Hello and welcome this is the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week the British Fisherman's Wives

who fought in the 1960s to change the law covering safety at sea.

I could not sleep, my two young brothers at sea, 17 and 22.

I was worried sick out my mind for them.

Also Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks which lay undiscovered until the 1960s,

the brutality of the Battle for Hweh during the Vietnam Wars Tet Offensive,

we hit underground, and when we came out we felt as if we were standing on the moon.

There was complete destruction. That's how fierce it was.

And also in the podcast from the 1970s, Washington, D.C.'s lesbian separatists known as the

Furies. And it's with an issue relating to the rights of women that we begin, as we take you back to Iran in 1975, and the appointment

of the country's first ever minister for women's affairs.

Manas Afkami was the first person in the Muslim world to become a minister specifically for women.

The particular moment in history that this happened is important.

The mid-1970s was a period of social change in Iran, and some of those changes, it has been argued,

helped to ferment the unrest which eventually led to the return of Ayatollah

Romani and the establishment of the Islamic State.

Fahanahytha has been speaking to Manas Afkami

about being the only woman in the King at the airport during the departure ceremonies

for a head of state who was leaving.

It was both an unusual minister for women under Iran's king, the Shah.

Since the late 1960s, women had been making progress in Iran. They'd entered the diplomatic... In the studied in the US had returned to teach literature at the National University.

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