5

The Invisible Class

After a few weeks of fieldwork, I had come to see the daily complaints of clients and their arguments with the staff as part of everyday life at ALLY. Eye-rolling and side conversations in classrooms were common methods of expressing discontent. On a rainy afternoon, in a community development class designed to increase clients’ sense of social responsibility, the escalation of arguments between the clients and the teachers brought to the surface many of the previously unspoken tensions. Crossing their arms and looking away while sitting around a table, the clients stayed silent after the teachers, Barmak, Hamid, and Shirin, asked them to read their proposals for the community development project of their choice. This was the third week of refusing to do the assignment and assigning the blame on lack of time or the difficulty of coming up with ideas. The teachers’ last resort was a warning they hoped would do the trick. After being advised that not completing their class assignments could affect their grade and their progress in ALLY’s program, the clients’ relaxed and uninterested attitude transformed into a mode of rebellion I had not seen before. After all, finishing ALLY’s program successfully and on time was clients’ ticket to gaining employment and achieving their goal of independence. “You can’t force us to do anything!” Mahsa, one of the clients, said loudly as she straightened her back and looked the teachers in the eyes. “I have a thousand problems, and ‘doing something good for society’ is the last thing I care about,” Mahsa continued as she passed a glimpse on everyone’s face in class, waiting for others to chime in with their support.

Clients’ lack of interest in completing the assignment had become apparent to me weeks prior to this event. I often heard the young women, outside the class, mocking the content of the course and the assignments in front of me for being chert o pert (useless), hoping to get the same reaction from me. Inside the classroom, they often kept such comments to themselves in order to, I assumed, maintain a respectful relationship with their teachers. That day, the clients were especially blunt: “I don’t know why we are wasting time doing things that will take us nowhere,” Afsoon, another client, said in support of Mahsa to object to the inclusion of a community development class in ALLY’s program. Soon, arguments between the clients and the teachers extended to arguments among the clients over the fairness of some complaints and the benefits of certain classes, such as the one they were all sitting at. The escalation of arguments in a class of twenty and the teachers’ inability to gain control of the room left teachers with what they saw as their only choice: Dividing the class into three small groups based on the amount of work the women had completed. Each group was to be guided and run by one of the teachers in an effort to regain control of the room and respond more effectively to clients’ grievances.

I moved to the second floor with a group of clients who had firmly refused to complete the class assignment and were known for their “naysaying attitude.” This attitude, Barmak told me later, was the reason for their separation and why the class was at times “unproductive.” From those clients, I heard complaints directed at the content and the structure of ALLY’s program: “We sit here and play with this mud that the sponsors are paying for. It’s such a waste of time, money, and resources,” Afsoon said as she questioned the necessity of taking a sculpting course at ALLY while having more pressing needs for finishing the program and finding employment. I had heard clients in monthly meetings with the managing team similarly questioning the logic behind taking classes that they saw as irrelevant to their immediate needs and goals. Clients took seriously classes such as computer, English, accounting, Microsoft, and clerical skills, which were part of ALLY’s economic empowerment program. The goal of such courses was to provide the young women with the necessary skills and certificates for acquiring jobs and alleviating their poverty.

ALLY’s social education and art therapy program, while enjoyed by many clients, was not always received with the same level of commitment. The necessity of workshops and classes on community development, reproductive rights, sexualities, painting, and sculpting, which were held for informative and therapeutic purposes, was often contested among the clients. This does not mean that these classes were not beneficial or enjoyed by the young women. Clients often told me that, prior to attending ALLY, they had dreamt of attending painting or dance classes and that such experiences brought them an exhilarating sense of achievement. Some had gained considerable skills in painting and photography, exhibiting and selling their work at art galleries in Iran and abroad with the patronage of the organization. Others had used art, dance, or martial arts classes to heal from past traumas. But the inclusion of such workshops and classes was the reason why finishing ALLY’s program would take clients a total of three years and require them to attend the organization five days a week, eight hours a day. Dealing with extreme poverty and often the family’s abuse if the clients could not establish themselves as contributors to the household through housekeeping or paid labor, many young women saw ALLY’s three-year program as incongruent with the demands of their daily lives. Meanwhile, clients’ efforts to render as legitimate their concerns in the eyes of the staff had proven difficult. “You might not see the benefits of these classes right now, but you’ll see them later,” was the response of the teachers and the managing directors, who wished to assure clients about the unforeseen advantages of the classes they saw as useless. “We get the same response over and over again. It’s as if we are talking to a wall,” one of the clients told me in a private conversation, expressing resentment toward a response she deemed patronizing.

I was not sure how to make sense of staff’s uninterested attitude toward hearing clients’ complaints as legitimate concerns. I had difficulty understanding why many staff insisted on maintaining ALLY’s program as is despite the growing complaints of the clients and their own admission of its impracticality, which had become apparent due to the increasing dropout rate. At times, I thought the staff’s behavior represented the power struggle between the privileged middle-class workers and their marginalized clients, as many scholars have argued in their analysis of beneficence or philanthropic paternalism.¹ Yet, in any given state or NGO-led program, there is a diversity of motivations among hierarchically positioned actors and the variety of discourses operating simultaneously (Radhakrishnan 2015). NGOs and empowerment programs witness tensions between the stakeholders and clients who are often of varying class and ethnic backgrounds. Thayer’s (2010) study reveals how collaborations between urban middle-class feminists in Brazil and their rural sisters created tensions and conflicts due to each group’s different class composition and standpoint. While urban feminists emphasized body politics and reproductive rights, the rural women prioritized land rights, employment, and establishing a voice for peasant women. The unequal class and ethnic position of stakeholders and clients and the varying structural opportunities to exercise their voice (Rao and Sanyal 2010) shape the dynamic of relationships within NGOs. In spaces fraught with inequalities of power and privilege, where all are invited to equally participate in decision-making, “we have a case not of deliberative democracy but of discursive competition that requires individuals and groups to declare their demands in the hopes of being heard” (Rao and Sanyal 2010: 167).

Here, I shift the question from why ALLY workers ignored clients’ complaints to ask about the institutional discourses that necessitated maintaining ALLY’s program as is despite the growing dissatisfaction of the clients. I do so by emphasizing the larger institutional texts that coordinate the actions and consciousness of social actors (Smith 2005). In this chapter, I show how the daily decisions made by the staff, such as weighing the legitimacy of complaints and assessing the necessity of changing or maintaining the program, were shaped by class discourses of success and class-based social processes of inclusion and exclusion, which in turn shaped organizational narratives and definitions of empowerment. I also explain the everyday conflicts between the staff and clients as a class tension that was formed by conflicting middle-class and working-class discourses of privilege and justice.

More specifically, I argue that in class-based systems of privilege and marginalization, the social processes of exclusion render the working class and the poor as lacking what the middle class have. With embodied cultural capital being one of those elements that are lacking, empowerment programs are compelled to help their clients develop the cultural capital necessary for class mobility. Following this logic of empowerment, ALLY’s program had transformed into one where empowerment had come to mean skillfully performing middle class. With a great deal of organizational efforts directed toward granting clients a middle-class cultural capital necessary for gaining and maintaining employment in middle-class work environments, clients’ immediate need for employment and financial gain was deprioritized. The class-based discursive articulations of success and empowerment embedded within ALLY’s program had resulted in equating performing middle class with being empowered. This chapter offers a critical analysis of the highly invisible class discourses and middle-class subjectivities that shaped ALLY’s empowerment program and resulted in clients’ growing dissatisfaction and contentious relationships with staff.

Being Poor and Performing Middle Class

Escaping poverty and gaining financial independence through vocational training were the core objectives of ALLY around which most organizational planning and structuring was done. This structuring applied to the arrangement of spaces (where most building rooms were designated as classrooms) and time (when the everyday and weekly schedules separated courses based on subject) and the division of responsibilities (when an “educational unit” monitored the clients’ progress at the organization closely). In fact, when entering the organization, it was easy to assume that one had entered a moasese amoozeshi (an educational institute), a title many of the staff and clients themselves used to refer to ALLY.

Despite concerted efforts toward preparing clients for the job market, the prospect of finding gainful employment with which clients could acquire a sense of independence was not hopeful. With the high rates of unemployment in Iran, even for the college graduates (Amuzegar 2004), and the high costs of living due to the neoliberal economic policies of the state and the inflation exacerbated by global sanctions, “housing poverty” (Sheykhi 2007) has been a condition with which many clients and their families struggled. Living on one’s own and separating from an abusive or unhealthy familial environment were therefore not practical outcomes for which clients could strive. Despite such discouraging circumstances, the possibility of making more money than what clients earned at sweatshops was a promising opportunity for which the young women were willing to strive. Any form of financial gain, ALLY’s staff had come to believe through interacting with clients’ families, could protect the young women from control and abuse at home by providing them with the status of breadwinner. “When they get older and gain financial independence,” Mina, a social worker at ALLY, told me, “they become the helping hand of their families. And their family is not going to bother them as much.”

The objective of gaining financial independence through vocational training might appear as the most straightforward aspect of ALLY’s women’s empowerment program. Yet, the practical realities of providing such training to ALLY’s target population had proven more challenging than initially thought. The original program was only half as long as it was during my fieldwork. A twelve- to fifteen-month program was originally designed to cater to the dire financial needs of the young women. At that point, art, dance, and similar classes were being held, but they simply served as recreational activities that could help with women’s mental health and, thus, their capacity to learn. That program, however, soon proved ineffective:

The problem was that they had no communication skills. Their behavioral and communication skills were so weak and so low that they would get fired from their jobs. So, we forced them to pass a two-and-a-half-year program and then decide what specialty they want to choose, decide where their talents are, and after they finished that program and got their certificate, we would see if they were ready or not. (Mina, Social Worker)

When the girls come to me for their [job] briefings, how much can I teach them in that one session [about the techniques of doing interviews]? I tell them some general things; the things you can find in many of the books out there. Things like you need to look polished, how to speak, how to respond to some common questions. It depends on the girls too, if they get it in the first interview or if they have to screw up five interviews and find out what it’s all about in the sixth one. (Ava, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

Over the years, the perceived lack of behavioral and communication skills among clients had resulted in multiple changes in the length and the content of the program. After noticing the inability of the clients to acquire and hold jobs due to a lack of “interpersonal skills,” administrators decided to lengthen the program to a three-year one in which women would go through intensive therapy while attending multiple workshops on communication skills in addition to their social education and vocational training. The management believed the new program was more effective in preparing women for the job market. ALLY’s focus on the subjective transformation of the clients as a central element of their empowerment was also partially done in the same light. The understanding was that coming from the strict and limiting environments in which they were raised, most women had not developed the necessary skills for representing themselves in ways that their future work environment would demand. Some women, for instance, especially lacked the ability to work in the public sphere alongside men who were unrelated to them.

One of the girls that I was working with as a coordinator wouldn’t look me in the eye in the beginning. She used to say there is no way she can talk to a man. But now she is getting better slowly. She couldn’t say a word. (Barmak, Teacher)

During the first year, none of them wanted me as a male therapist because they weren’t comfortable with me. But I give people chances. [One of the girls] used to come here and would sit on that chair [pointing to the chair furthest away from him] and wouldn’t look me in the eye. But now that client sits here [pointing to a nearby chair] and is very comfortable with me. This is an opportunity for them to meet people of a different kind. (Alborz, Psychologist)

The problem of being present and comfortable in public spaces and around unrelated men, I was told, was mostly an issue with the most impoverished Afghan women. It was also the history of sexual abuse and trauma that would deter many of the women from seeking proximity to men, who they associated with potential abuse. ALLY’s founder and the team of directors as well as many of the staff, however, saw the presence of the male staff as a necessary component of empowerment.

What is really great for the girls at [ALLY] is that they see men that don’t have a sexual gaze. It’s a safe space. I myself wear chador but see how comfortable I am when I come to [ALLY]! It’s because [ALLY] is a safe space. This is awesome. The girls can see that people don’t look at them as women or as someone to take sexual advantage of. They have male teachers, male therapists, male psychiatrists, male managing directors that eat breakfast and lunch with them. This says that you are a human. Doesn’t matter what your gender is, you are a human. Even if you’re a girl, I can be a man just sitting next to you. This is really good for the girls. It changes their criteria for friendships and relationships. (Rose, Social Worker)

Gaining financial independence and becoming empowered depended not solely on vocational training but on a variety of unforeseen circumstances to which the staff had to respond. ALLY was responsible for modeling the typical space of future work, and it had to be an ideal space in which the organization’s principles of equality, respect, and human dignity were upheld. ALLY was regarded as a transitory space for class mobility; it not only offered job skills, it also provided impoverished clients with the opportunity to learn how to function in spaces from which they were previously excluded. Gaining employment as accountants, hairdressers, secretaries, or graphic designers would require women to shift spaces—to leave the slums and to enter spaces dominated by the middle class. Being present in such spaces and maintaining employment, the staff soon realized, required the ability to “perform” middle class by maintaining the appropriate appearance, speech, manners, and self-representation. The organization refused to provide assistance with finding jobs to those clients who, after three years, had not yet embodied this middle-class cultural capital. The “reputation of the organization could be harmed if we recommended girls who couldn’t keep a job,” Ava, a foreign affairs staff member, told me in an interview. In a conversation with Barmak, one of the teachers, I learned that the need for changing one’s mannerism and speech was at one point expressed by the young women themselves:

BARMAK: We used to constantly have meetings with other teachers and other people and a couple of psychologists to write our lesson plans. We had a meeting with the girls too and asked them, “What would you want to add to the program? What is lacking in ALLY? If we were to add a class, what do you want it to be about?” We asked for help from the girls, and the need for change came from the girls themselves. For example, having classes on “building relationships” was the girls’ idea. Then we realized that these needs exist.

FAE: Do you remember some of the other needs that the girls were talking about?

BARMAK: Yeah, they were so interesting. The girls were saying them in very simple terms. For example, one of them was that [chuckles] we want to speak gholombe solombe [yuppie and uppity] because people care a lot about how we speak. Another thing was their appearance that was important to them.

Barmak spoke of clients’ desire for learning “big words” and the “uppity” speaking style in the context of a conversation about the changing programs of ALLY and clients’ participation in the new design. And he related the women’s desire for change in their style of speaking and appearance to their low self-esteem—an organizational narrative often used to explain clients’ actions and attitudes. Here, I argue, however, that the clients’ request for learning and using “big words” demonstrates the larger social processes of inclusion and exclusion that are especially class-based. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) explains cultural capital as a set of symbolic elements acquired through being part of a particular social class. Taste, clothing, mannerisms, posture, and credentials are all different elements of cultural capital that determine one’s position within the social order and chance for experiencing class mobility. Objectified and institutionalized forms of cultural capital are seen by one’s material possessions, credentials, and degrees. Embodied cultural capital, such as one’s accent, dialect, or interpersonal skills, also designates one’s social status. What Bourdieu (1990) calls habitus is the embodiment of the habits and manners developed by being located in a particular social position. The need to grant ALLY’s clients the cultural capital necessary for inclusion in middle-class spaces was recognized by both the clients and the staff. Class-based systems of inclusion and exclusion are strongly present and their presence is recognized, but discourses often do not allow their own articulation. The dominant organizational narratives about raising clients’ self-esteem by improving their interpersonal skills point to the staff’s recognition of the importance of developing such skill sets without articulating them as effects of unequal class systems and exclusionary social processes. Class inequality and its effects hence remained unexplored, while clients’ inability to maintain employment was commonly discussed.

Due to these challenges, ALLY’s empowerment program had changed to an extensive three-year process of cultivating middle-class taste and persona in impoverished women. Empowerment had gradually shifted in convoluted ways; rather than entailing equipping clients with a substantive skill, it became about helping them appear middle class. Since many of the women lacked a high school education, the emphasis of a number of classes was on expanding their vocabulary and helping them articulate their thoughts in ways that gave the impression of having higher education. “If you had heard the girls a year ago, you couldn’t believe they are the same people,” Barmak told me proudly, explaining how the creative writing classes had expanded women’s vocabulary and ability to express their views. The organization had also recognized the need for taking women to museums, restaurants, movie theaters, and on short vacations that would allow them to acquire cultural capital through experiences that are exclusive to the middle and upper classes. Similarly, cultivating a sense of interest and appreciation for art, music, and philosophy was part of the empowerment process, as it granted clients linguistic or artistic symbolic capital. The presence of these classes for women whose primary struggles were poverty and the accompanying violence demonstrates that for the middle-class staff of ALLY, the ability to appreciate a “higher” culture—as the middle class does—was an empowering goal for which women should strive.

What I really want to see is for the girls to have art workshops and not art classes. Not classes for learning how to paint or how to play the music, but to gain a social understanding of art. For example, the girls feel very alienated from philosophy or poetry, although their creative writing class compensates for that a bit. I would really love it if ALLY would do something so that the girls would reconcile with art and not think that artists are of such a different caliber that they can’t relate to them. Because it’s really not like that. From a social perspective, we can see that the texture that artists create is the same as the masses of people. (Hamid, Teacher)

Why would Hamid speak of appreciation for the arts or connecting with the world of poetry and philosophy as his ultimate hope for ALLY’s clients? Why would the staff not take seriously the complaints of the impoverished women who repeatedly questioned the necessity of such programs for their well-being and success? In my formal and informal interviews, it was easy to see that, for the staff, clients’ mastery of literature or passionate interest in art were indicators of having developed an empowered personhood. As they bragged about clients developing vocabulary and conversational skills, I realized that for many of the staff, acquiring middle-class cultural capital was empowerment itself. However, it is important to note that many young women also experienced their new skills as empowering. As I show in the next chapter, they particularly used organizational resources to articulate their own critique of class inequality and the staff’s class privilege. Yet, the deep entanglement of the discourses of empowerment and the discursive class-based articulations of well-being had resulted in a common perception of empowerment as one’s ability to display a middle-class persona.

When women’s empowerment initiatives are implemented in poor rural settings, the focus is on their economic independence through making crafts, sustainable farming, and managing livestock. When empowerment programs are implemented in large urban areas like Tehran, the indicators of success are similarly shaped by cultural discourses of class and prestige commonly found in urban class-based economic and social settings. ALLY’s program and the staff’s perception of empowerment thus reflected the institutional texts that mark success by employability, type of occupation, education, and one’s embodied cultural capital. Class, however, is a dynamic process, a site of political struggle, and more than a set of static positions filled by indicators of employment and housing (Lawler 2005). In fact, class is better understood in relational, rather than substantive, manifestations of class existence. This is to say that middle-class identities rely on “othering” the working class and envisioning a position of superiority. Stephanie Lawler (2005), in her analysis of middle-class identities, demonstrates how the poor are often described in terms of lack—of culture, of class, of taste, of ethics, and sometimes of humanity itself. “This constitution of working-class existence in terms of ‘lack’ is now so widespread as to be almost ubiquitous. It informs social policy (‘social exclusion’ presumes a deficit model, as do discussions of ‘widening participation’) and is present even in some (though by no means all) analyses which are sympathetic to working-class people” (Lawler 2005: 434).

Discourses of empowerment are activated by the daily activities of social actors who engage with those discourses through retelling of cultural narratives of success and performing class as a relational construct. While ALLY’s employees were particularly critical of class inequality and those cultural narratives that depicted their clients as less than worthy, the larger class discourses of success determined their assumptions, actions, and decisions. They envisioned vertical class mobility for the poor as an ultimate goal for survival and well-being not simply by obtaining employment and wealth but also by embodying the “higher” culture and enjoying leisure activities that accompany economic success. Empowering the poor thus became a process whereby clients mastered middle-class performances by cultivating their cultural capital.

ALLY’s workers often expressed their heartfelt commitment to providing clients with opportunities similar to those they provided for their own loved ones. I appreciated greatly, as did many of the clients, the staff’s kind and diligent efforts to furnish clients with learning and leisure opportunities. Educators and researchers have long focused on adolescents’ brain development and cognition and searched for ways to increase their productivity and ease their transition to adulthood. These narratives recommend providing children and adolescents with opportunities for exploring vocational interests within educational settings. The role of educators is explained as helping adolescents with building career awareness and preferences (Wadlington, Elizondo, and Wadlington 2012). Leisure activities and opportunities to explore new interests are discussed as elements that are central to adolescent identity and occupational development (Vondracek and Skorikov 2011). ALLY’s educational program, designed based on relevant research on adolescent development and trauma, emphasized the exploration of vocational interests and leisure activities as central to young women’s empowerment.

The middle-class staff of ALLY imagined teen years that could be spent exploring the “finer points” of an education. They thus invested resources and energy into providing the young women with an education that would allow them to explore their talents and interests. Their efforts, however, were often criticized by the impoverished clients for whom this was considered a luxury, as their teen years were simply a point of time connecting an unlived childhood to a forced adulthood. The young women, who had been obligated to work and take responsibility as children, often rejected the plausibility of self-care through participation in ALLY’s art, dance, and social education programs. This is not to say that the clients did not enjoy or benefit from those efforts. As I mentioned previously, I spoke with many clients for whom learning to sing, dance, or paint was an unachievable yet salient dream before joining ALLY. The clients expressed a great deal of interest and appreciation for such opportunities but often found themselves struggling with navigating their daily realities within the world of possibilities now known to them. These possibilities, they knew, were temporary opportunities that would be out of reach soon after leaving ALLY. During this three-year program, clients showed continuous and consistent “growth,” according to the staff. Many went from having few interpersonal skills to being able to present themselves linguistically, in appearance, and in interests as middle class. During this process, however, as I showed in the beginning of the chapter, clients’ dissatisfaction with the program was also continuously growing, resulting in everyday tensions and conflicts at ALLY. Adding courses and programs that helped with clients’ development of life skills or interests had involved extending the length of the program, as the process of embodying cultural capital is a lengthy one that requires continuous rehearsals.

Although remaining poor and performing middle class could be seen as an achievement by the staff, who saw empowerment as developing the proper mannerisms, modes of feeling, and patterns of speech, being poor and only performing middle class had proven extremely unsatisfying for the clients, who desired some immediate financial gain and were under extreme pressure by their families to contribute to the household either as breadwinners or housekeepers. The experiences of social workers had proven that attending ALLY required constant negotiation with women’s guardians, whose conditions of poverty required family members of all ages to contribute to the urgent needs of the family.

The families, because they are poor, expect their kids [to work] instead of going to classes . . . [they ask them] “What money are you bringing home? If you are there every day, all day, how are you helping the family?” Because of these kinds of pressures from the families, many of the girls decide to quit, especially in the first three months. . . . We work a lot on this [mentality] by telling them that dear mom and dad, if your daughter keeps doing menial work at a shop right now, she will remain a worker forever. Give it two years, and she will be running the shop! But they are right too. How can someone who is worried about their food for the day even think about waiting for two years for their kids to get a degree and find a job? (Rose, Social Worker)

I heard from social workers about the never-ending struggle of ALLY to convince clients’ parents to allow their daughters’ participation in a three-year program. Many of the clients I spoke with also complained about the length of the program and the impossibility of pleasing both ALLY and their families. Young women’s initial excitement about attending ALLY was gradually replaced by resentment and complaints. “What happened to that Mona who was so hopeful and energetic in the beginning?” Mona, a senior client at ALLY, said with teary eyes at the end of the community development class that had gone sour. Mona had found it impossible to comply with the demands of the program while working toward her goals and maintaining peace at home. Many staff members were aware of clients’ dissatisfaction and unhappiness:

They complain a lot about how long [the program] is, and it really is. One of my clients was telling me “I understand! I see that my relationships are much better, my communication is much better and I have better relations with people and I have less problems. But I had a friend who started this with me. I came to [ALLY] and she went to learn sewing and working with machines; now she is making two million tomans [US$700 at the time] a month. I can see how awful her relationships are and that I’m doing so much better, but she is making two million a month!” (Arezoo, Psychologist)

The workers who recognized clients’ complaints as legitimate would often speak of this problem as a dilemma for which they had no concrete solution. Designing and implementing a program that provided clients with ample time for recovering from past traumas and developing social skills while immediately equipping them with vocational skills capable of producing income had proven extremely difficult, if not impossible. Ava, the foreign affairs worker, told me about ALLY’s limited options:

On one hand, if the program is shorter and less than three years, the changes that we expect [to see] don’t happen, and it’s not like we have reached our goals this way either! On the other hand, when it’s three years long and you are in a tough situation, I have even seen this among middle-class girls, they see marriage as the solution. . . . When you are in a tough situation, you start thinking about detours! (Ava, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

As a result of the growing tension between the clients and the staff, the necessity of implementing a new program that would be more conscious of clients’ needs was recognized and prioritized by the directing team. Raha had proposed changes in the length and the structure of the program that could allow clients to attend ALLY while engaging in entrepreneurial work such as handicraft making at the center. However, this could only be done if the number of art and social education courses that the clients were required to take was substantially reduced.

The Invisible Class Discourse in Program Development

“My father expects me to decide if I’d marry a suitor after a couple times of speaking to him. There’s no way I can go on the many dates you say is going to help me get to know him better,” Parisa, a sixteen-year-old Iranian client, said with a frustrated voice in a premarriage counseling workshop in which clients were advised not to jump into marriages with men they did not fully know. “It all comes down to the skills you will have to learn to use to negotiate with your father and make him realize the negative effects of a rushed marriage,” the teacher responded.

“Talk to him?” Parisa asked with a derisive tone. “What are you talking about? My dad’s brain is on vacation! Besides, I can’t be a noon-khor [dependent] forever! That’s why he keeps mumbling ‘marriage is the prophet’s tradition,’” Parisa said disdainfully, mimicking her dad’s voice.

Early and forced marriages were common problems among clients who lived in poverty and in families for whom early marriage of their daughters meant lessening their unbearable financial burdens. Some young women, on the other hand, would jump into marriages with their abusive partners or suitors they barely knew, as they saw marriage as a quick way out of their current miserable living conditions. ALLY had gone to great lengths to hire well-established counseling experts to hold workshops that could provide clients with life-changing advice. ALLY would consistently offer workshops on marriage and premarriage counseling with the hope that the information offered by counseling psychologists about the necessary conditions for a happy marriage would deter many women from making bad choices. The young women often expressed a great deal of interest in any opportunity to discuss dating, romantic relationships, or marriage. Many clients had boyfriends, were engaged to be married, or were sexually active outside of marriage, which made talking about boys and dating even more exciting. While they showed a great deal of interest in these workshops, what they could take from them was fairly limited. For Parisa, the dating advice offered in the workshop was a source of frustration for two reasons. For one, it demonstrated the secular middle-class teachers’ lack of awareness of the cultural norms within clients’ communities, where a long period of dating, while secretly practiced, is not permissible. Second, it showed teachers’ lack of awareness of how practices such as forced and early marriages persist due to the poverty and meager resources of the families of the young women. Unable to provide the basic necessities for dependent family members, particularly girls who could not contribute to the household financially, families reluctantly found the marriage of their young daughters to be the only option. As Parisa clearly stated, her father’s attempt at upholding the prophet’s tradition was the result of his inability to provide for a dependent and not of a religious or misogynist mindset that could be reasoned with.

The content and the structure of the workshops that were formed based on academic research (often conducted on love-based relationships) showed little compatibility with the conditions of the poor in Iran. Various governmental organizations and private counseling centers across Iran offer premarital counseling and dating workshops for the upper- and middle-class youth who live a cosmopolitan lifestyle and can afford such services. Yet the same dating advice offered at ALLY had little practical application for the clients who lived in fundamentally different material and cultural circumstances. This problem was also evident in workshops on health and nutrition as well as classes on communication skills. While catering to clients’ health and interpersonal skills was necessary for having a holistic women’s empowerment program, the information offered in such classes had little practical value for clients who could not afford nutritional food, choose to date before marriage, or use words with tones and manners prescribed as “good communication” with their poor or working-class family members, who, according to clients, saw such speech as “snooty” and “deplorable.” While Raha was aware of the impracticality of such classes and workshops for many of the young women, addressing the larger economic injustices the clients experienced was out of ALLY’s sphere of influence. Parisa, therefore, like many other clients, showed a great deal of frustration and disruptive behavior in classes in which she felt alienated.

Similar concerns and complaints were directed toward other aspects of ALLY’s program that reflected a class bias. I learned through my observations of courses such as community development that there was a strong organizational emphasis on cultivating in the young women the desire and ability to engage in social activism. In these courses, clients learned about the coconstitutive relationship between society and individuals and were introduced to creative grassroots initiatives. Clients were expected to envision, design, and carry out small community projects (building neighborhood libraries, running literacy classes for community members, cleaning the neighborhood, etc.) as part of the course requirement. ALLY’s larger educational program had mandated that clients volunteer at nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations after passing their specialty courses. This volunteering experience and the community development courses were designed, I was told, to nourish in the young women a strong sense of “social responsibility.” “Some of the girls are very self-centered,” Shirin, a teacher, told me. “We designed these courses to tell them that they have responsibilities too.”

[We ask them] now that you are here and have learned things, what do you want to do for your society? We teach them the concepts of sustainable development, social activism, and social responsibility, and we tell them that you are responsible. If you are doing something for your society, you are not doing anyone a favor. It’s a responsibility. (Barmak, Teacher)

ALLY’s goal of showing marginalized women that they could be “agents of social change” capable of disrupting unjust social systems was an exciting one. I participated in community development classes dutifully and joyfully to uncover the impact of such education and to understand how these women perceived the mandate of taking responsibility toward a society that has turned its back to their struggles. I heard and saw a great deal of selfless decisions by the impoverished women who wished to help those less fortunate than themselves. During the first week of my research, I heard that following the devastating earthquake in the Philippines in 2013, the young women made a collective decision to forgo one month’s supply of the daily fruit they received at ALLY so that the funds could be donated to those affected by the earthquake. While such collective and humanitarian efforts were common, I also came to witness a strong resistance to the idea of engaging in community service or doing unpaid volunteer work from many of the clients. While some of the women embraced the idea and the opportunity, many others rejected the necessity of engaging in community services on the grounds that their effort and energy must be channeled toward overcoming their daily and personal struggles.

The extreme poverty, long working hours, and chaotic households with which clients struggled daily did not allow them to envision engaging in a selfless social service as an empowering activity the way their middle-class teachers did. For many of them, activism was a middle-class leisure activity they simply could not afford. Some had encountered difficulties when implementing a community project for their previous classes. This experience had left them feeling that activism was less than empowering. While the teachers perceived themselves and their clients as equally responsible and capable of impacting their communities, the young impoverished ethnic-minority women found that their marginal status meant their voice and actions had little impact. As the women continued to resist the course content and assignments, the teachers insisted on developing in clients, who they saw as “self-centered,” a sense of social responsibility deemed necessary for becoming agents of social change. Ava told me about how the often-ignored class dimension of volunteering services had hindered the development of this program:

When we send them for volunteer work, they keep telling us that we live far away, do we have to go there? In all these years, only one or two of the girls did this passionately, and I think they were those living in our dormitory. The rest nagged and complained the whole time. This is the reality . . . the meaning of this work isn’t really clear for them. We had briefing sessions to explain why, [and they kept asking] “Why should we work for free and pay for the commute too?” The reality is that in all societies, those who do volunteer work are [financially] secure, are of a particular social class, or are concerned for their society. Those who do volunteer work mostly do it for a line on a résumé or maybe they want to go to heaven or something. (Ava, Foreign Affairs Personnel)

Ava’s statement suggests her awareness of the class dimension of volunteer and activist work, even though her job required explaining the importance of developing a sense of social responsibility to clients. For many of the young clients, however, community service and social activism were less than empowering. Doing unpaid work when their labor has been exploited and sacrificing their energy in a society where their well-being has been systematically overlooked were counterintuitive, especially when such work was done in the name of “self-empowerment.” Moreover, subjecting oneself to rejection by one’s community was less than empowering for many of the already marginalized clients, who faced serious obstacles in implementing their community projects. This is not to say that the clients were not interested in or did not see as valuable the act of service. In fact, I witnessed clients’ compassionate and collective efforts to help those suffering by sacrificing their little share of resources. What they objected to was the demand placed on them irrespective of their status and outside the realm in which service could remain meaningful and empowering.

It is also important to note that while many clients showed disruptive behavior and refused to participate in community development projects, some others experienced a great sense of agency by envisioning themselves as capable of impacting their society though community service. This group of clients, inspired by the ideas learned at ALLY, wished to share the newly gained awareness with close family and community members. Many of the Afghan clients spoke hopefully about the day they could return to Afghanistan and run similar classes for women. Others had already begun communicating the new ideas with their close family members. In any case, it was apparent that most women found their circle of influence limited to intimate settings. The middle-class conceptions of agency and morality promoted by the middle-class staff, which entailed taking up larger and more ambitious projects, were rejected by impoverished women, who could not ignore the relation between class privilege and social efficacy.