Reddit Post claims a 1973 photo showing a woman in Iran wearing a short dress while cutting a birthday cake. Here is the truth
Claim:
A photo shows a woman cutting her own birthday cake in Tehran, Iran, in 1973.
Rating:
Context:
The photograph was taken in Tehran in 1971, not 1973. Sima, the woman in the photo, had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and was cutting the cake for Tehran’s birthday party. ‘a colleague.
On April 11, 2024, Reddit user u/Technical_Ad_4299 posted a photo of a woman in a short dress cutting a cake. The caption read: “Woman in Tehran, Iran, cutting a slice of cake in 1973 for her birthday.” The post was later removed for violating a subreddit rule that it did not stick to its theme of being exceptionally interesting. However, at this point it had already racked up many upvotes.
Previously, Snopes made contact with a person identifying themselves as one of the children of the woman in the photo. It was the trip that allowed us to discover the history behind photography.
Dress code for women in Iran
In the past, a Facebook user reposted the same photo with the caption: “Here is an image taken in Iran of a woman cutting her birthday cake in 1973, 5 years before the Islamic Revolution. I just wanted to point out how things can change when government becomes religious.
https://www.facebook.com/lmaddalena/posts/pfbid02xorLE1hxufq2nwPJEsjEEtReVWZX5UBDEoNqTEX2Qkhp2g7uNPfQnN9QzKu77bwl
According to users who commented on the photo, the woman’s apparent happiness and freedom to wear the clothes she wears stands in stark contrast to the country’s current reality.
The U.S. Institute of Peace has published information on how modern dress rules and other discriminatory guidelines specifically target women in Iran, particularly after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. For example, the Institute of Peace stated that “all women (in Iran) are required to cover their hair and dress modestly from the age of puberty.
A useful clue
According to reverse image search site TinEye, one of the first posts of the woman’s photo appears to be from June 24, 2018, also on Reddit. The oldest post showed the caption: “Woman cutting her birthday cake in Tehran, Iran, 1973.”
After some more research, we came across what seemed to be a helpful comment in another Reddit thread from December 22, 2020. In a repost on r/OldSchoolCool, Reddit user u/notbob1959 commented with information about a Pinterest board:
The original source of this photo is a Pinterest board and contains a few other photos of this woman and her parents. The title of the board is “My Mother in Iran – Inspiring Images of My Mother from the 60s” and it does not say that the photo posted is from her birthday or from outside the 60s.
As the Reddit comment says, the Pinterest board was titled “My Mom in Iran.” We reached out to the Pinterest user to see if he could provide us with more details about the photo.
Her name is Sima
In 2022, Pinterest user Sogol Hariri told Snopes that she was the daughter of the woman in the photo. She revealed that the photograph was taken in 1971, not 1973, and showed her mother, Sima, who was 18 at the time, just after being hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air . She told us that Sima was cutting the cake in the photo for a co-worker’s birthday, not her own party.
Via email, Hariri said his mother remembered the moment of the photo “very clearly”:
Let me start by clarifying that the photo was taken in 1971 in Tehran, Iran and is in fact Iranian! My mother was born in 1953 in Tehran and this photo was taken when she was exactly 18 years old. Her name is Sima and she lived and worked in Tehran and eventually married and had her three children there. We all currently reside in Canada.
She remembers the context of the photo well, as she had recently been hired as a flight attendant for Iran Air and had just started her training. One of her new colleagues at the airline invited her to a party celebrating her birthday and she had the honor of cutting his cake for all the guests. It was during her career at Iran Air that one of her colleagues encouraged her to become a model and she thus began a modeling career in Tehran, where she walked in numerous fashion shows. I’ve attached a photo of her before one of her flights and a few of her modeling photos wearing different looks. She describes this period of her life as very exciting and glamorous! I always loved looking at his photos from that era, which led me to casually post them on Pinterest. I had originally commented on Pinterest that his photos were taken in the 1960s, but there is only one family photo that was taken at that time, and all the others were taken in the 1970s .
Hariri sent us several photos of his mother and her modeling career. She also included a high-resolution version of the original photograph and another photo showing Hariri holding the original copy of his mother cutting the cake:
Sima works as a flight attendant for Iran Air.
Sima walks the catwalk during her modeling career.
Sima walks the catwalk during her modeling career.
Sima walks the catwalk during her modeling career.
Sima sitting in a room with international models.
The original photograph of Sima cutting his colleague’s cake in Tehran in 1971.
Sources:
Afary, Janet. “Iranian Revolution”. Britishhttps://www.britannica.com/event/Iranian-Revolution.
Hanna, Andrew. “Part 3: Iranian laws on women. » Introduction to IranDecember 8, 2020, https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2020/dec/08/part-3-iranian-laws-women.
justjared18. “My mother in Iran.” PinterestJune 8, 2013, https://www.pinterest.ca/justjared18/my-mother-in-iran/.
pasbob1959. “The original source….” r/OldSchoolCool via RedditDecember 23, 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/.
TinEye Reverse Image Search. https://tineye.com/.
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