[The massive protests in Iran, fueled by the audacity of young
women and children, are rooted in over a century of struggle.]
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WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM: THE ORIGINS OF THE UPRISING IN IRAN  
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Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson
December 2, 2022
Dissent
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_ The massive protests in Iran, fueled by the audacity of young women
and children, are rooted in over a century of struggle. _

Women carry flags and pictures during a protest over the death of
22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in Iran, in the
Kurdish-controlled city of Qamishli, northeastern Syria September 26,
2022, Orhan Qereman

 

_This article will appear in _Dissent_‘s Winter 2023 issue, out in
January. To get your copy, subscribe now
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In March, 1979, urban Iranian women and girls and their male
supporters took part in a week of demonstrations in Tehran, beginning
on International Women’s Day, to protest the new Islamist regime’s
edict compelling women to wear hijabs. The demonstrators expressed a
deep sense of betrayal at the direction being taken by the Iranian
revolution, then just weeks old. “In the dawn of freedom, we have no
freedom,” they chanted. Their ranks grew by the day, reaching at
least 50,000. The movement attracted international solidarity,
including from Kate Millet, who famously traveled to join them, and
Simone de Beauvoir. At home, Iranian feminists gained support from the
People’s Fedayeen, a Marxist-Leninist group which had engaged in
armed resistance against the American-backed monarchy before it was
overthrown by the revolution. For a few days, the Fedayeen formed a
protective cordon, separating the protesters from crowds of Islamists
who were trying to physically attack them. But in time, influenced by
a visiting Yasser Arafat and others, the Fedayeen withdrew its support
for fear of weakening the revolution at a time when, it was widely
believed, the U.S. government was ready to pounce and restore the
shah. Over the next few years, the Iranian feminist movement seemed to
die, or at least go underground.

More than forty years later Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a twenty-two-year-old
Kurdish woman, arrived in Tehran with her family on vacation. Soon
after, on September 13, 2022, agents of the country’s infamous
morality police arrested her on charges of wearing her hijab
improperly. Despite her vigorous protestations, they took her into
custody, whereupon, according to eyewitnesses, she was severely
beaten. Three days later, she died from brain injuries. Amini’s
death struck a nerve throughout the nation. The state’s refusal to
look into the causes of her death, or to offer an apology, further
fanned the anger of protesters. Demonstrators soon began to chant,
“Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, we are all together.”

Demonstrations have taken place in more than eighty cities and towns
throughout the entire country. As the protests have spread, young
women, even high-school and middle-school students, have ripped off
their headscarves and cried, “Death to the dictator!” The uprising
is rooted in red-hot anger against gender apartheid, and not only
among women. As the renowned actress Golshifteh Farahani told _Le
Monde_
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what has made these protests historically novel is that “men are
willing to die for women’s freedom.”

Demographically, Iran, with a population of 85 million, is a very
different country than what it was in 1979. Fully 75 percent of the
country is urbanized, literacy stands at almost 100 percent among
people under twenty-five, and there are 4 million university students,
the majority of whom are women. Meanwhile, the fertility rate has
fallen to 2.1 births per woman, from 6.5 in 1979.

Many issues besides women’s rights are bound up in the protests:
authoritarianism, economic stagnation and severe unemployment, climate
disaster, and various religious-fundamentalist impositions. The
current uprising also represents the public’s response to the
regime’s colossal cronyism and corruption, and to its
confrontational foreign policy and regional expansionism, which have
isolated Iran and contributed to extremely high inflation in the
country. These grievances have fueled other protests over the past few
years, but the 2022 uprising is also distinguished by an ethnic
dimension: Mahsa Amini was from Iranian Kurdistan, an impoverished,
marginalized area with a long history of revolutionary resistance.
When she was born, her family had wanted to give her a Kurdish name,
Jina, but the policies of the Islamic Republic restricted their
choices to Persian and Arabic names. In Kurdistan, the 2022 uprising
has taken over whole towns—and the regime has not hesitated to use
live ammunition against the protesters. Many also believe that Mahsa
Amini was singled out by the morality police of Tehran because she was
dressed as a Kurd.

Decades of ethnic oppression also fueled protests in Sistan and
Baluchestan, a southeastern region that borders Pakistan. After
demonstrators came out in Zahedan to protest the reported rape of a
local girl by a police official, the regime responded with gunfire on
September 30, 2022. Police chased demonstrators off the streets,
firing live ammunition into a Sunni mosque during worship services.
The violence resulted in at least ninety-three deaths, soon known as
the Zahedan Massacre. This has led to widespread and continuing
protests in the region, supported by the highest-ranking cleric of the
province, the Sunni imam Mowlavi Abdulhamid, who is known for
supporting the Reformist wing of the regime. These events, which show
a connection between movements against gender oppression and against
ethno-national oppression, point to the deeply intersectional
character of the 2022 uprising. Various professional and artistic
groups—including actors, lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers,
professors, and even some past and present members of the national
soccer team—have expressed solidarity with the protests.

The uprising has continued with particular force in Iranian Kurdistan,
with the city of Sanandaj playing a central role. (Kurdish leaders in
Iraq and Syria also condemned Amini’s killing.) By October, regime
forces using live ammunition were storming the city, firing machine
guns indiscriminately at protesters, rampaging through people’s
homes, and even shooting to death a man who had simply honked his car
horn in solidarity with protesters. Kurdistan, especially Sanandaj,
Mahabad, and Amini’s hometown Saghez took center stage again in late
October, when vast crowds from all over the country converged to mark
the forty-day anniversary of Amini’s death, a centuries-old custom
followed by all Muslim communities in Iran. The state tried to stir up
fear and dissuade people from gathering by saying a shooting at the
religious shrine of Shah Cheraq in Shiraz (the second holiest shrine
in Iran) was “an attack by ISIS.” But no one seemed to believe the
government’s account, and protesters responded with chants like
“You are our ISIS.” The police also tried to block the outpouring,
but to no avail. They opened fire at one point and killed some of the
mourners. A nationwide general strike was also called for that day,
with scattered success.

In Tehran’s Evin Prison, where thousands of protesters are being
held, a fire broke out in late October that could be seen throughout
the entire city. It’s not clear what led to the fire, but it
might have been started by guards in an attempt to silence prisoners
who chant in solidarity with the protesters inside the gates. By
November, the bazaars were shutting down as protests continued
nonstop, with the largest strikes in Tehran and Kurdistan. The
ancestral home of regime founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was
torched.

The uprising has been fueled by the audacity of young women and
children, and they have experienced the regime’s brutal response. A
commander of the Revolutionary Guards revealed in September that the
average age of detained protesters was only fifteen. Sixteen-year-old
Nika Shahkarami was arrested after taking off her hijab and setting it
on fire at a protest in Tehran in September, and she died soon after
in police custody. Sarina Esmailzadeh, also sixteen, was beaten
severely by police at a September protest in Karaj, an industrial
suburb of Tehran, and later died in a police station. In October, Asra
Panahi—another sixteen-year-old—was bludgeoned to death by police
after she disrupted a pro-regime ceremony at her school in Ardabil, in
Iranian Azerbaijan. In November, a nine-year-old boy named Kian
Pirfalak was reportedly killed by security forces in the southern
province of Khuzestan. His death further galvanized the protests and
turned him into a new icon of the movement, representing hundreds of
children who have been arrested or murdered. The public became almost
inconsolable when it became known that the young boy was progressive
and had used a secular invocation, “to the God of the Rainbows” in
a school project, in a departure from religious orthodoxy.

The protests have featured young women standing up before crowds,
baring their heads, and then cutting off their hair in an act of
defiance—and in a revival of a cultural practice of women cutting
their hair in mourning, which goes back as far as the eleventh-century
founding text of Persian literature, the _Shahnameh_. The movement
has also developed its own anthem, “Baraye” (“For the Sake
of”). Written by singer Shervin Hajipour, it is played and sung
constantly throughout Iran and in diaspora communities. The lyrics
say:

For the fear of dancing in the alleys
For fear at the moment of kissing
For my sister, your sister, our sisters
For changing rusted minds, for the shame of poverty
For the wish to live a normal life
For the dumpster-dwelling children and their wishes
For this dictatorial economy
For this polluted air
For the worn-out plane trees on Vali ‘Asr Street
For the cheetah and its possible extinction
For the innocent banned stray dogs
For the unstoppable tears
For repeating this moment
For smiling faces
For students and their future
For this compulsory paradise
For the imprisoned elite students
For the Afghan kids
For all these “fors” that are beyond repetition
For all these meaningless slogans
For all the collapsed, shoddy buildings
For the feeling of peace
For the sun after a long night
For sleeping pills and insomnia
For man, homeland, prosperity
For the girl who wished to be a boy
For woman, life, freedom
For freedom, for freedom, for freedom

While the uprising has been leaderless so far, it has not been aimless
or incoherent. Its slogans indicate the movement’s general
aspirations. The most prominent one, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” not
only places women’s emancipation at the center but also evokes
transformative change: it originated in the Rojava region of Syria,
where Kurdish forces, some commanded by women, drove out the Islamic
State in late 2017. It is incredibly moving to hear demonstrators in
Tehran, who are largely from the dominant Persian community, shouting
out a slogan that originated in Kurdistan. Usually they shout it in
Persian, but sometimes, in a further act of solidarity, they use
Kurdish.

“Death to the dictator,” the movement’s other primary slogan,
began to emerge in 2019. It marks a clear break with the tenor of the
massive Green Movement of 2009–10, which had a clear leadership that
channeled the movement into demands for the democratization of the
Islamic Republic, not its overthrow. Echoing the most prominent slogan
of the 1979 revolution, “Death to the Shah,” the 2022 version
refers instead to Supreme Religious Leader Ali Khamenei. (A popular
variant of this slogan—“Death to the oppressor, whether Shah or
Rahbar [supreme religious leader]”—suggests opposition to efforts
by some conservatives in the diaspora to restore the monarchy in the
person of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah.) The slogan is
particularly risky because Khamenei is, in the legal terms of Iran’s
theocracy, God’s representative on Earth; even verbal attacks on him
could be subject to a law that makes “rebellion against God” a
capital offense. Another slogan underlines the depth of popular anger:
“This is the year of blood. Seyyed Ali [Khamenei] will be
overthrown.”

CONTEXT OF THE CURRENT UPRISING

The current unrest broke out in the wake of several smaller uprisings
over the past several years. In 2017, young women began a series of
anti-hijab protests in which they posted selfies on social media that
showed them unveiling in public. In September 2019, a young woman,
Sahar Khodayari, died after setting herself on fire to protest a
prohibition on women attending soccer matches. Later in 2019 and in
2020, demonstrations over gasoline prices grew into nationwide
anti-government protests concentrated in smaller cities and rural
areas. However, these two types of protests, one prompted by gender
apartheid and the other stemming from economic grievances, remained
largely separate.

As protests subsided somewhat during the COVID-19 pandemic, the regime
engineered the 2021 election of President Ebrahim Raisi, a far-right
figure who was directly involved in the execution of thousands of
Iranian political prisoners in 1988 and previously served as the
country’s chief justice. Soon after, a crackdown began. In the
summer of 2022, the government bulldozed homes in a village inhabited
for more than a century by members of the Bahá’í religious
minority. During those same months, the morality police escalated
attacks on young women for “improper hijab,” accusing them of
insufficiently covering their hair or other body areas. It was this
phase of repression that took the life of Mahsa Amini.

Some believe that the regime might loosen hijab regulations and evolve
toward a more “normal” military dictatorship under the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps, but there has been no evidence that this
will happen. Gender subordination has been woven into the fiber of
this regime ever since 1979. Supreme Leader Khamenei, who has held the
position since 1989, is in declining health, which also presents a
crisis for the regime. If the officials orchestrating the current
repression are hesitant in pursuing a full crackdown, as recent
hacking of state communication has revealed, it is because they
don’t want to be left holding the bag when new leadership comes to
power—in case that leadership is eager to use particularly odious
officials as scapegoats while claiming, however fraudulently, that a
new era will involve more listening to the people.

In addition to chafing under religious restrictions, middle- and
working-class Iranians have seen their standard of living drastically
drop over the past decade. The country has faced skyrocketing prices
and housing costs and high unemployment. By early October, labor
groups, including some in the strategic oil sector, had begun to take
a prominent role in the protests. At the turn of the twenty-first
century, high oil prices briefly allowed the government to spend more
on domestic social programs. In recent years, however, growing
internal consumption, aging production facilities, and U.S.-imposed
sanctions have limited Iran’s capacity to export oil. Moreover,
oil-funded state expenditures contributed little to economic
development, let alone job creation.

U.S. sanctions, which were reimposed during the presidency of Donald
Trump, greatly increased the suffering of the Iranian people. However,
many Iranian economists see corruption and mismanagement as more
important factors in Iran’s economic crisis. Many believe that the
suffering of the Iranian people stems largely from the aggressive
foreign policy of the “military-industrial-theocratic complex” led
by the Revolutionary Guards and Khamenei. In exchange for political
backing, the state has awarded large contracts to the Revolutionary
Guards and the paramilitary Basij militias it oversees. The Guards and
their militias are directly involved in backing unsavory allies,
including the murderous Assad regime in Syria, and in building drones
and ballistic missiles that are being sent to assist Putin in
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2020, some 80 percent of Iran’s
economy (including both the oil and gas industries) was under the
Revolutionary Guards’ control. They have become the country’s
principal employer. Some argue that the Guards hold the real power in
Iran, albeit under the nominal leadership of Khamenei.

There is a heated argument going on in Iranian diaspora circles over
what to call the present uprising. Some have called it a feminist
revolution; others have argued that the term “revolution” is
inappropriate, as significant cracks in the regime or its repressive
apparatus have yet to appear. Yet the situation is fluid. At the end
of October, Parliament voted to give the security forces a 20 percent
pay increase, seemingly to keep them motivated amid concerns that
soldiers might be hesitant to open fire on young students, some of
whom are reportedly children of members of the Revolutionary Guards
and of veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. There are also rumors that the
military has approached Khamenei and asked for a compromise by
bringing back Reformists who have been pushed out of power, including
President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the
real winner of the 2009 presidential election. Mousavi, together with
his spouse, the Muslim feminist Zahra Rahnavard, and the other 2009
Reformist presidential candidate, the cleric Mehdi Karroubi, have been
under house arrest for almost thirteen years.

Whether protesters would accept a somewhat more tolerant Islamist
government remains to be seen. But with every decade that has gone by
since 1979, Iranian society has inched closer to a breaking point.
Since the revolution, Iran has seen dramatic changes in attitudes
toward sex, marriage, and procreation—changes that threaten the
ideological fabric of a regime that has built its legitimacy on gender
segregation and claims that it values family, piety, and old notions
of justice and morality. But the struggle against gender apartheid in
Iran stretches back more a century, to long before the Islamic
Republic.

OPPOSING GENDER SEGREGATION: THE RED THREAD OF IRAN’S MODERN SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS

The first major social movement in modern Iran, the messianic Babi
movement, began in the mid-nineteenth century. Among the goals of the
movement was to end many Shi’i rituals that were the basis of social
and gender hierarchies in Iranian society, including mandatory veiling
and gender segregation. These issues have been at the heart of modern
Iranian social movements from the beginning.

Islam, especially in its Iranian Shi’i form, is a
“pollution-conscious” religion, much like Zoroastrianism, Judaism,
and Hinduism. In these religions, the orifices from which blood,
semen, and urine seep out are particularly guarded because they are
entry points through which impurities might enter the body. Women are
seen as the door of entry to the community, and their access to public
spaces and control of their own bodies are seen as threats to the
whole society, since their exposure might allow impurities (physical
and moral) to infiltrate the family. In nineteenth-century Shi’i
Iran (as in Orthodox Jewish and Zoroastrian communities), a woman’s
sexual and reproductive functions turned her body into a contested
site of potential and real ritual contamination. It was therefore not
surprising that the most important leader of the Babi movement was a
woman named Qurrat al-Ayn, who in a radical act publicly unveiled. In
part because of her unveiling, there was a backlash against the
movement and its demands. The royal court and high clerics ordered
that the Babis be massacred, starting with its leaders, including
Qurraat al-Ayn, who died in 1852.

The position of Iranian women had not improved by the turn of the
twentieth century. Iranian women lagged far behind the Azerbaijani
Shi’is of the South Caucasus (who lived under Russian colonialism)
and the Sunni Muslims of the Ottoman Empire. In the South Caucasus,
middle- and upper-class Muslim women received an education, and Muslim
philanthropists were busy building palatial schools for girls. In
Turkey, things were even further along: the first medical school of
midwifery had opened in 1842, the first secondary school for girls was
established in 1861, and the first teacher-training college for women
was founded in 1870. In contrast, there were no schools for Muslim
girls in Iran, primarily because of the entrenched opposition of the
Shi’i clergy.

This situation changed dramatically with Iran’s 1906 Constitutional
Revolution, which brought the country a European-style parliamentary
democracy, a constitution modeled on the 1831 Belgian Constitution,
and a progressive bill of rights. Among the revolutionaries were
socialists—predominantly social democrats of Iranian heritage from
Tiflis (now known as Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) and Baku (now
the capital of Azerbaijan)—who encouraged the formation of
grassroots organizations known as _anjomans_, modeled on the soviets
of the 1905 Russian Revolution, and promoted progressive ideas like
increasing women’s access to education and the public sphere. Elite
women formed women’s _anjomans_ as well as schools, clinics,
orphanages, and home theaters.

High-level clerics were outraged by these developments. They labeled
the progressive constitutionalists “atheists” and warned that soon
Muslim women would be wearing pants and marrying non-Muslim men. But a
generation of male journalists, parliamentary deputies, and poets
supported the women’s activities, and the constitutionalists were
able to push aside the conservative clergy’s opposition for a time.
The revolution came to a tragic and abrupt end in 1911, when Russia
occupied the country in collusion with Great Britain.

The rise of the Pahlavi dynasty, in 1925, coincided with a new era of
gender and sexual politics, alongside the emergence of a more educated
middle class. The twin goals of the constitutionalists had been
democracy and modernity. Under Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled from 1925
to 1941, they could not achieve the first, but they lent him their
support in order to achieve the latter. The shah implemented a number
of modernizing reforms. His support for the sciences undermined
clerics when it became clear that many religious rituals, such
as _ghusl _(ritual immersion in public bath houses), spread
diseases. His educational and legal reforms ended formal segregation
and discrimination against religious minorities such as Zoroastrians,
Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and Sunni Muslims. At the same time, he
oversaw a new form of nationalism that was state imposed, in contrast
to the grassroots, democratic nationalism of the Constitutional
Revolution. Persian was declared the official state language, even
though it was the first language of only a slight majority of the
population. Reza Shah further attempted to limit dissent by forcibly
relocating certain ethnic populations to preclude assemblies that
might evolve into organized political resistance. Shi’i and
Persian-speaking populations were frequently sent to Sunni and
Turkic-speaking areas to undercut the threat of separatist ethnic
movements.

The most controversial of Reza Shah’s reforms was the compulsory
unveiling of women, instituted in 1936. Public reaction was mixed.
Many members of the new middle class (such as teachers and
pharmacists) accepted the change and started appearing in public with
their wives and daughters unveiled. But members of the more
traditional middle class, such as clerics and merchants, recoiled and
would not let their wives leave home. Regardless of the opposition,
unveiled women soon appeared in public in large numbers, on their way
to schools, in women’s organizations, and in various professions.
The Pahlavi regime’s other major gender reform was ending the
practice of boy concubinage (a tradition that dated back to the
pre-Islamic era) and ostracizing all forms of homosexuality.

In 1941, the Allies occupied Iran. Reza Shah, who had tended toward
neutrality owing to Iran’s large volume of trade with Nazi Germany,
agreed to abdicate in exchange for having his twenty-two-year-old son,
Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, placed on the throne. Though martial law
was soon imposed and Allied forces remained in Iran throughout the
Second World War, the authoritarian state was undermined—ushering in
chaos but also a new era of political freedom and calls for
accountability. For the first time since the Constitutional
Revolution, a relatively free press, trade unions, and multiple
political parties emerged. Liberal nationalists revived the legacy of
the Constitutional era and campaigned for political reforms and
democracy. Backed by the Soviet Union, the communist Tudeh Party
gained widespread and enthusiastic support among young people, both
students and workers. This was despite the fact that the first
generation of Iranian communists, led by Avetis Sultanzade, had been
murdered by Stalin’s regime in 1938.

Together with social democrats, the Tudeh helped foster an
unprecedented sense of camaraderie among diverse social and ethnic
groups. Leftist organizations were more tolerant of ethnic and
religious minorities and helped break down many old hierarchies of
status and gender. A new generation of young urban women, many of them
high school students from a variety of religious backgrounds, joined
various political parties and campaigned for suffrage, the right to be
elected to office, the right to work and child care. Less strict
veiling in public returned among traditional urban middle-class
communities, but the vast majority of the more modern middle-class
women remained unveiled. The substantial breakdown of both religious
and gender segregation in Tehran and other major cities only further
infuriated the most traditionalist religious Iranians.

In 1951, Iran’s parliament voted to nationalize the country’s
British-owned oil industry, making Iran the first nation in the Middle
East to do so. Two years later, the United States and Great Britain
jointly overthrew the democratically elected nationalist Prime
Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (1951–53), and brought back the pliant
young monarch Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had briefly fled the
country. The imperialist powers ousted Mosaddeq partly by exploiting
differences within his own coalition over social and cultural issues.
In the crucial years of 1951 and 1952, women’s suffrage divided the
nationalist movement. The issue was a contributing factor in the
breakup of the nationalist coalition in early 1953, which facilitated
the coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence.

Iran once again embarked on an agenda of authoritarian modernization,
including gender reforms, which the government used to signal its
commitment to Western norms. While Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s
reform projects had a limited scope in terms of how many people
actually adopted a “modern” lifestyle, they had a sizable symbolic
impact: images of modernization permeated new public spaces, including
newspapers, television, cinema, billboards, the fashion industry, and
popular magazines. Many urban homes had a television set by the late
1960s; going to the movies was a popular form of entertainment.
Pictures of women in revealing clothing and making provocative
gestures filled the media. The advertising industry propagated images
of Western beauty ideals and lifestyles, and magazines published
cartoons featuring semi-nude women. It was not only traditionalist
clerics who disapproved of these developments but also most leftists
and secular nationalists, especially since the regime touted these
changes in gender roles as indications of Iran’s growing proximity
to the West. As a result, hostility to new gender norms became a key
factor in cementing a political alliance that would have been
unthinkable during the first half of the twentieth century: a tenuous
“Red–Black” anti-shah coalition of anti-imperialist leftists,
nationalists, and conservative Islamists.

Ever since the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, advocates of modernity
had pushed for women’s rights by implicitly promising that giving
women new rights and opportunities would not interfere with them
meeting traditional expectations. They would remain dutiful daughters,
faithful wives, and self-sacrificing mothers, even as they assumed a
more public role in society. From this perspective, women’s
education would benefit the whole nation. By the 1960s, however, a new
generation of assertive women working within the parliament,
government bureaucracy, the legal system, and universities began to
undermine this idea. Under the impact of Western second-wave feminism,
modern urban Iranian women demanded new legal, economic, and
individual rights, including more rights in marriage. They also broke
old sexual taboos. The poems of Forough Farrokhzad, a brilliant
feminist poet and filmmaker who had left her husband for another man
and lost custody of her only son, became anthems of this new
generation. Her work shocked readers with its emotionally and sexually
provocative messages. The poem “Sin,” for example, begins:

I sinned a sin full of pleasure, in an embrace which was warm and
fiery.
I sinned surrounded by arms that were hot and avenging and iron.

The publication of “Sin” created a scandal at the religious
seminaries and in the city of Qom, where clerics and their supporters
called for a ban on Farrokhzad’s works. Even more outrageous was
another poem, “Captive,” in which the narrator admits to having an
affair while she is married and has a child. She compares herself to a
caged bird:

I think of this knowing I shall never be able to escape this plight,
For even if the keeper should let me go, I’ve lost all my strength
for the flight.
Every sunny morning a child, behind the bars looks smilingly at me
When I start to sing my song of joy, his lips form kisses that he
brings for me.

Breaches of feminine modesty, such as images of young Iranian women in
popular women’s magazines and Farrokhzad’s poetry, broke the
social contract over gender and galvanized a backlash against Western
sexual mores, Western feminism, and, soon, the modern gay rights
movement as well.

Not long after the 1979 Revolution, the Islamic Republic instituted a
dramatic reversal of women’s rights. The state revived premodern
social conventions, such as mandatory veiling, easy divorce for men,
child marriage, and polygamy, but enforced them through modern forms
of surveillance and control. Women accused of improper veiling were
flogged, and those accused of premarital or extramarital sex were
imprisoned, or, in a few cases, stoned to death, and men in modern gay
relationships were severely punished and even executed.

Harshly misogynistic laws existed alongside populist social and
economic programs that initially benefited the urban and rural poor,
including women. By the 1990s, however, privatization policies widened
the wealth gap. After initially encouraging pronatalist policies in
the early 1980s, the regime reversed course and established a popular
and comprehensive family-planning program. This period, from the late
1980s into the early 2000s, came to be known as the era of the
Pragmatists (supporters of economic liberalization), who were followed
by Reformists (supporters of cultural liberalization). Because these
family planning programs were offered in the name of Islam, many pious
families relented and embraced them. The results, coupled with a
literacy campaign that targeted rural women, led to a drastic
demographic transition. The overall fertility rate dropped from 6.4
births per woman in 1984 to 1.8 in 2010 and stabilized at 2.1 in 2022.
The United Nations Population Division found that in the periods
spanning 1975–1980 and 2005–2010, Iran saw the sharpest downward
percentage changes in fertility rates of any country in the world.
Connected to this decline was a substantial increase in the age of
first marriage for both women and men. The number of formal marriages
declined, while religiously sanctioned temporary marriages (an ancient
form of concubinage, in which sex is usually exchanged for money) and,
gradually, a more modern form of cohabitation known as “white
marriage,” increased.

As a result of industrialization, urbanization, vaccination, better
hygiene, and the adoption of contraceptive technologies, the
institution of marriage went through a profound change in Iran, just
as it did in the West. Marriage became less centered on procreation,
and women’s demands for emotional and sexual intimacy increased. New
forms of normative heterosexuality were established as mutually
pleasurable sex and romantic love in marriage became important. Sex
outside marriage also became more acceptable. As women became more
sexually assertive, they also became less tolerant of men’s
extramarital affairs, both heterosexual and homosexual, and less
tolerant of state intrusion into their personal lives. Divorce rates
also increased.

Gender relations continued to change despite all attempts by the
Islamist state to wind back the clock. Young rural men and women
recruited into the regime’s forces soon began to enter into
companionate marriages that were blessed by the regime, rather than
arranged by their families. By the second decade of the twenty-first
century, arranged marriages and marriages strictly within kinship
groups were no longer the norm, even in tribal and rural communities.
Women came to expect intimacy, spontaneity, and a greater degree of
emotional and sexual closeness. Moreover, as the mean age of marriage
for girls went up, dating became a more accepted part of life.

Today, Iran remains a land of deep contradictions not just in politics
but also in love, sex, and marriage. While women’s participation in
the formal economy is very low, they are heavily involved in the
informal economy. Many have several part-time jobs and financially
support their families. A significant number of urban women have also
chosen to stay single or, if divorced or widowed, not to remarry. Yet
school textbooks remain deeply conservative, portraying women
primarily as wives and mothers. Young people date online, and many
urban women engage in premarital sex. But when a relationship does not
end in marriage, women often undergo hymenoplasty before getting
married to an available and more traditional male partner who expects
his wife to be virgin. Couples increasingly elect to cohabit in
“white marriages” instead of entering into legal marriage. At the
same time, anachronistic laws continue to ban intimacy between
unrelated men and women, the morality police monitor the hijab
regulations, buses and canteens are segregated by law, and, from time
to time, the morality police severely punish people for breaching
these laws.

All of these factors paved the way for the large and persistent
protests we are witnessing today in Iran. Iranian women have been part
of every major social protest since the second decade of the Islamic
Republic, and in recent years, they have often been at the forefront
of these protests. Women have fought alongside or even in front of men
for their common goals, such as education, jobs, and human rights, but
also specifically for women’s rights. They have assumed leadership
roles in mass national protests and injected feminist concerns into
broader social and economic grievances. Participants in these social
protests have included large numbers of the Iranian working class,
women and men, mostly young, along with members of various
marginalized national minorities—Arabs, Kurds, Baluchis, Lurs, and
Azerbaijanis—and persecuted religious minorities, such as
Bahá’ís and Sufis.

Women were significant participants in the immense 2009 Green
Movement, a spontaneous outburst against the rigged presidential
elections in June of that year. Protests broke out when President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, according to polls, was expected to lose the
election, was declared to have won an incredible 62 percent of the
votes cast. Millions of people came to the streets, demanding,
“Where is my vote?” The _New York Times_ reporter Roger Cohen,
who was in Tehran at the time, wrote, “Iran’s women stand in the
vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men
on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray.”

Women were also major participants in mass protests from December 2017
to January 2018. Demonstrators protested against high inflation and
government corruption and called for an end to the Islamic Republic
and its overseas interventions. Protesters even chanted, “Death to
Khamenei.” Thousands of people, including many women, Iranian Arabs,
and Kurds, were arrested by security forces.

A second wave of mass protests emerged in November 2019, when more
than 200,000 people took to the streets after the price of gasoline
went up 50 percent and the country experienced drastic water shortages
caused by a combination of climate change and rapacious state
capitalist policies. Once again, an ostensibly economic protest became
a political one that bridged the gap between the urban poor and what
the sociologist Asef Bayat has called the “middle-class
poor”—that is, highly educated young people who cannot attain the
basics of a middle-class life. These protests were violently quelled.
According to Amnesty International over 1500 people were murdered by
the Revolutionary Guards in the oil-rich southern province of
Khuzestan. As Houshyar Dehghani wrote in the online daily _Radio
Zamaneh_, women were clearly in the leadership of these protests:

Women are on the front lines of the protests. _They_ are the ones
who stand up to the [Revolutionary] Guards and refuse to
flee, _they_ encourage the people to resist, _they_ get into
discussion with the oppressive forces, _they_ stand before the
weapons of the plainclothes men, and chant slogans, whereby the crowd
joins them. It is the women who take pictures and videos, and when the
[Guards] try to arrest someone, it is the women who confront them and
try to save the arrested person. The state media called them
suspicious and agents of foreign powers. . . . Plainclothes forces
used sexual violence to frighten the women and to push them back to
their homes. But the influence of such taboos and cultural practices,
which are at the root of the Islamic Republic, is fading. When
someone, after witnessing the massacre of 1500 people, has the courage
to stand up to the security forces, sexual molestation is a feeble
weapon.

Women have also been organizers and leaders of social efforts such as
the Campaign to Release Political Prisoners, the Campaign to Eradicate
Stoning and Executions, the Campaign for Environmental Reform, the
Campaign of Mothers for Peace, and the Campaign to Protest the Rape
and Torture of Political Prisoners. More recently, Iranian feminists
started a #MeToo Campaign, speaking out about sexual harassment,
abuse, assault, and rape, and they have named influential men in their
accusations, including powerful Revolutionary Guard commanders,
clerics, and intellectuals.

They have also launched a movement to end mandatory veiling. In 2014,
Masih Alinejad, a journalist living in exile, launched a Facebook
group called My Stealthy Freedom. She invited Iranian women to post
pictures of themselves without a hijab. Hundreds of women posted
images, and the page quickly garnered international attention. Women
even participated from inside Iran, despite enormous personal danger
to themselves and their families. On December 27, 2017, a young woman
named Vida Movahed was arrested when she tied her hijab to a stick,
stood on top of a utility box on the busy Revolution Avenue in Tehran,
and waved it before the crowd, becoming an icon for the protests.
Dozens engaged in similar acts of defiance and were often arrested.

2022: AN IRREVOCABLE CHANGE IN GENDER RELATIONS?

Polls have shown that most Iranians believe wearing the hijab should
be voluntary. But the regime has recently doubled down on its
policies. In an attempt to push women back into a life of marriage and
multiple children, draconian regulations on abortion and birth control
were adopted in the fall of 2021, the likes of which Iranian society
has never seen. Birth control is no longer available throughout Iran
without a prescription, and pregnant women are monitored by the state
to ensure they carry their pregnancy to term. In July 2022, President
Raisi decided to harshly enforce the hijab laws, which had gradually
come to be far less strictly observed. These policies, clearly
misguided even by the government’s own standards, may now bring it
down.

Concerns about purity had, until relatively recently, prevented women
from fully participating in social movements for fear of being called
“dishonorable” or “immoral.” But in a world where premarital
sex is becoming far more common, such labels no longer have the power
they once did. Today, Iranian women fight the police with both their
brains and their bodies. Men are by now used to seeing women as
leaders of social campaigns, and women are using martial arts to fight
the police in the streets. Today’s protests are a culmination of
nearly two centuries of struggle for the civil rights of Iranian women
and of ethnic and religious minorities.

The Iranian regime understands the ever-increasing power of the
century-old women’s movement, particularly now that it has joined
together with protests over economic and ethnic grievances. The
government has used myriad strategies to stifle it. Activists are
beaten, blinded by having pellet guns shot in their eyes, prevented
from seeking medical care at hospitals, arrested, and thrown in jail,
where, according to a recent CNN report, both young women and men are
tortured and raped. Since the latest wave of protests started in
September, the regime has killed around 500 people and arrested more
than 18,000 people, many of them children. Journalists are arrested
for reporting on events, and major news outlets are barred from
covering the demonstrations or are shut down outright. Organizations
that provide activists with platforms receive ominous warnings, and
websites associated with the movement are routinely shut down. We
cannot know what will happen as a result of this repression, but we
can say with absolute certainty that Iranian women will continue to
forge ahead. Like a mighty river blocked by giant boulders, the
movement continuously finds a new path, sometimes in entirely
unanticipated ways.

Over the past century, Iranian women have achieved momentous changes.
They won the right to education and to enter public spaces; they
consistently fought state-imposed regulations on what they could or
could not wear; they gained the right to work outside the home, to
vote, and to hold office; and they have increasingly demanded more
companionate marriages and the right to leave abusive ones. Women
responded positively to birth control measures established in the late
1980s. They have taken control of their bodies, reducing the number of
pregnancies or choosing not to have children. Women have become top
scientists, engineers, academics, journalists, attorneys, athletes,
directors, actors, and writers who have tirelessly fought for
women’s rights. They have unleashed a new genre of feminist
literature and have become some of the most prominent publishers,
directors, and artists of the past few decades. Persian-speaking
feminists are continuing to form links of solidarity with their
Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, and Arab compatriots and with members
of the Sunni and Bahá’í religious minorities, and they have been
at the forefront of the solidarity movement with Afghan women. In the
process, Iranian advocates of women’s rights have broken through
centuries-old sexual and gender taboos and rituals, while also earning
enormous respect from a broad swath of society. Iranian feminists such
as Shirin Ebadi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, and Narges Mohammadi have become
recognized in the international community as courageous trailblazers
and pioneers of a more democratic society in Iran.

The 2022 uprising already constitutes a tremendous victory, no matter
how it ends; Iran has already changed irrevocably. The present
confluence of the movements for women’s rights, civil rights, and
minority rights, combined with the support of the general population,
in both the middle and working classes, has brought Iran to the verge
of pronouncing a death sentence on the theocratic regime that has
ruled for more than four decades.

_JANET AFARY is Mellichamp Professor of Global Religion at the
University of California, Santa Barbara._

_KEVIN B. ANDERSON is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara_

_DISSENT is a quarterly magazine of politics and ideas, publishing the
very best in political argument, and take pride in cultivating the
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The historical section of this essay relies on the following earlier
publications by the authors:

Janet Afary. 1996. _The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11:
Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism_.
New York: Columbia University Press.

Janet Afary. 2003. “Shi’ite Narratives of Karbala, Christian Rites
of Penitence: Michel Foucault and the Culture of the Iranian
Revolution, 1978-79,” _Radical History Review_, no. 86 (Spring):
7-36.

Janet Afary. 2009. _Sexual Politics in Modern Iran_. Cambridge
University Press.

Janet Afary and Jesilyn Faust, eds. 2021. _Iranian Romance in the
Digital Age: From Arranged Marriage to White Marriage_. London:
Bloomsbury Press.

Janet Afary. 2022. “From Bedrooms to Streets: The Rise of a New
Generation of Independent Iranian Women,” _Freedom of Thought
Journal_ 11 (Spring): 1-28. DOI: [link removed]

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson. 2005. _Foucault and the Iranian
Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism_. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Roger Friedland, Janet Afary, Paolo Gardinali, and C. Naslund. 2016.
“Love in the Middle East: The Contradictions of Romance in the
Facebook World,” _Critical Research on Religion_ 4:3, 229-258.

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