So first, it's late here, so this is somewhat rambling and disjointed, covering several different points in a way that's not the most fluid, but will have to do at this time of night.

One of the things I study is urbanization in the Middle East, especially its effect on religion and politics, though mostly in Turkey, not Iran. Here's a paper that gives relevant statistics for Iran's urbanization. Figure 4 I think is really a key figure (imgur version). At the time of the Revolution, Iran was roughly half rural, and one should keep in mind that a good portion more lived in slums, which if they're anything like Turkey's or Egypt's slums, were often somewhat culturally isolated from what we think of as typical urbanites (and, to be clear, were generally filled by recent migrants from villages and their descendants).

Now, we shouldn't think of rural people in the Middle East late 70's as completely isolated from Western culture. Last summer I was in the house of a conservative mayor of a village in Turkey, and on his walls he had pictures of himself from the 1970's and he looked full on 1970's, like clearly influenced by American fashions from the period. A few years back, I encountered another guy who was driving a cab in Istanbul, and he talked about how back in the day when he was a shepherd in a distant Black Sea village, he used to sing Elvis, and Rolling Stones, and David Bowie songs to his sheep (this was about in the 1970's or 80's). He's definitely not typical of a Turkish villager, but villages aren't these living time capsules that some people assume them to be. One of the things that you see again and again in ethnographies in Turkey from the 60's to the 80's is how much people in the villages think things are changing, how they're drawn to the cities in a way that they just weren't in the 1950's. I have the notes for this ethnographer and his wife studying a Turkish village in the 1940's the 1950's and the people are so isolated--to them, Ankara and England seem essentially equally foreign. In the 1960's and 1970's, everyone in their 20's and 30's is thinking of moving to big cities for a better life. But in these ethnographies of village life do often hint at how isolated the villages still are. The ethnographers tend to be surprised at how quickly and obviously the villages are changing that they tend not emphasize how very different they still are from the cities. All the ethnographies from the 60's and 70's might as well be subtitled "continuity and change". By the 1980's, we're back to realizing how different the villages are from the cities. A famous Turkish ethnography of rural life from this period is called We Have No Microbes Here, which show how differently rural and urban Turks view health and healing; another, the Seed and the Soil, in part emphasis just how different rural gender roles continue to be, and how much women are still something to be protected and controlled. This is in secular Turkey, too. Ethnographies of slum life through the 90's often emphasizes how "out of place" the rural to urban migrants who exclusively populate the slums feel. How culturally kept out of the "rich people's" (which we'd call "Westernized") part of the cities they feel. Some of my friends in Istanbul have relatives who've only been to the center a handful of times in their lives (this would be like living in far out Bronx and having only been to Manhattan a few times--which of course is true for a lot of people in New York, my friends who teach in the Bronx tell me, we just tend not to think often of them).

There's a saying that the clothes make the man, but we tend to over read the clothes in these old pictures. We tend to see similar clothes to the American 1970's and assume similar values. This is not the case. The mayor in the small village in Turkey with the photo looking very 1970's that I mentioned, his family practices this thing commonly called "haremlik" and "selamlık", which basically separates the house into a public sphere where we as men sit and a private sphere where the women stayed. He, his adult son, and I, for example, ate separately from his wife, who stayed in the haremlik side. Now, his family wasn't so strict about it compared to other places I've seen, and his grade school age daughter eventually came out and talked with us (this would have been unthinkable two generations earlier--I have an ethnography from the same village). I don't think this was a conscious decision; other times in this village, I went into houses and had conversations with women in the public areas--I think it has more to do with long standing traditions around meals than anything else. But still, I found it a good example of how typically American clothes don't necessarily lend itself easily to typically American values.

There are all these great videos of Khomenei's return where these throngs people in Western clothes are just absolutely mobbing him, and he's doing what I can only assume is a traditional Shi'a gesture of ritually slapping their hands. This ABC news report from 1979 doesn't show the hand slapping I'm talking about (which is often the news footage the best shows how people dressed), but it gives you some sense of how Khomeini's supporters dressed during the Revolution. Some of the other clerics and confidants, of course, are in traditional clerical dress, but as soon as you get to 1:20 and start seeing the crowds, you realize how many of the people are in blue jeans and sweaters or t-shirts or whatever.

One thing you noticeably don't see in that news video or other news videos other videos of Khomeni's return are women, except in brief shots with a few women in black chador standing separately. When you see women in those famous shots from the "secular 1970's", they are mostly in what are clearly elite environments: universities, resorts, etc. Occasionally you'll see street shots that aren't obviously on a university campus, but these seem to be in "downtown" areas and elite districts. In Turkey, women's fashion shows started in the 1920's as a conscious sign of "modernity" (both sides are very concerned with women's bodies), but these fashions were practically available only to a very thin elite. And this despite these fashions being officially encouraged by the state. In my experience, while rural men's fashions did show Western influence, rural women's fashions changed (I have old photographs of the same village over time and I was actually shocked at how each generation there was a lot of change in this "conservative, traditional" fashion), but much less in tune with Western fashions. Today, in secular Turkey, more than 80% of women cover their heads. Yet, in the areas that I go to in Istanbul (which are the same areas that Western journalists and ritzy photographers would go), you'd never get that sense at all. Far fewer than half wear hard scarves, and in the secular fancy neighborhoods I've lived in, to be honest many times cleaning women are the only women with headscarves you'll see. If you turned on Turkish TV, you'd almost think that only grandmothers covered up. And this is after about two decades (but only about two decades) of a "modest" fashion industry that tries to make clothes that are both pious and inspired by high fashion, that tries to position the wearer as both consciously religious and consciously "modern" (in shopping districts, this is the fashion you'll see--pious people who have money don't necessarily want to live in the same districts as secular people with money).

So, in short, though I know more about Turkey than Iran, I'd say yes, the pictures in many ways are misleading, and lead us to believe that the lives of a small minority are typical of the broader population--in 1979, the modal Iranian lived in a village. Very few people went to university. Now, this isn't to say that the Revolution had no effect on dress, culture, and values--quite the contrary, it had a noticeable effect even in the countryside and slums. But here's a different view of urban Iran, from the eve of the revolution. Look at the women in the crowd--about half are wearing chadors, and half have their hair uncovered. Look at these photos of protests in the 1950's and 1970's in Iran. I'm not positive about in Iran, but in the first photo the women's clothes would read as upper middle class in Turkey during that period. The second photo, of women out protesting 1978-9, is interesting, and I think shows you that uncovered hair wasn't just a very thin slice of the society, even if it was likely a minority. The one from 78-9 is actually a rather iconic picture of the anti-Shah protesta, but one gets the sense it's famous in part because it shoes a side of the protests not seen in most other pictures. If you also compare that shot to others of protests, the predominance of men in most of them I think says a lot. So I don't want to portray those pictures as only showing some tiny, tiny minority, but at the same time, it'd be a huge mistake to see them as totally typical.