“Those Who Tell You What to Wear Today Will Tell You What to Think Tomorrow”: Revisiting International Women’s Day 1979 in Iran

Still from Iranian Women's Liberation Movement Year Zero, 1979.

This text was commissioned prior to the US-Israeli war against Iran. We are publishing it in anticipation of International Women’s Day on March 8. While critical of the Islamic Republic, as well as leftist protest movements, it is in no way intended as an endorsement of the current military aggression against Iran.

—Editors

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International Women’s Day 1979 signaled the beginning of a six-day nationwide protest during which thousands of women marched through the streets of Tehran and other major Iranian cities, including Abadan, Tabriz, Sanandaj, and Isfahan.1 Two days before the protests began, the leader of the 1979 Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, officially declared that from then on women were obliged to wear the hijab in public ministries. Consequently, beginning on March 8, women organized en masse for the first time against the mandatory use of the hijab in particular and the Islamic Republic in its ascendancy more broadly. Despite their significance, however, these protests remained largely unknown beyond those who directly participated in them, until recently. Why?

Various forms of historical erasure were at play. The most obvious was the oppression carried out by Islamist revolutionary factions at the time the protests took place and in the years that followed. But a more hidden and contested reason is the left’s neglect. The left perceived resisting US imperialism and liberating the working classes from the claws of the monarchy as revolutionary priorities, and was willing to sacrifice women’s basic rights for those priorities. What the main currents of the left did not understand at the time was that Khomeini’s assertion of control over women’s bodies was only the beginning of a bloody process in which Islamist revolutionary factions would eliminate all other groups, revolutionary or not.

The 1979 International Women’s Day protests unfolded less than two months after the successful ousting of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the former Shah of Iran, and the abolition of the monarchy by a coalition of secular leftist, leftist Islamist, and Islamist revolutionary groups. This led to Ruhollah Khomeini’s return to Iran and the beginning of efforts to consolidate a postrevolutionary Iranian state. This era was marked by intense political possibility: students and unemployed workers occupied the houses of wealthy people who had fled the country; ethnic minorities demonstrated for their rights; the workers’ movement renewed its organizing efforts by seizing the means of production and forming syndicates; and revolutionary women began organizing what would become the first public celebration of International Women’s Day in Iran.

After the coup of 1953, organized by the CIA and MI6, which led to the reconsolidation of the Pahlavi monarchy, all celebrations of International Women’s Day were criminalized due to its roots in the workers’ movement, its internationalist character, and its association with the Soviet Union.2 March 8, 1979, therefore, marked the first time women in Iran could openly organize a public celebration for International Women’s Day. Against this background, several leftist women’s groups, created soon after the success of the 1979 Revolution, coordinated the March 8 celebrations. These groups included the Temporary Committee for Organizing Women’s Day (a Trotskyist organization), and groups founded by women affiliated with the Tudeh Party (the Communist Party of Iran).3

In the run-up to the Revolution, unofficial discussions amongst the Islamist revolutionary factions regarding the mandatory use of the hijab and the further curtailment of women’s rights began to circulate in the wider public. Just as these discussions remained unofficial, oral and written testimonies show that women themselves did not believe that the passage of such a law was a real possibility. Even with Khomeini’s decision to abolish the Family Protection Law upon seizing state power, most women were still in disbelief over the possible enshrinement of the mandatory use of hijab. Passed into law in 1967 as part of Mohammad Reza Shah’s White Revolution, the Family Protection Law included laws concerning the grounds upon which women could file for divorce, and an amendment that raised the legal age of marriage for girls to eighteen. Shortly before 1979, these laws were expanded to include restrictions on polygamy and a mother’s right to custody.4 While testimonies show that, at the time of its legislation, leftist women protested against its performatively progressive nature, claiming that despite the law’s legislation, women’s “lack of economic and social independence remained,” it cannot be denied that the Family Protection Law granted women family rights for the first time in the country’s history.5

Under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first order of business was the repeal of the Family Protection Law, thereby undermining the recent expansion of women’s rights. Rumors regarding the passage of new sexist laws followed soon after.6 The outcome: abortions were banned; women’s “blood money”7 and inheritance were decreased to half that of men; women were banned from high-ranking positions such as judge and president; sex workers were massacred; sex work was criminalized; laws concerning femicide, domestic violence, and rape became more lenient, thus favoring the guilty party; and the stoning of women as a form of punishment was introduced into the judicial system. It is worth noting that this diminution of women’s bodily autonomy was not simply a loss of political liberties. As part of Khomeini and the Islamist’s strategy to consolidate and centralize socioeconomic power, repealing these laws served as the basis for the mass, society-wide transfer of ownership over titles, wealth, and assets from one portion of the population (women) to the other (men). As it would turn out, the abolition of the Family Protection Law was but the initial step by the Khomeini government to ensure that any post-Revolution accumulation of power would only further benefit a future, centralized Islamic Republic.

Shortly after the abolition of the Family Protection Law, and two days before International Women’s Day, Khomeini gave a speech at the Feyziyya seminary in Qom—both a holy site in Shi’a Islam and the largest center for Shi’a scholarship in the world. With this speech, what had been rumored regarding laws concerning the obligatory use of hijab was confirmed by Khomeini, in a remark regarding unveiled women. As Khomeini put it, “Naked women must not enter Islamic ministries. They can enter, but only with a hijab.”8 The following day, news of this speech was spread by the country’s main news outlets, with Keyhan writing “Imam Khomeini: Women Must Enter Ministries with Hijab” and Etelaat’s headline reading “The Imam’s Opinion About Hijab: Women Are Allowed to Work But Only With Islamic Hijab.”9 On the very next day (March 8), women employees who did not wear a hijab were prohibited from entering government ministerial buildings—i.e., their workplaces. They thus began to protest in front of the ministries that had denied them entry. As their protest grew, they began marching towards Tehran University, where the Temporary Committee for Organizing Women’s Day and other Tudeh Party–affiliated groups—e.g., the Society for Militant Women and the Society for Women’s Consciousness—were holding sit-ins and conferences.10 The women who protested against being denied access to their workplaces interrupted the Women’s Day conference. As one of the organizers, Hayedeh Daragahi, recalled:

The conference had just started when a bunch of women stormed into the meeting. It was clear that they had come from the protest. Soaking wet from the snow, they were shaking from anger and cold. When I ran towards them, they said, “Do you know what they’re doing to us in the streets? Why are you sitting here holding conferences?”11

In light of this interruption, the organizers initiated a vote and eventually decided to cut the conference proceedings short to join the protestors, marching from Tehran University to the prime minister’s palace to confront then-prime minister Mehdi Bazargan.12 As Mehnaz Matin and Mohsen Mohajer show in their introduction to Iranian Women’s Uprising 8 March 1979, volume 1, two events thus took place on March 8, 1979: the previously organized celebration for the first International Women’s Day in Tehran, and the spontaneous demonstration against the mandatory hijab law. The merging of those protesting mandatory hijab with those gathered for International Women’s Day infused the women’s march with a uniquely revolutionary urgency, transforming March 8 into the biggest women’s march in Iranian history and the first protest against the Islamic Republic, still in its ascendency.

While a strategy of merging the two protests might seem obvious from the vantage point of the present, the protests remained heterogeneous at the time, despite their eventual union. Their lack of a unified strategy grew by the day. Initially, the committees organizing around International Women’s Day were not founded as insurrectionary groups to counter the emergent state. The protests that ensued and coincided with March 8, by contrast, emerged spontaneously out of anger at the prohibition of unveiled women from government ministerial buildings. These included a more diverse array of political beliefs because, unlike the International Women’s Day celebration, these demonstrations were not organized by leftists. Upon the union of the two protests, some of the participants in the March 8 celebration still did not believe the rumors regarding the impending gender apartheid state, withdrawing their participation from the demonstrations, which had now assumed an anti-Khomeinist bent.

Similar to their male counterparts, a number of the leftist women who organized or participated in the March 8 demonstrations were not yet disillusioned by the prospect of this new state. Even by day three of the protests, this could be seen in the tendency to refrain from disrespecting Khomeini and in the avoidance of polarizing language on the part of conference speakers, such as Bar Association member Parivash Khajenoori and professor of history Homa Nategh.13 Some women, despite their secular leftist beliefs, even went as far as accepting the mandatory law for hijab, arguing that its initial acceptance would eventually be reversed with the realization of the revolution. However, after Khomeini’s March 6 speech, the disenchantment with the prospect of an Islamic Republic originally felt by some was now increasingly felt by ever-growing segments of the protestors, leading some to chant, “Down with Khomeini.”

In light of the violence employed during the previous days of protests, this moment of generalized disenchantment marked the beginning of the overt struggle against the still-nascent state.14 It is, however, crucial to understand these contradictions and their simultaneous unfolding on March 8, 1979, in order to avoid glorifying International Women’s Day as a homogenous historical phenomenon. Doing so would erase the contradictions inherent to both the 1979 Revolution and the Iran’s women’s movement. As for the betrayals from the left, it is worth noting that their withdrawal of solidarity was not a result of a simplistic adherence to, or strict interpretations of, Islamic law. On the contrary, the left’s jettisoning of the so-called “women’s question” was a result of the class reductionism and overrepresentation of anti-imperialism that structured the left’s understanding of the symbolic weight of the veil under the Pahlavi dictatorship and, thus, during the 1979 Revolution.

The revolutionary coalition viewed the former Pahlavi regime as a regional pawn of Western imperialism, and the US in particular. They believed that Iranian oil, extracted through the labor of the Iranian working classes, was fueling US imperialism because, while the Shah suppressed his own people, he maintained close ties with the US and invested in what the left and Islamists saw as Western-oriented modernization programs. The struggle against the monarchy was therefore framed not only by Pahlavi’s domestic repression but also by his close relationship with Western imperial powers, making it, by extension, a struggle against US imperialism.

One of the hallmarks of the former Pahlavi regime was its propaganda regarding the image of the modern Iranian woman as urban, wealthy, and without a hijab. Thus, in the eyes of the main currents of the anti-monarchist movement, the hijab and its use were part and parcel of the struggle against the former Shah, such that non-veiled women became a symbol of the inherently anti-revolutionary and imperialist bourgeoisie. It was for this reason that the revolutionary factions—both Islamist and secular leftist—primarily viewed the use of the hijab as a matter of class and ideology, pure and simple. In their eyes, true women revolutionaries were believed to be either working-class women who veiled themselves out of tradition or religious belief, or revolutionaries, due to their anti-monarchist convictions.

However, reducing “the left” to one homogeneous current with a united stance and strategy regarding “the women’s question” and the mandatory hijab laws would deny the vast diversity of leftist groups active not only in the capital but all over the country during the Revolution15. Whereas the main currents of the left might have withheld solidarity for the March 8 protestors, not all leftist groups were oblivious to this insurrection. In February 1979, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedaian16 issued two statements against the mandatory hijab, asserting that “women and men must be equal in all areas and aspects of social life, and any laws or regulations contrary to this principle must be immediately abolished.”17 Moreover, as testimonies, photographs, and news articles show, during the International Women’s Day protests in not only Tehran but also in Mahabad, Kurdistan, men who were mostly members of the Organization of Iranian People’s Fedaian joined the demonstrations, taking it upon themselves “to protect the women” by forming human chains. After protestors were met with violence in Tehran, Kurdish leftist groups even travelled to Tehran from Kurdistan to attend the demonstrations. As the newspaper Ayandegan stated,

Unlike previous days, they no longer attack the women directly but instead try to block their movement. Shortly after, Hezbollah members unleash punches and kicks on the men who have taken it upon themselves to protect the women, shouting: “Bastards, SAVAK agents, imperialist stooges, CIA operatives …” The men remain unfazed, and the line of women marches forward, stretching for seven kilometers. They pause in front of hospitals and schools, growing in number as many men join them—15,000 to 20,000 in total. Following the marchers, around 600 Hezbollah members trail behind, while ahead, 50 veiled women chant: “SAVAK operatives and hypocrites, your alliance is shameful!” and “Unveiled communists will never support the workers!” The protesting women respond: “Freedom is our culture, Silence is our disgrace!”18

While Islamist revolutionary factions violently suppressed the protests, harassing and beating the women on the streets with broken bottles, knives, and batons, revolutionary parties of the majority of the secular left refused to join their march in solidarity.19 Liberals and nationalist revolutionary factions alike decided against supporting the women for fear of jeopardizing their coalition with the Islamists.20 Meanwhile, main currents within the left claimed that the protestors were nothing but “parasites without dignity” who “dressed to attract men and propagate depravity.”21 The major newspapers affiliated with the Islamists and the secular left, therefore, refused to cover the first few days of these protests. While these outlets eventually reported on the demonstrations due to the sheer number of protestors in the streets, the media outlets of all the major parties failed to adequately cover the extent of the violence with which protestors were met.22 Moreover, when the women’s protests were mentioned, these outlets portrayed them as nothing other than an attempt by Western-oriented bourgeois women to corrupt the Revolution and Iran’s Muslim society. National television went so far as to claim that the protestors were monarchists “paid by US makeup factories to riot and deviate the revolution’s course.”23 Even one year after the protests, an article published in the acclaimed leftist magazine Ketab-e Jom’e displayed the left’s ongoing obsession with distinguishing between “hard-working, intellectual, and revolutionary women” of the working class and those in attendance on March 8, 1979, who, in the eyes of the publication, consisted predominantly of bourgeois women lacking in revolutionary consciousness.24 Over the course of the six days of protests, leftist women participated on their own behalf and without the support of their respective parties.25

The primacy given to anti-imperialism and class struggle on the left, which came at the expense of women’s oppression, overdetermined the situation to such an extent that even some women from the secular left refused to regard the struggle against gender-based violence as equally fundamental to the Revolution. It took many revolutionaries, such as Homa Nategh, years to realize that, contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, the so-called “women’s question” would not be automatically resolved by strategically collaborating with Khomeini and the Islamists because, in Nategh’s words, “those who today tell you what to wear, will tomorrow tell you what to think!”26

It is important to mention that, despite the brutal suppression of March 8, 1979 and the abandonment of protesters by other revolutionary factions, the protests successfully blocked the passage of the law concerning the mandatory use of the hijab for an additional three years. With its passage into law in 1982, there was a dramatic increase in gender-based violence against women who refused to veil. This degree of targeted and publicly acceptable violence was first made visible on March 8, 1979, and grew to the extent that, in the following years, “no one dared to even consider resisting the mandatory hijab.”27

In the years following March 8, 1979, alongside the abandonment of the so-called “women’s question” by revolutionary factions, the Islamic Republic carried out a systematic campaign to erase the memory of International Women’s Day and all other insurrections against the regime. Those who organized or participated in March 8, 1979 faced a double threat: even though the left had abandoned them, the Islamists still labeled them as leftists and sought their destruction. First, the regime raided the homes of militants, destroying any material documenting their political activity, including records of organizing or participating in the March 8 protests. Second, the women were charged with betraying the regime because of their secular leftist beliefs and were either imprisoned or executed, with a few fortunate ones escaping into exile or disappearing into obscurity. As a result of this coordinated effort—literally eliminating both the protestors and their archives, to first delegitimize them and then erase International Women’s Day from the state’s narrative—it would take decades for those not present to learn of the events surrounding March 8, 1979 and the rich history of Iran’s Women’s Movement.