: What the Success of Women-Led Protests Tell Us About Iran’s Future #WorldNEWS The traditional mourning period in Iran lasts 40 days. Since the widespread national protests began nearly two months

What the Success of Women-Led Protests Tell Us About Iran’s Future #WorldNEWS
The traditional mourning period in Iran lasts 40 days. Since the widespread national protests began nearly two months ago following the death of Mahsa Amini—the young Kurdish Iranian woman who fell into a coma after being allegedly beaten by Tehran’s so-called “morality police” over her purported failure to properly veil her hair—the period of mourning in the country hasnt ceased. At least 328 Iranians have died in the protests, according to the Tehran-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).
But what began as an outpouring of grief over Aminis death has evolved into a transformative national movement. The predominantly women- and youth-led demonstrations and their clarion call for “woman, life, liberty” have touched nearly every corner of Iranian society. Despite the violent crackdowns by Iranian security forces resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests, there are no signs of the movement’s momentum abating anytime soon.

That protests principally led by and for women could persist for this long would have been previously unthinkable in Iran, which has for decades been ruled under the iron fist of its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The country is one of the world’s worst performing countries for gender parity. While Iranian women have a long history of political activism and mobilization in the country, they rarely feature at the center of those movements. Today, Iranian women are not only at the forefront of the ongoing protests, but they are also behind its central demands—namely, the downfall of the regime.
But the centrality of women in these protests matter for reasons that go beyond representation or equality. That’s because, according to scholars of civil resistance, high levels of women participation tend to make mass movements more inclusive, innovative, nonviolent, and, crucially, more likely to achieve their goals. The prevailing question facing Iran is whether these protests will prove to be representative of, or the exception to, that rule.
For Iran, the centrality of women in the ongoing protests was not a matter of design so much as a consequence of circumstance. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, women’s rights in the country have been continuously curtailed—notably, though not exclusively, through the imposition of strict dress code rules, including compulsory hijabs for women in public. While Iranian women have previously sought to remedy their situation by backing reformist candidates and campaigns, those efforts were largely futile in bringing about substantive change. That women emerged as the primary mobilizers behind the current protests comes down to the fact that “women just had so much more to lose,” says Mona Tajali, an Iranian scholar of gender and politics in Muslim contexts.

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