Iranian men and women push boundaries to express newly discovered power in a rigid society
By: Ashley Miznazi
When I was in elementary school, I visited Tehran to meet my Iranian relatives for the first time. I remember busy streets, mountains in the distance, historic palaces and modern shopping malls. My most salient memory from that summer, however, was seeing how the women in my family expressed themselves when they knew no outsiders were watching.
When the men in my family left the house to work or visit friends, my aunts and female cousins would unravel their hair from their hijabs and singing and dancing would fill the house like a sweet spell. I learned it wasn’t that they hated their husbands or were celebrating their absence; these women were simply acting out freedoms denied to them in public. The occasional red lip-stick would come out, and the women would enjoy the afternoon talking and applying each other’s makeup.
Many Americans misunderstand Iran because Western news coverage often focuses on its adversarial relations with the U.S., including its nuclear deals, economic sanctions and oil crises. This lack of coverage has led to a scarcity of knowledge on Iranian culture. Westerners often believe Iranian people and culture are “backwards,” expecting women to be obedient and submissive. Beyond the politics and stereotypes however, there is a rising movement of young Iranian men and women fighting for personal freedom and expression.
Understanding the modern women’s movement in Iran requires a trip back in time. The 1979 Iranian Revolution deposed the Western-backed monarchy and replaced it with an Islamic republic. In the weeks after the monarchy was overthrown, crackdowns on dress code drew thousands of women to the streets to protest the new law requiring women to wear the veil, regardless of religion or nationality.
Eventually the protests died down and women became invisible. The government required women to wear dark, long, baggy cloaks with socks and sensible shoes. Not a strand of hair could show, and nail polish and lipstick were also forbidden. Those mandates continue to this day, enforced by an agency known as the “morality police.” While women can and do protest these restrictions, the dress code is a weapon of control in Iran.
For example, if a man claims in a divorce hearing that his wife removed her hijab in a gathering, he has the upper hand to gain custody and control of the family’s assets, said Shaparak Shajarizadeh, a member of the Iran Transition Council, in a phone interview. She said when she divorced her husband in Tehran in 2001, the judge did not let her speak.
Shajarizadeh said her personal experiences with prejudice is why she continues to take part in protests. In 2018, Shajarizadeh joined the campaign #WhiteWednesday where journalist Masih Alinejad provided a platform for women to share photos either wearing white or no headscarf to protest the mandated dress code. Men participated in the movement too, wearing scarves posing next to a woman unveiled. The campaign was a statement that the hijab has become a political symbol of oppression, Shajarizadeh said.
The movement gained traction and encouraged some to even remove their hair covers in public areas, Shajarizadeh said. Women switched from just wearing white hijabs to unveiling entirely, including Shajarizadeh, who went months without wearing a headscarf.
For showing resistance to the government “in its face,” Shajarizadeh said she was arrested and charged with encouraging prostitution, propaganda against the government and acting against national security. She was beaten and interrogated before being sentenced to two years imprisonment and 18 years of probation. She now lives as a refugee in Canada after serving a two-month term.
“Everybody knows that this oppression of women was not just on women,” Shajarizadeh said. “It was to suppress half of society.”
Things are changing, however. Shahla Talebi lived through the revolution and was a political prisoner in Iran for almost a decade before being released in 1992 for participating in pro-women’s rights movements. Talebi is now an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University and believes the passion stirring today is different from the one protesters felt in 1979.
“I went back to Iran and all these young women were walking out literally giving their phone numbers to these young men, flirting with them very openly,” Talebi said in a Zoom interview. “It has become normalized to push the boundaries even in your personal everyday life.”
For instance, Iranians drink and mixed gender parties go on, but the hosts might beg neighbors and pay local police to turn a blind eye. For young couples, living together unwed has become an illegal phenomenon commonly referred to as “white marriage.”
Technology plays a large role in modern protests. Young men and women in the country have begun using an app to share the location of the morality police to enable each other to evade punishment for taking off garments in public. The app, Gershad, gives Iranians the ability to tag the morality police’s location on a Google map with a bearded man. Although the government blocked the app, tech-savvy Iranians use virtual private networks to bypass the restrictions.
Both men and women of the younger generation are breaking norms in droves, said Santa Clara University professor Mary Hegland, and there are too many of them for police to keep track of and punish.
“Their hair is just wild with a little slip of a colorful printed scarf, their jeans are so tight, they wear high-heels, they love makeup and dresses,” said Hegland in a Zoom interview. Hegland conducted field research during the revolution and is one of the few American researchers still with access to the country.
The West has a traditional view of Iran that men are against women, said Hegland, but men and women are banding together today to fight for more personal freedoms.
“Very religious men and women in the community where I work say the hijab should not be forced,” Hegland said. “They’re really against these things even if they choose to be modest.”
Desperately, Iranian women such as Shajarizadeh want the world to stand with them and not their government. Whether the rebellious efforts of Iranian women and men will amount to larger scale political reform is anyone’s guess, but there is an undeniable opening for progress now.
