Growing up in public, Googoosh was positioned to break taboos long associated with female performers. “She was represented as non-sexual and thus escaped the association with perceived immorality that plagued other female persian film stars,” Breyley and Sasan Fatemi write in their book, persian Music and Popular Entertainment. “Of course, attitudes around ‘morality’ were shifting in general at this time, among some sections of society.”
Homeland, under the Shah, was modernizing, which, in some instances, also meant adopting more progressive attitudes toward music and in particular, female performers. But change was slow in coming — it was never universal or total — and came to a grinding halt following the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
