In the autumn of 2022, mass women-led protests erupted across Iran and rocked the repressive regime (Pic: Wikimedia commons)
On International Women’s Day in 1979, some 100,000 women marched through Iran’s capital Tehran.
These women had taken part in the revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran. They had experienced their collective power.
But the day before, the new regime had made the veil compulsory for women.
The women’s protests lasted for six days. Women chanted, “We didn’t have a revolution to go backwards”.
As one protester recalled, “There was no question in our mind that this is the first step to suppress us, and we should stand up to it—both as women and as revolutionaries.”
Male supporters formed human chains around the women marchers to shield them. However, the chain was broken up on several occasions, and some protesters were attacked.
United States feminist Kate Millett, author of the influential book Sexual Politics, attended the march.
Millett argued for Iranian women to organise separately from men. “It’s important to ignore men,” she advised a demonstrator. “Why waste your time?”
Millett expressed an imperialist feminist outlook. She assumed that the women of Iran were trailing behind white American women on the path to liberation and needed her advice. And she was utterly oblivious to the hatred Iranians felt towards US imperialism.
The women’s protests forced the Iranian government to back down over making the veil compulsory.
In 1983, with Ayatollah Khomeini in power, the Iranian parliament approved a law punishing women who refused to comply with state-enforced veiling.
Iranian women have always fought against colonialism and for their own rights. And the hijab has always been a political as well as a religious symbol.
In 1872, women like Zainab Pasha were active in the Tobacco Protests against British control of tobacco production. Pasha said, “If you men do not have the courage to punish the oppressors, wear our veil and go home. We will fight instead of you.”
Veiling was abolished in 1936 during the reign of Reza Shah. The ban actually made life harder for many women who did not want to leave their homes unveiled. They became more isolated.
Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, granted women the freedom to dress as they wished in 1941. But the veil was looked down on as a symbol of backwardness, ignorance and poverty.
After the CIA backed coup of 1953, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi consolidated his power.
All independent women’s organisations were closed or brought under state control. The shah hated the hijab as a rejection of his pro-US rule. Many secular women wore the veil to show their opposition to the shah.
In 1963, the shah rolled out his White Revolution, which sought to “modernise” Iran to shore up his rule. Women were given the vote.
But the shah was no supporter of equality. He banned International Women’s Day, demanding that Iranian women commemorate his father’s ban on the veil instead.
And in 1973 he told a woman interviewer, “In a man’s life, women count only to be beautiful and graceful and to know how to stay feminine. And this women’s lib business for instance.
“What do these feminists want? Equality? I don’t want to seem rude but you may be equal in the eyes of the law, but not, forgive me for saying so, in terms of ability.”
Women, he said, never “produced a Michelangelo or a Bach. You’ve never even produced a great cook. And don’t talk of opportunities. Are you joking—have you lacked the opportunity to give history a great cook?”
He told the interviewer that women could not govern because, “You’re schemers, you’re evil. Every one of you.”
The clerical regime that came to power after the revolution had to grant women more rights when it needed their support during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88).
When the war ended, women began to enter public life. Universities began to expand and more women attended. Somewhere between 55 and 60 percent of university students in Iran are women.
And women began to participate more in the labour market.
Women started challenging strict rules in their everyday life—this was the “quiet revolution”. But it didn’t say quiet.
In the 2005 election campaign, thousands of Iranian women protested for greater equality. A group broke the ban on women watching football by forcing their way into Tehran’s Azadi Stadium.
Greater numbers were involved in protests during the election campaign of 2009. Neda Agha-Soltan, a philosophy student, was shot dead by security forces and became the symbol of the protests.
In the autumn of 2022, mass women-led protests erupted across Iran and rocked the repressive regime.
Many protests were led students and schoolgirls. Their slogan, “Woman, life, freedom,” became an international rallying cry for those desperate to see women’s lives change.
The movement began after the death in custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini. She was arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf in accordance with Iran’s dress laws.
The regime responded with great brutality but was also forced to make some concessions.
Iranian women have always fought back—but imperialism will only make their fight harder.
The Iranian regime uses fear of US imperialism as an excuse to crack down on the women who defy it.
In July 2025, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave an interview to Iranian TV as he bombed Tehran.
Netanyahu said of Iran’s leaders, “They shoot down your women, leaving this brave, unbelievable woman, Mahsa Amini, to bleed on the sidewalk for not covering her hair.”
With breath-taking hypocrisy, Netanyahu used Mahsa’s name to justify his attack on Iran while his genocide left tens of thousands of women to bleed in the streets of Gaza.
The Israeli soldiers who pose with Palestinian women’s underwear cannot free women from oppression.
Bombs sanctioned by a US president who has overturned abortion rights and brags about assaulting women will not bring liberation.
Back in the autumn of 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan promising to liberate women from the Taliban. But the invasion was a disaster for Afghan women.
The imperialists have always weaponised women’s rights to justify their military assaults while attacking women’s rights at home. All those who care about women must resist their drive to war.
US-Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Iranians