By Kelly J Shannon
Woman. Life. Freedom. Those are the words being chanted by the thousands of anti-government protesters taking to the streets across Iran in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
The young woman died while in the custody of the Gasht-e Ershad, the country’s “morality police”, who detained Amini for violating Iran’s hijab law, which mandates veiling for women and modest Islamic dress.
Despite the government’s insistence that Amini died of a pre-existing heart condition, Iranians widely believe that the morality police beat her to death.
While Amini’s death was the spark that ignited the protests, the roots of unrest stretch back decades.
At its heart, the uprising is about the Islamic Republic’s four decades of patriarchal oppression and violence against women, as well as the determined resistance of Iranian women to the oppression.
While Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s government, which ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979, was repressive, women in Iran made significant gains during his rule.
They had access to higher education, careers, the right to vote and hold office (admittedly a dubious right in an undemocratic country), equal pay laws, health care and reproductive rights, and a cabinet-level position dedicated to women’s issues – only the second such position in the world. Women could choose how they dressed.
Because of women’s activism, Iran’s 1967 Family Protection Law, and a subsequent 1975 amendment, was one of the most liberal such laws in the Islamic world. It mandated more equitable marriage, divorce and inheritance rights for women and largely eliminated polygamy.
Although many women participated in the uprising that toppled the shah’s regime, controlling and subordinating women was at the top of the new Islamic Republic’s agenda from the moment of its inception in 1979.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist Shiite cleric who was the symbolic leader of the revolution, saw women’s equality as incompatible with the strict Islamic society he sought to create.
On March 6, 1979, just weeks after the shah fled the country and two days before International Women’s Day, Khomeini declared that he wished to overturn the Family Protection Law and that all women must wear the chador, Iran’s traditional form of Islamic veil that covers a woman’s hair and body.
In response, tens of thousands of Iranian women marched in protest across the country for three days. Because Khomeini shared political power with pro-democracy liberals like Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, the protests caused him to temporarily back down and rescind the declarations.
But in 1980, after Khomeini consolidated power, he once again ordered compulsory veiling and fired all female judges. Female protesters again took to the streets, but they could not stop Khomeini’s agenda. The Islamic Republic enshrined compulsory veiling into law in 1983, along with other restrictions on women’s rights.
The 1980s brought harsh repression for Iranian women, and there was little organised resistance during those years. The Islamic Republic surveilled its people and meted out brutal punishment for anyone who did not conform to its strict codes of behaviour.
Iran’s morality police, an earlier iteration of today’s Gasht-e Ershad, stopped and arrested women (and sometimes men) on the street for “improper” dress, and raided people’s homes to root out illegal alcohol, Western contraband and “un-Islamic” behaviours.
The government forced women out of certain jobs, segregated universities by sex and banned female students from majoring in certain subjects such as veterinary science and geology. It repealed the shah’s family law, thus depriving women of most rights in marriage, divorce and child custody.
It lowered the minimum age of marriage for girls, first to 13 and then to nine (it raised the age to 13 again in 2002), and encouraged polygamy. Women also lacked freedom of movement and required a male guardian’s permission to leave the country.
Iranians who opposed the Khomeini government and had the resources fled the country, forming a global diaspora that included Iranian feminists who fought for women’s rights while in exile.
Even worse, the Islamic Republic systematically used violence against women. In 1980, as Khomeini consolidated power, the government began executing large numbers of its citizens for dubious crimes.
This included women who refused to veil or resisted the regime in other ways. The government accused them of prostitution or “waging war on God”. Female political prisoners were denied due process and were often tortured or sexually assaulted. Many of them died by stoning – a particularly brutal form of execution not historically practised in Iran.
Iranian women began fighting back in earnest in the 1990s. In what became known as the “Pink Revolution”, women, especially in urban areas, collectively began pushing the boundaries of the hijab law by wearing make-up, colourful headscarves and long coats instead of chadors, and intentionally allowing their hair to peek out from under their scarves.
Given the large number of women who resisted Islamic dress, the morality police could not arrest everyone.
Emboldened by their success, Iranian women began organising in other ways. In 2006, they held a peaceful protest calling for the repeal of discriminatory laws against women.
Out of the protest, Iranian feminists formed the grass-roots One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws campaign, also known as Change for Equality. This activism occurred despite harassment from authorities during the presidency of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who cracked down on violations of the veiling law, and during whose presidency the current iteration of the morality police was created.
The activists behind Change for Equality played a key role in the mass 2009 protests after the suspicious re-election of Ahmadinejad. Women rose up in force, and images of young, stylish women protesting in make-up, sunglasses and blue jeans with headscarves perched far back on their heads dominated international news.
The uprising ultimately ended with a violent crackdown by the government, which included security forces shooting and killing a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, whose death was captured on a cellphone camera.
Over the past decade, women’s organised resistance to veiling has grown. Young women filmed or photographed themselves removing their headscarves in public.
They posted videos online of women being harassed in public by morality police or other citizens for wearing “improper” hijab, as a way to shame the harassers.
They used social media to decry compulsory veiling and created the civil disobedience campaign, My Stealthy Freedom, where women posted photos of themselves bareheaded on social media. The government responded with arrests and long prison sentences.
Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, is an extremist who has cracked down on dissent since taking office in 2021, with a special focus on veiling in response to women’s organized resistance to the practise.
His government has been using facial recognition technology to arrest and punish young women appearing in the anti-hijab videos posted to social media. Earlier this year, a young woman was detained and beaten for appearing in one of the videos and was forced to appear on TV to apologise for her behaviour.
Amini’s detention and death demonstrate the government’s sense that it can act with impunity in its oppression of women. The outpouring of anger across Iran, therefore, probably came as a surprise to Iran’s leaders.
Iran is resorting to its standard repressive tactics to quell the uprisings – restricting access to the internet and cellular service, and even opening fire on protesters. At least 30 people have died in the protests.
But angry women aren’t backing down. They’re publicly burning their headscarves and cutting off their hair. Unlike in 1979, large numbers of men are protesting alongside them, and the protests are growing as the government responds violently.
Unlike recent protests about lack of drinking water or economic troubles, the protest is about a central tenet of the Islamic Republic’s identity – its subordination of women. As a result, the protesters are openly calling for the end of the Islamic Republic and its theocratic rule.
Iran’s government claims that the protests are the work of the country’s enemies, but, in fact, they are the result of smouldering discontent that dates back 40 years and poses a powerful threat to the regime.
Iran might manage to crush the protest movement as it has done to others, but if that happens, it will only add to Iranians’ pent-up fury.
Or perhaps the killing of Mahsa Amini might prove to be the turning point in Iranian women’s long struggle for freedom. We might just be witnessing the beginning of a revolution. Woman. Life. Freedom.
Kelly J Shannon is an associate professor of history at Florida Atlantic University and author of “US Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights” and is writing a book on US relations with Iran from 1905 to 1953.
