From Anarchistories by Tom Goyens
Freedom of Choice
The oppression of women in Iran remains one of the clearest expressions of the theocratic order established in 1979. The nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in September 2022 revealed not only the courage of Iranian women but also the unresolved struggle over bodily autonomy, public morality, and state power that began with the Islamic Revolution itself.
More than any other group, women may well feel a particularly bitter sense of betrayal. In the late 1970s, women of all classes and persuasions played a major role in the movement to overthrow the Shah, even though the monarchy had introduced a limited, top-down modernization. Scholars have often focused less on what women contributed to the revolution than on what the new regime later imposed on them. The anarchist writings discussed here also rarely mention women protesters.
Throughout 1978 and early 1979, Khomeini encouraged and celebrated women’s participation in the struggle against the Shah. Large numbers answered the call, joining demonstrations, encouraging male relatives to become active, or hosting anti-regime meetings in their homes. Khomeini and his allies needed the broadest possible coalition against the monarchy, and women were essential to that mobilization.
Yet even during this uneasy alliance, Khomeini never concealed his vision of a religiously ordered society grounded in gender hierarchy. “A nation whose respected women demonstrate in modest garb [hijab] to express their disgust with the Shah's regime,” he proclaimed, “such a nation will be victorious.”1 Khomeini welcomed women into the revolution, but not into equality.
Writing in Freedom on February 10, 1979, the day before the Iranian armed forces stood down and allowed Khomeini to assume power, Shahin was among the first commentators to identify dress codes as a “symbolic test case” for Iran’s future, especially for women. He predicted widespread harassment by what he called “self-appointed thought police.” Shahin also noted that the little “liberation” women experienced under the Shah largely concerned clothing and public appearance rather than any fundamental transformation of women’s social position.2
Shahin’s warning pointed to a broader historical reality: struggles over personal appearance can become larger conflicts over power and conformity. The right to choose one’s appearance is not frivolous; it touches identity, dignity, and humanity itself. Conflicts over hair and dress have repeatedly served as flashpoints against coercive social norms. Afros in the United States symbolized Black pride and resistance; in the Soviet bloc, Western youth fashion was treated as ideological deviance; during China’s Cultural Revolution, outward appearance became intensely politicized. In post-1979 Iran, however, such norms were not merely social pressures but legal mandates enforced through arrest and violence.
One of the first reactionary acts of the new regime was not the introduction of a new decree, but the abolition of an old one. In February 1979, the Family Protection Law, which had expanded women’s rights in marriage and divorce, was dismantled. A series of new decrees followed in March. Women could no longer serve as judges. Divorce became the prerogative of the husband. Women who wished to keep their jobs were expected to appear veiled.
When International Women’s Day arrived on March 8, over one hundred thousand women and men gathered in Tehran to protest the new restrictions, especially compulsory veiling. Demonstrators carried signs reading “We will fight against compulsory veil; down with dictatorship,” and “’Women’s Day of Emancipation is neither Western, nor Eastern, it is international.” Women protesters were repeatedly assaulted in the streets.
Despite the resistance, repression deepened. In June 1979, the education ministry banned coeducational schooling and shut down workplace day-care facilities, measures that pushed many women out of employment and back into the home.
By the summer, the revolutionary coalition had fractured. Many women who had supported the overthrow of the Shah now faced a new authoritarian order.
The rapid marginalization of women confirmed for many anarchist observers that the revolution had entered a counterrevolutionary phase. Yet anarchists did not entirely agree on what the women’s movement represented, what its goals should be, or whether opposition to religious authority alone was sufficient to challenge broader structures of domination.
For the French anarchist writer Maurice Joyeux, the struggle of Iranian women exposed the fundamentally authoritarian character of political Islam. The title of his essay of March 1979 declared “In Iran, in the face of religious reaction, it is women who carry the hope of peoples benumbed by Islam!” He condemned what he called the “spiritual imperialism” of several Middle Eastern regimes and argued that the most radical position was “the will of women to break with the Qur’an and to live freely.” “Only women go to the heart of the problem,” he wrote, “for only they rise up against what is essential: the moral dictatorship of spiritual imperialism.”
Yet this interpretation simplified the diversity of Iranian women’s views. Many women who opposed compulsory veiling remained religious and objected less to Islam itself than to the state’s monopolization of moral choice.3
Other anarchist writers worried that focusing exclusively on religious oppression or legal discrimination did not go far enough. Writing in April 1979, Fausta Bizzozero, cofounder of Rivista Anarchica, praised the courage of the Women’s Day demonstrators but argued that many of their demands remained limited to civil and legal reforms. The right to work, dress freely, and enjoy sexual autonomy were essential freedoms, she acknowledged, yet demands of this sort “do not in any way call power or the class structure into question.”
Bizzozero also rejected explanations that reduced the Iranian crisis to male domination alone. Her remarks were prompted by statements made by American feminist Kate Millett who attended the Women’s Day demonstration before being arrested and deported. Millett denounced both Khomeini and Pope John Paul II as embodiments of male chauvinist authority. Bizzozero objected that replacing male rulers with female ones would not dismantle hierarchy or coercion. “If, instead of Khomeini, it were Indira Gandhi, and instead of the Pope a woman pope,” she asked, “would that change anything?”4
Other anarchist observers were more encouraged by the organizational forms emerging within the Iranian women’s movement itself. The Canadian anarchafeminist paper Open Road reported that Iranian feminists had organized a Committee for Women's Rights and raised funds to publish a newspaper. In New York, activists created a Circle for Support for Iranian Women, while in London an Iranian Women's Solidarity Group worked to challenge media portrayals of Iranian women.5
The Iranian anarchist exile Rahespar, writing in Le Monde Libertaire, argued that the Iranian feminist movement possessed a distinctly “libertarian character” precisely because it operated outside party structures. Small autonomous groups coordinated protests and publications without centralized leadership.6
Most anarchist observers agreed that the resistance of Iranian women revealed both the authoritarian direction of the revolution and the persistence of autonomous struggles against state attempts to regulate everyday life and bodily autonomy.
An Anarchist Alternative?
Anarchists did not simply criticize the emerging Islamic regime or denounce Marxist authoritarianism. During 1978–79, several libertarian writers outlined a decentralized alternative based on federalism, self-management, and the abolition of the state.7
Rahespar, sensitive to Iran’s ethnic diversity, advocated a “federative system among all ethnic minorities.” In his view, the creation of separate nation-states, including a Kurdish state, would merely reproduce new forms of dependency and foreign influence. He criticized the Kurdish Democratic Party for its Marxist-Leninist orientation and rejection of decentralization. Ethnic groups should defend their identities, Rahespar argued, but outside the framework of the nation-state.8
As we have seen, many anarchists feared that the Iranian Revolution would merely replace one hierarchy with another. Writing in November 1978, Hermet argued that a genuine revolution had to reject not only the monarchy, but also the army, political parties, and clerical authority. “If any kind of hierarchy emerges,” she warned, “the Revolution is doomed.”9 Sauvage likewise saw ordinary Iranians trapped in a geopolitical struggle while political and religious organizations maneuvered to seize power. Liberation, he argued, could not come through “religious or political channels.”10 Shahin warned that the uprising lacked a genuine “libertarian substructure” and was therefore likely to produce another authoritarian regime.11
Events during 1979 seemed to confirm these anarchist fears. Following the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, Le Monde Libertaire argued that the hostage crisis was not simply a spontaneous student action but a political maneuver involving leftist groups operating under the protection of Khomeini’s regime. The paper condemned a form of “leftism” that avoided direct confrontation with clerical power and instead reinforced the new Islamic state. The students, it argued, had missed a more effective political strategy: using the embassy documents to stage a symbolic “trial of American imperialism.”12
More broadly, the author warned that revolutions often destroy their emancipatory aims through extremism, violence, and new forms of authoritarianism. Unless Iranian revolutionaries rejected both religious and secular fatalism, the revolution would merely reproduce another oppressive order.13
Despite mounting repression, libertarian groups did emerge inside revolutionary Iran. In May 1979, activists formed the Malatesta Group, named after the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, to promote libertarian socialism based on self-management and federalism. The group rejected terrorism and called for cooperation among radical currents.14 Around the same time, the Persian-language anarchist bulletin Nafarman (“Rebellious”), probably edited under a pseudonym by Ahmad Reza Ravanbakhsh, began circulating clandestinely.15
Even during the Iran-Iraq War, anarchist activity persisted. In October 1980, reports from a “Tehran Libertarian Group” appeared in Nafarman and were later reprinted abroad in Le Monde Libertaire and Freedom.16 Distribution had become dangerous, but libertarian publications from abroad still reached readers inside Iran.17
Before you go, I’ve enabled pledges if you’d consider supporting this work in the future. —Tom Goyens
Quoted in Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (Harvard University Press, 2005), 151.
Freedom, February 10, 1979.
Joyeux. “En Iran, face à la réaction religieuse, ce sont les femmes qui portent l’espoir des peuples arabes abrutis par l’Islam!” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), March 22, 1979.
Fausta B[izzozero], “Se Komeini Fosse Una Donna,” Rivista Anarchica (Milan), April 1979.
“Revolting Women in Iran,” Open Road, Summer 1979.
Rahsepar, “Iran d’hier a aujourd’hui,” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), November 22, 1979.
“Es lebe der Tyrannenmord,” Schwarze Gockler, September 1978.
Rahsepar, “Iran d’hier a aujourd’hui,” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), November 22, 1979.
Hermet, “Révolution, oui ! Croisade, non!” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), November 16, 1978.
Sauvage, “Un peuple en marche, mais vers quoi?” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), January 4, 1979
Freedom, February 10, 1979.
“Iran: La Corde Raide,” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), December 13, 1979.
Ibid.
“Naissance du groupe Malatesta,” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), June 28, 1979
“Communiqué,” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), March 13, 1980.
“Informations internationales,” Le Monde Libertaire (Paris), October 23, 1980.
“From the Home Front Tehran,” Freedom, October 25, 1980.




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