The custodial death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was arrested by the morality police in Tehran, has sparked wide protests in Iran. Under the scanner are police who patrol public places to enforce the headscarf law and other Islamic laws. Conversations are also taking place on the situation of women in the Islamic Republic. Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, women have been required by law to wear a veil covering their head and neck and conceal their hair. Over the past two decades, however, more and more women in Tehran and other cities of Iran have been letting strands of their hair outside their veil as a form of protest. More recently, some women have been sharing photos that show them taking off headscarves in opposition to hijab rules.
The struggle against compulsory headscarves made headlines in December 2017 when a young woman, Vida Movahed, waved her hijab on a stick on Tehran’s Revolution Street. Then, on July 12, this year, the hijab and chastity day on the Islamic Republic’s calendar, another group of women took part in a national civil disobedience campaign against mandatory headgear. More and more women, many of whom have not experienced the 1979 revolution, have been risking fines and even prison sentences for violating the hijab rules. The Iranian Revolution, which ended with the victory of Islamists and the creation of the Islamic Republic, was marked by a noticeable presence of women. Thousands of young women joined Islamist and leftist political groups. In his interviews with foreign journalists before returning to Iran Ayatollah Khomeini praised women for their involvement in the revolution. In March 1979, after the new Islamic law on veiling at workplaces came into force, massive demonstrations took place in the Capital and major cities of Iran. Along with the introduction of compulsory veiling, the Islamic Republic abolished the modernising reforms in the field of civil liberties for women and families law introduced during the Pahlavi regime. The Shah-era laws restricting the exercise of polygamy and raising the legal age of marriage to 18 were abolished.
After the death of Khomeini in 1989 and the end of the eight-year war with Iraq, new ideological currents emerged among women who demanded reforms while supporting the Islamic regime. Reformist women stood firm against some of the ideological frameworks of the Islamic regime in the 1990s, but they were gradually overtaken in the first decade of the twenty-first century by a younger generation, the carriers of new demands. The most significant action of this new generation of activists was the “One million signatures for the repeal of all discriminatory laws against women in Iran” campaign in 2006. From the Green Movement women against electoral fraud in 2009 to the protest against acid attack on women’s resistance movement on the streets of Esfahan in 2014, women’s resistance movements have caused social and political tremors in Iran. In one of its recent reports on the country, Amnesty International noted that the Iranian authorities have not taken any initiatives to combat violence against women and girls in private spheres or the public sphere. Recent history shows us that Iranian women have been present at all major points in the country’s destiny. They have contributed to the evolution of the Iranian public sphere while building a new future for their country.
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