Iranian women have been at the center of the Islamic Republic’s policies because their control, disguised as care, is fundamental for the Islamization that the Islamic Republic pretends to maintain. But women aren’t uncontrollable objects that accept impositions, limitations, and discrimination. On the contrary, Iranian women have constantly struggled to widen their freedoms and access to rights, improve their position in society, and perform in the public sphere.

Women, as a collective, have been a part of all the social movements in Iran. In 1979, they were a part of the Revolution because they were linked to the group in charge of overturning the shah, but they were divided for political, social, and religious reasons. Women didn’t participate as a monolith. It’s a mistake to assume that all the women who participated in the Islamic Revolution were supportive of Khomeini or that they felt betrayed by the imposition of a regime that went against their ideals.

The women’s movement in Iran is wide, with different visions, intentions, and origins, but it is mostly focused on improving the social, legal, economic, and political positions of women. Therefore, actions and priorities respond to the context. Based on Janet Afary (2009), I propose a division in generations that can’t be as cutting and with blurry and porous borders because the women’s movement is so continuous that it’s had to fight against families, institutions, rulers, laws, regimes, and the system itself.

First generation

Women in the state of emergency

This generation went from occupying the public space and wearing traditional garments as a form of political protest to using their bodies as political tools and the veil as a condition to occupy the public space; from being a part of the protests to having to fight for their autonomy. This doesn’t mean that during the Pahlavi dynasty, women were free, autonomous, or had absolute rights, but that– in the Islamic Republic– segregation is imprinted in the laws, as is the imposition of the veil and the prevalent discrimination. This first generation also includes the years of the war against Iraq, as during the continuous state of emergency, the issues of the subaltern populations lost importance in comparison to the emergency of the nation and, in fact, were used to eradicate any intention of opposition. The continuous attacks of the regime and the social weathering that the war provoked turned the women’s movement into a fragmented and inactive period.

Second generation

Pragmatism and reformism era

Civil society flourished during the 90s, especially organized women, because the end of the war and Khomeini’s death allowed a social and political reframing within the Islamic Republic. During this period, women started to officially occupy the public spheres, not to replace the men who were at the front lines of the war, but to reclaim the education, work, art, and activism spaces. Women occupying those spaces weren’t conservatives who started to join the public spheres after the Islamization of these spaces. The second post-revolutionary generation of the women’s movement was formed by activist women who lived an ideological change because they decided to prioritize paid work over the mandate of reproductive labor. This ideological change met reformism, which motivated the political environment, although not in a generalized way, because the Supreme Leader and the conservative factions kept imposing and boosting the ankylosis of the fundamentalist interpretation of society and women’s roles.

Third generation

Resistance to repression by migrating to cyberspace

Ahmadinejad’s presidential periods led to the dismembering of the women’s movement and any social organization, but they didn’t extinguish; they migrated to cyberspace. This generation, despite the use of all the regime’s strength and institutions to dismantle the opposition, resisted repression by focusing on campaigns (after proving the efficiency of the One-Million-Signatures campaign) that drove activists to focus on specific issues and to reduce their networks. This meant a change in their organization and to focus on cyberspace. This generation also participated in the Green Movement and suffered losses. Even though they didn’t participate as a movement or a contingent, they were part of the society that demanded the respect of their vote.

Fourth generation

Back to the streets

After the pause that Ahmadinejad’s repression meant, added to the deep economic and social crisis that Iran lived in, and the war in the region during Rouhani’s administration, protests in the public space made a shy comeback with small rallies like dokhtar-e khiaban-e enghelab (daughters of Revolution Street). To understand the characteristics of the 2022 protests, we must first understand that the generation of daughters of the second-generation women’s movement has no link to the rhetoric of the Revolution, the war, or the Islamic Republic. They are not afraid, and cyberspace is an extension of their everyday life. The fourth generation of the women’s movement understands cyberspace as a part of their own lives; they don’t use it as an escape or an alternative space for organization, but as a native land where they communicate, organize, and learn.

Fifth generation

The women who aren’t afraid

The separation of this generation from the previous one is a consequence of the violence that was used to repress and the bravery of Iranian women to keep fighting against a regime that represses and discriminates them systematically. Hence, as well as the regime has used women’s bodies to send messages and do politics, now women are using their bodies to send messages and do politics. They go out to public spaces without a veil, and although apparently trifling, they keep on living.