long study of local government and lobbying in the United States.
The workshop posed some risk for the women. When The Boston Globe wrote an article about the visit, the women asked that their names not be used out of fear that the regime in Tehran might punish them for attending.
“They are so scared,’’ said organizer Fatemeh Haghighat-joo, a former reformist member of the Majlis who left Iran and is now a visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
Haghighatjoo told the Globe organizers were careful to plan a workshop that would not get participants in trouble.
“This is not a regime-change workshop. This has nothing to do with Iranian politics,’’ she said. “In Iran, the government is so centralized. It is important for them to observe how an independent local government may work.’’
Still, last year the university, known throughout New England as UMass, was forced to cancel its workshop for Iranian women activists when two of the would-be participants were arrested and four others banned from traveling. The arrested participants were interrogated about their plans to come to Boston, Haghighatjoo said, and are out on bail.
“Certainly, it’s risky for the Iranian women to attend anywhere in the United States,’’ said Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “If Iranians are traveling abroad to attend conferences or discussions where the regime can’t control the participants or outcomes, that shakes the regime to the core.’’
This year, UMass tried again but invited a less controversial group, mostly businesswomen. Iranian authorities prevented only one from leaving the country—Firouzeh Saber, who ran a national job creation project for Iran’s Ministry of the Interior.
Last Tuesday, the nine who came to Boston watched a Power Point presentation by Judy Meredith, a lobbyist who is executive director of the Public Policy Institute. She said she offered them the same training on lobbying that she gives citizens in Iowa and Texas, but she tried to focus on strategies that might succeed in Iran.
“I don’t want to get these women put in jail,’’ Meredith told the Globe. “They were very nervous about it. They said nobody lobbies [in Iran]. But they were curious about how you do it. They said, ‘What would you do if you were one of us?’’’
Meredith advised them to start a national network of female entrepreneurs and ask for government assistance in getting low-cost loans to create more jobs.
“I said, ‘I don’t know what the process is in Iran, but I think politicians everywhere are the same.’ They want to do something for a critical mass of their constituency — and to get credit for it.’’
On Thursday, the women toured the state capitol and met with female lawmakers at a reception. They took note that 25 percent of 200 state lawmakers are female in Massachusetts, compared with 2 percent in Iran’s Majlis.
“They spent a long time on, ‘How are you able to get elected?’’’ said Jessica Leitz, a staff member. “Many of them had the perspective that getting into politics themselves would hurt their businesses and even ruin them.’’
The Iranians also spent a day observing a courtroom, receiving an overview of the Massachusetts judicial system from retired Judge Beverly W. Boorstein and Bristol Probate Judge Elizabeth LaStaiti, who talked about the struggles of American women for equal rights, Haghighatjoo said.
The workshop was sponsored in collaboration with the YWCA in Boston, with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.