The Activism of Iranian Women

Among the many compelling stories of the ongoing uprising in Iran -- including the martyrdom of Neda Agha-Soltan, an unarmed protester whose final moments of life after being shot by a government sniper were captured on a gruesome cell-phone video and broadcast around the world -- is the active role that Iranian woman are playing in the demonstrations.

I have been loosely following the Iranian women's movement ever since, to my great surprise, a citation for an article I published in Feminist Criminology showed up on the Farsi-language website of the Iran Women's Information and Statistics Center. (Visit the English-language site here). While the Iranian women's movement has been strengthening in recent years, the current demonstrations denouncing the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have given women in Iran an even more prominent platform for their activism:

For years, women's defiance in Iran came in carefully planned flashes of hair under their head scarves, brightly painted fingernails and trendy clothing that could be glimpsed under bulky coats and cloaks.

But these small acts of rebellion against the theocratic government have been quickly eclipsed in the wake of the disputed June 12 presidential elections. In their place came images of Iranian women marching alongside men, of their scuffles with burly militiamen, of the sobering footage of a young woman named Neda, blood pouring from her mouth and nose minutes after her fatal shooting.

In a part of the Muslim world where women are often repressed, these images have catapulted Iran's female demonstrators to the forefront of the country's opposition movement. It is a role, say Iranian women and experts, that few seem willing to give up, and one that will likely present President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hardline government with even greater challenges in the wake of the recent violence and protests.

The Washington Post's Anne Applebaum, writing at Slate.com, has more:

The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority: As activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to use brutal forms of repression against dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a young woman in blue jeans—a peaceful, unarmed demonstrator—unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.

They may succeed. Violence usually succeeds, at least in the short term, in intimidating people. In the long term, however, the links, structures, organizations, and groups set up by Iranian women, not to mention the photographs of the last week, will continue to gnaw away at the Iranian regime's legitimacy—and we should take note. I cannot count how many times I've been told in recent years that "women's issues" are a secondary subject in the Islamic world. Whether it's the Afghan Constitution under discussion or the Saudi government, the standard line among the standard commentators has always been that other things—stability, security, oil—matter more. But regimes that repress the civil and human rights of half their population are inherently unstable. Sooner or later, there has to be a backlash. In Iran, we're watching one unfold.

Indeed.