Political activist and human rights advocate
On March 8, 1979, tens of thousands of Iranian women took to the streets, demanding the right to choose what to wear on the first International Women’s Day of the post-revolutionary Iran.
The rally that was supposed to be a celebration of women, became the start of a six-day battle against the newly imposed Islamic dress code on them. It was perhaps the earliest sign that the revolution they had fought for had been hijacked.
Only weeks before, many of these same women—students, doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, activists—had marched against the dictatorial rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, fighting for freedom, democracy, and equality, unaware that they would become the first victims of Iran’s Islamization led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
On March 7, 1979, Khomeini decreed that all women working in government offices must heed Islamic diktats and cover their hair. The following day, women arriving at work unveiled were turned away.
Many felt this was not about clothes, but control. They saw it as an attempt to erase women from public life. And they fought back.
“We did not rise to go back,” thousands chanted marching from the University of Tehran toward the Prime Minister’s office. “In the dawn of freedom, women’s rights are missing.”
The peaceful demonstration was met with brute force. Islamist revolutionaries and pro-Khomeini mobs stormed the march with sticks and knives. Dissenting women were beaten and stabbed. They were called enemies of Islam and agents of the West.
But they did not back down.
For six days, they marched through the streets of Tehran, defying the cold, the growing danger, and the bitter sneering of those who dismissed their struggle as secondary to the revolutionary cause.
The dismissive view was by no means limited to Iranian masses. It was shared by many Western intellectuals who, bewitched by the revolution in Iran, ignored or actively justified the repression of the new regime.
Thinkers afar: enablers and allies
While feminists like French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and American writer Kate Millett stood in solidarity with women in Iran, others like de Beauvoir’s compatriot Michel Foucault helped legitimize the Islamic Republic.
De Beauvoir recognized the Iranian women’s fight as part of the global struggle for gender equality, helping establish the International Committee for Women’s Rights (CIDF) to amplify their voices. Millett traveled to Iran to document their struggle and was arrested and expelled for her efforts.
Foucault also visited Iran but had a wholly different view of the events. He romanticized the revolution, reducing it to a rejection of Western imperialism and ignoring its catastrophic consequences for women and dissidents. He brushed aside human rights concerns as Western biases, a framing that persists in various forms to this date.
Another lasting influence in Western intellectual circles is Palestinian-American philosopher and literary critic Edward Said.
Said’s most influential work, Orientalism, was published a year before the revolution in Iran. He focused on Western narratives about the East. While many of his arguments against colonialism were valid, they were weaponized by Islamists to deflect criticism.
Said, unlike Foucault, never glorified Iran’s transformation. Others used his emphasis on culture, however, to depict forced veiling and gender segregation as cultural differences rather than human rights violations, failing to—or choosing not to— challenge the repression in a meaningful way.
A Legacy of Resistance
Back in Iran, the forced veiling of women was completed and codified in 1983. Those daring to flout the law would be punished by official enforcers or emboldened thugs. The Six-Day Protest of 1979 was defeated.
But it heralded a long fight for equality that’s continued to this date.
In 2022, the world watched as Iranians across Iran took to the streets after a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died in custody, having been detained for not covering her hair fully.
Amini’s tragic death—a state murder by all accounts—ignited the largest uprising against the Islamic Republic. Young men tore down posters of supreme leader Ali Khamenei as young women set their scarves on fire.
Their slogan? “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
The struggle against hijab and gender apartheid is not just an Iranian issue—it is a global human rights fight. Iranian and Afghan women continue to resist, even as the Islamic Republic and the Taliban impose laws aimed at erasing them from public life.
What happened on March 8, 1979, is not just history, it is a warning. Revisiting that eventful day and what has happened in Iran since, may help Western intellectuals and politicians see mandatory hijab for what it is: systemic, religious oppression, not a symbol of cultural relativism.
When enforced by law, hijab is not a cultural practice. It is a means of control. Iranian and Afghan women are calling for solidarity, demanding that the world listen to them rather than the Foucaults of the world.
International Women’s Day is a day to honor those who fought and are fighting for equality. It also has to be a day to reject the view that dismisses their struggle, and enables their oppressors.
Opinion expressed by the author are not necessarily the views of Iran International.
