This Goes Out to the Underground A Mother, Her Daughter, and How We All Rise Together

In this searingly honest memoir, an activist and human-trafficking expert retells the true story of how she utilized illicit trade networks to smuggle herself across the globe and save her daughter—and ignited a feminist movement.

Pardis Mahdavi has always been caught between worlds—whether the strict expectations of her Iranian-American family stuck in the 1970s versus the liberated reality of living in Iran during the sexual revolution in the early 2000s; the demands of her traditional, controlling husband and the responsibility that came with her research into the world’s most vulnerable women; or the pipe dream of justice from a legal system that abandoned her in contrast to the efficiency of grassroots organizations that served to traffic goods and people.

When her two-year-old daughter vanished, Pardis believed she had a twenty-four-hour window before Tara might be lost forever. With the police unable to help, Pardis called the one man she still trusted: Sumac, who had been her jailer in Iran four years earlier, when she was put under house arrest and interrogated about her involvement in the movements to challenge the regime.

In a Los Angeles courtroom fighting for custody, Pardis met other women stymied by an unjust justice system. These women, marginalized since birth, used underground feminist networks to do the impossible over and over: to survive and make the world safer for others through lasting changes in human trafficking laws and reproductive rights.

Pardis Mahdavi, PhD is Provost and Executive Vice President of the University of Montana and a former Professor and Dean of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. She is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Dr. Mahdavi's career began as a journalist, writing for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. She continues to write for Foreign Affairs, Huffington Post, The Conversation, as well as Ms. Magazine. Her work has been featured in her academic books as well as numerous public opinion and policy pieces.

Dr. Mahdavi has published four single authored books and one edited volume in addition to numerous journal and news articles. She is the author of Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution, as well as multiple essays on the significance of sexual politics in the Arab Spring and Green Movement across the Middle East. More recently, her work on sexual politics has been featured in The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Zocalo, the Denver Post, as well as Facebook Watch.