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  • 2022-07-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Does Pic Show Woman Cutting Birthday Cake in Iran in 1973? (en)
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  • On June 14, 2022, Twitter user @lostinhist0ry tweeted a picture with the caption, Woman cutting her birthday cake in Iran 1973, 5 years before the Islamic Revolution. We received mail from readers asking if we could find data that might confirm whether or not this was true. After this story was published, we established contact with one of the children of the woman in the picture. This is the journey of how we found the story behind the photograph. Ten days after the viral tweet went up, a Facebook user reposted the same picture with the caption, Here is an image from Iran of a woman cutting her birthday cake in 1973, 5 years before the Islamic Revolution there. Just wanted to point out how things can change when the government gets religious. According to users who commented on the photograph, the woman's apparent happiness and the freedom to wear the clothes she's dressed in portrayed a stark contrast to the country's present-day reality. The U.S. Institute of Peace published information about how modern dress code rules and other discriminatory guidelines target women specifically in Iran, especially following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. For example, the Institute of Peace said that all females [in Iran] are required to cover their hair and dress modestly from the age of puberty. According to the TinEye reverse image search website, one of the earliest postings of the picture of the woman appeared to be from June 24, 2018. A post in the r/OldSchoolCool subreddit on Reddit showed the caption, Woman cutting her birthday cake in Tehran, Iran 1973. After some more digging around, we stumbled upon what looked to be a helpful comment in a different Reddit thread from Dec. 22, 2020. In a repost on r/OldSchoolCool, Reddit user notbob1959 commented with information about a Pinterest board: As the Reddit comment said, the Pinterest board was titled My Mother in Iran. We contacted the Pinterest user to see if they could provide more details about the picture. After this story was published, we received a response from the Pinterest user. Sogol Hariri said she is the daughter of the woman in the picture. She revealed that the photograph was captured in 1971, not 1973, and that it showed her mother, Sima, who was 18 years old at the time, just after she was hired to be a flight attendant for Iran Air. She told us that Sima was cutting the cake in the picture for a colleague's birthday, not her own celebration. By email, Hariri said her mother remembers the moment in the photograph very vividly: Hariri sent us several pictures of her mother and her modeling career. She also included a high-resolution version of the original photograph and another picture that showed Hariri holding the original print of her mother cutting the cake: (en)
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