The women of Iran are rising up — again.
Since the recent death of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the country's morality police, Iranian towns and cities have erupted in protest.
These protests have become one of the greatest challenges to Iran's political establishment since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Authorities have unleashed a brutal crackdown, including issuing the first death sentence to an unidentified protester.
But women's protest in Iran is not new. Iranian women have been at the forefront of political protest and change there since the beginning of the 20th century.
"There's actually been a very long history of women advocating for the role of women in Iran, and for having freedom," Pardis Mahdavi, a provost and executive vice president of the University of Montana, tells ABC RN's Rear Vision.
"We've seen Islamic feminism, we've seen more secular feminism, we've seen multiple generations of feminists, and these have actually laid the important groundwork for what we see on the streets of Iran today."
For more than a century, the place of women in Iran has been a seismic political, cultural and religious issue. And women have responded time and time again by making their voices heard.
'Women came out into the street'
With around 85 million people, Iran's population is predominantly Persian (not Arabic) with several other ethnic minorities.
From 1905-1911, the country was rocked by the Persian Constitutional Revolution, a period of unprecedented debate, which paved the way for the country's modern era.
It temporarily curbed the power of the long-established monarchy and brought about a parliament and a new constitution.
Haleh Esfandiari, a director emerita and distinguished fellow of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Centre in Washington DC, says the women's movement was at the forefront of this revolution.
"A great number of women came out into the street and protested for more rights," Esfandiari says.
"But when the constitution was drafted, women didn't get the right to vote or to be elected to parliament. Basically, they didn't get any rights. They were again considered second class citizens."
A ban on veils
The country's tumultuous history continued in 1921, when a British-backed coup led to a military commander Reza Khan crowning himself Reza Shah ('Shah' meaning 'king').
This started the Pahlavi royal dynasty, which would last for 54 years.
Reza Shah promised to modernise Iran, with policies that would have major impacts on women.
"[He] believed that women, as half of the population, needed to participate in the development of the state … He focused on education, employment and also the veil," Esfandiari says.
In 1936, Reza Shah banned Islamic veils (including the hijab and chador) and pushed for Iranian women to dress like Europeans.
Esfandiari says this was "very tough" for some women because they "didn't have the means to appear in public without the veil".
Reza Shah also raised the age of marriage from nine to 13 for girls and allowed women to attend the University of Tehran.
'Golden years for Iranian women'
In 1941, during World War II, the British forced Reza Shah to abdicate in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
This Shah ruled for almost 40 years, supported by the US and other Western allies.
"I personally think that the reign of the Shah, when it comes to women's rights, were the golden years for Iranian women. Women got the right to vote and to be elected to parliament. So the political sphere was open to them," Esfandiari says.
"Women were participating in the development of the state. As a friend of mine once told me, 'I felt no doors were closed to me'."
But not everyone agrees.
'The dictator'
Shahin Nawai is an entomologist and political activist. She was a student in Iran at the time of the last Shah, and she has a very different view of his time in power.
"During the period of the Shah, the big problem for me as a student, as a young woman, was the censorship and the dictatorship," she says.
"I couldn't do anything — I couldn't read any book that I wanted. I couldn't read any magazine that I wanted. It was completely under the control of the secret police of the Shah."
The secret police, called the SAVAK, crushed any dissident movements.
Pardis Mahdavi adds that, "under the Shah, women certainly had more freedom of dress, etc, but women still felt that their ability to participate — political participation — was stunted".
"Women's ability to fully engage in meaningful and gainful employment was also something that they felt was challenged."
And so scores of Iranian women stood up to the Shah.
The 1979 revolution
Dissatisfaction with the Shah's brutal regime erupted into the streets in 1978. Once again, women were on the frontline of these protests.
"The slogan of that revolution was 'independence, freedom, Islamic Republic,' [but] nobody had an idea what the 'Islamic Republic' meant," Esfandiari says.
"The women who took part in marches in the millions, they expected that the government would not only provide them with democracy, but also would show them an expansion in women's rights."
On January 16, 1979, the once unthinkable happened — the Shah left the country and went into exile.
The revolution brought together different voices. But in its aftermath, the country's Islamic authoritarian wing began to dominate.
Iran's pro-Western secular regime was replaced with an anti-Western Islamist regime under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, the new 'Supreme Leader'.
Crackdowns
Shahin Nawai says women's rights in the new Islamic Republic of Iran were soon curtailed.
"[In] 1979 we had over 40 different women's organisations, all over the country … but in 1980, they closed. [People from these groups] were arrested and actually killed."
"The oppression came all over from Khomeini."
"Women lost the right to divorce, as divorce became again the unilateral prerogative of the man. The age of marriage was reduced for girls to nine," Esfandiari says.
And the veil once again became a key political point.
"Women's bodies were at the centre of the platform under which the Islamist regime came to power … Their critique really was a critique of an Iran that had become overly infatuated with the West," Mahdavi says.
"[So] they created an entire arm of power called the morality police, and their entire job was focusing on 'upholding right and forbidding wrong'."
"It meant regulating women's bodies, from what they wore to how they walked, who they walked with, where they were in public, etc."
In 1985 the Islamic regime introduced the mandatory wearing of the hijab.
Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian History at the University of St Andrews, points out that "one of the first protests [of the new republic] was actually women protesting about the mandatory imposition of the hijab".
'Overly focused on their bodies'
The following generation, which Mahdavi calls the "children of the revolution" began to challenge the regime on a larger scale. Young women played a prominent role.
"This was a regime that was so overly focused on their bodies," she says.
"[Young women] were frustrated by a regime that spent more time policing what women wore, than in attempting to figure out a solution to the unemployment problem, or attempting to solve traffic flow issues, or pollution."
She says young women "used [their] bodies to speak back to a regime with which they did not agree".
"So they did this by sliding the headscarf back, wearing red lipstick, wearing red nail polish," which she calls "acts of resistance".
The Green Movement
From the late 1990s, there has been an ever increasing number of protests across Iran.
In 2009, a disputed presidential election, which saw conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stay in power, kickstarted the massive Green Movement protests.
Mahdavi says women were at the forefront "because [they] had the most at stake under a conservative regime".
"It was women who suffered the most at the hands of a morality police that was really scrutinising their bodies and their behaviours."
Women were also heavily involved in the protests in 2017-2018, which targeted the government's economic failures.
'Enough is enough'
Then on September 13, 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police in Tehran allegedly for wearing her hijab too loosely.
While in police custody, she fell into a coma. Three days later, she was dead.
According to Amnesty International, "credible reports emerged from eyewitnesses that the 'morality' police had subjected her to torture and other ill-treatment inside the police van, including through beatings to her head".
What started as protests outside the hospital Amini was in have since spread to dozens of cities across the country, growing into something much larger.
"Women's issues were the starting point for many, but it's really much larger now. It's about human rights. It's about human dignity. It's also about issues around equity and issues around economics," Mahdavi says.
"People have been living under the pain of [international] sanctions. Unemployment has risen to astronomical levels ... Traffic is only getting worse. Pollution is only getting worse."
Authorities have responded with violence, as activist HRANA news agency claims hundreds of protesters have been killed, including dozens of children.
"This has been brewing for more than two decades. Arguably some might say that discontent with the Islamist regime has been brewing since the revolution of 1979," Mahdavi says.
"One of the things that also inspires me is the fact that we see schoolgirls protesting," she says.
"Iranians in Iran and around the world are saying, somehow, this time feels different … Enough is enough."
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
