatemeh, sister of Imam Reza—and its dozens of seminaries are the foundation of the clerical establishment at the heart of the Islamic Republic. But five minutes outside town lies another mosque, at Jamkaran, the site of a vision of the hidden Twelfth Imam, who went into occultation 11 centuries ago. For years Jamkaran was an obscure site, apart from the Qum orthodoxy, but since Ahmadinejad came to power and started talking about the return of the Mahdi, or messiah, it has grown into what can only be described as a megamosque, and one that dwarfs the megachurches of California or Texas. On Tuesdays (the day the Mahdi allegedly appeared at the site) and on Fridays hundreds of thousands of pilgrims show up, on foot, by car and by coach, to pray, picnic and to drop a handwritten note into a well (actually two wells, gender-segregated but close) where some believe the Mahdi will read them and perhaps grant the wishes of the petitioners. I had visited three years ago on a Tuesday evening, in time for the dusk prayer and in the company of an overflowing crowd of what seemed like millions. But on this trip my car pulled into the new parking area on a Sunday afternoon, a normal workday in Islamic countries. I was struck by the scale of the construction: hundreds of thousands of square feet of new covered space surrounded the main mosque, and new minarets on the edges of the grounds could be seen from miles away.

It is tempting to think of Jamkaran as emblematic of a Shia obsession with the end of days—some have used it to argue that Ahmadinejad's government is seeking nuclear weapons in order to hasten the apocalypse and the return of the Mahdi. But Jamkaran is much more a place for people, admittedly pious, to get away from the rigors of life, and to hope that through their journey here they will somehow be saved. Begging favors of a hidden imam (as preposterous as his presence at the bottom of a well may seem) is not, as far as some Iranians are concerned, that different from Roman Catholic belief in the healing powers of a visit to Lourdes. On this day a group of a half dozen or so women in chadors were picnicking and enjoying themselves under one section of the half-finished extension to the mosque. At the well, I approached a group of young boys dropping notes down to the Mahdi. One of them, trying to peer through the grate into the pitch-black depths, asked me if I had a flashlight. "Do you think there's someone down there?" I asked him. "We want to see," he replied, and I suspected he and his friends were unconvinced by the myth. An older man stood at the counters nearby, deep in thought and jotting down words on a small piece of paper, collecting his thoughts, and then writing some more.

A tall, slender and handsome young woman in a black chador, with the faintest hint of makeup, furiously scribbled at another counter, oblivious to the fact that she was in the men's section. She folded her note, walked up to the well and dropped it through the grate. "A special favor?" I asked her. She looked at me suspiciously for a moment, and I explained that I was a reporter. "It's private," she said, "but we all have problems, don't we?" She walked away, perhaps skeptical that I had no ulterior motives. Her answer and her demeanor, however, spoke volumes. She was purposeful and had no time for state-imposed gender segregation. Whatever her "problem" was she didn't want to take it to a mullah in Qum who might lecture her on the fine points of Islam or Islamic behavior. (Indeed, a yearning for the Mahdi can be seen as a rejection of clerical rule, for the ayatollahs exist to defend Islam only in the absence of the Mahdi, and presumably will have outlived their usefulness upon his return to the physical world.) And she felt she had a place to go, on a weekday when perhaps her family or husband were at work, to unburden herself. Other people I talked to, both times I visited, were hoping for everything from a cure for a backache to a relief from debt, and the presence of well-marked infirmaries on the grounds suggests that Iran, a nation of hypochondriacs, is as concerned with survival as it is with salvation.

Just before reaching Tehran's train station, traditionally the southern gateway to the capital, one passes through a neighborhood called Javadieh. Once a notoriously rough area—Tehran's South Bronx or Compton, and nicknamed "Texas" for its Wild West atmosphere—it is rarely visited by most Tehranis even today. Yet the neighborhood is far less seedy than it once was. Modern apartment blocks compete with the older mud-brick buildings crowded onto narrow alleys and streets. New cars are parked everywhere.

This is Ahmadinejad territory. Although the president was actually raised in a lower-middle-class neighborhood farther north, his appeal as a man of the people, an incorruptible and unpretentious politician who has the interests of the poor at heart, is strongest in places like Javadieh. South Tehran is deeply religious, yes, but, more important, working class—suspicious and resentful of authority, particularly if that authority is identified with Iran's wealthy elite (many of whom are clerics). Residents turn out to vote in great numbers, with good reason: the Tehran mayors they've elected, including Ahmadinejad, have transformed this part of the city. Its denizens now enjoy good schools, parks and clean streets, as well as something that was once impossible in a strict class society: hope. Ahmadinejad's health-insurance plans for the poor and doubling of government pensions have won him many fans in Javadieh, but at least as important is his example of a poor-boy-made-good. Often he is respectfully referred to as Dr. Ahmadinejad, to note his Ph.D. (in traffic management).

The freedoms we value so much in the West are nowhere near as attractive as this new social mobility. On the streets of Javadieh, I stopped to talk to a man parking a late-model Pride (basically an -Iranian-made Kia) in front of a butcher shop displaying the heads and feet of sheep on the sidewalk. "In my father's day we could not have imagined owning a car, much less a new one, or taking vacations," he said, adding, "Shokr"—an expression meaning "one must be grateful." As bad as the economy is in Iran, with double-digit inflation (meas-ured in dollars) and unenviable unemployment statistics, every single motorcyclist I saw on Javadieh's traffic-clogged streets had a cell phone poking out of his pocket.

The Middle East's longest street begins at the railway station. Once vaingloriously and eponymously named by the Pahlavi dynasty, it is now Vali-asr Boulevard, and it runs uphill to the very northern extremes of the city. Whereas downtown one sees mostly older men and women dressed conservatively—even shabbily, almost as a badge of pride—jeans, colorful headscarves and gelled hair become more common in the boulevard's northern stretches. At Vanak Circle, a busy intersection with a JumboTron in one corner that unofficially demarcates North Tehran from the rest of the city, I stopped at a newsstand to pick up an English-language newspaper while a young man pushed in front of me to pay for his. I asked him who he thought would win the June 12 elections. "God forbid that anyone but Ahmadinejad does!" he replied. I was taken aback, and he noticed my surprise. "Let Ahmadinejad win," he explained, "and he'll be the downfall of the entire system."

Sentiments like that often give outsiders the impression that it's only a matter of time before Iran's youth—who make up three quarters of the population—overthrow their government. Yet while young Iranians can be just as focused on having fun as they are everywhere else in the world, the rights we ordinarily think of as lacking in Iran, such as the right to dress or behave as one pleases, are not their main concerns. Generally speaking, they are free to do as they please behind closed doors. They can watch first-run (if bootleg) Hollywood movies, on Samsung flat-screen TVs, while downloading songs to their iPods. (They can also drink alcohol, bootlegged through Kurdistan, and, even more cheaply, do drugs.) Even those who rebel against the austere social climate are as proud of their Persian-ness, their history and their culture as any other Iranian. Although they tend to be wealthy, well traveled and in many ways quite Westernized, they don't necessarily want their nation to be anything but independent of both East and West.

North Tehranis react with the same outrage as other Iranians whenever an American map shows the Persian Gulf as "the Gulf," or whenever Hollywood depicts Persians in anything less than a flattering light (such as in the movies Not Without My Daughter or 300). In late April, reports that Arab countries had demanded that Iran remove the name "Persian Gulf" from medals and brochures for the Islamic Solidarity Games to be held in Tehran in October sparked a particularly strong reaction all over town. "Screw them," yelled a friend of mine, a man educated in the West, completely Westernized, and hardly a supporter of the government. "Let the Arabs stay home—who gives a damn?" His indignant outbursts on the matter continued for days.

Near its end Vali-asr climbs steeply, into the foothills of the snowcapped Alborz Mountains. Here lies the home of the Islamic Revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's family compound, Jamaran. Mrs. Sadoughi's brother, former president Mohammad Khatami, has an office here, in a villa granted to him by the Khomeinis, who are now almost all reformists. Khatami relishes his new role as an éminence grise of Iranian politics, and on the day I visited him in his stately offices, he was besieged in various drawing rooms by politicians, mullahs, women in chadors and journalists, all vying for a few minutes of his time. In private, he appeared relieved that he had abandoned his campaign for the presidency. I told him that there had been disappointment in many quarters when he endorsed another reformist candidate, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi. "It is better to be a kingmaker than king," he joked to me in English.

It was a platitude, but I realized he was right. The Supreme Leader is, naturally, the supreme kingmaker in Iran, but there are others, including Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president, and Parliament Speaker Larijani. With myriad power centers and constituencies to keep satisfied (much as in the United States), running for or even being president requires compromises that a behind-the-scenes politician need not make. Khatami's decision to forgo an arduous campaign makes sense given the stakes this time around for whoever wins: the possibility of forging a détente with America after 30 years of open hostility. Some U.S. officials may have hoped that Khatami would be their partner in renewing ties, but he did the Obama administration a favor by choosing not to be king. Iran needs a president who can convince not just North Tehran but South, not just Tehranis but Yazdis, that the "change" the Supreme Leader promised is in their best interests. Khatami knows he can be more influential in this process, posht-e-pardeh, or "behind the curtain." In a land of mysteries, it is, not surprisingly, a favorite expression.

Majd is the author of The Ayatollah Begs To Differ.

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