Nahal Mottaghian
Tehran, Iran
I don’t want to generalize the Iranian women’s rights movement in any way. I don’t want to simplify it to just a few groups of women fighting for a few different things. The reality is that all women in Iran view their rights differently, and all women prioritize laws they feel are worth fighting for in different ways. However, there are three groups of women’s rights advocates that, I believe, show the range of the movement.
In this age of social media and constant connectivity, My Stealthy Freedom, an internet campaign encouraging Iranian women to share photos of themselves without their hijabs on social media, has gained an incredible international following. The campaign was started in 2014 by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, who is currently living in exile. It has expanded to including “White Wednesdays”: Alinejad encourages women in Iran to to wear white hijabs on Wednesdays as a symbol of unity and peaceful protest.
I met a woman in a white hijab on a Wednesday who told me, “It is a way to look around and know who is on your side and [who is] against the mandatory veiling of women.”
While My Stealthy Freedom is seen as a movement of liberal women, there are conservative women also working to increase gender equality. Politician Azam Taleghani, as the daughter of an Ayatollah, is a conservative and pious woman, and she is advocating for an increase in women’s roles in government. She was the first woman to register her name as a candidate for president and has registered three times. Each time, she was denied candidacy by the Guardian Council, which ultimately decides who is fit to run for president. There is little chance she will see this change in her lifetime; she is 73. But her purpose in trying is to point out the blatant gender discrimination in presidential elections.
There are also women who fall somewhere in the middle. There are scholars, politicians, and advocates, like those in the Feminist School, who are working towards changing discriminatory laws such as unfair marriage laws, and laws ranging from custody battles to honor killings. These women must analyze the laws, prove why they should be changed, prove that people want them changed (by getting signatures for petitions), and take up the issue before Parliament. The women of the Feminist School have released a list of laws they are working to change, including those for a women’s right to a divorce, custody, stoning, and much more.
All of these women I’ve mentioned, whether liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between, are working towards a collective cause.