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Iranian women just want their pre-1979 lives back

Iranian women have driven resistance against the Islamic Republic for decades — but amid Operation Epic Fury’s airstrikes, their voices are disappearing.

To understand this moment, you must understand what was lost.

Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi granted women the right to vote in 1963 — eight years before Switzerland did — and elected six women to parliament that same year.

In the late 1960s, women entered the diplomatic corps, the judiciary and the police force, working as lawyers, doctors, pilots and politicians; universities were full of them.

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Within weeks of the Islamic Republic’s declaration, female judges were dismissed, the minimum marriage age for girls dropped to 9 and the hijab became mandatory for every woman in Iran, including non-Muslims, punishable by imprisonment and flogging.

On March 8, 1979 — International Women’s Day — more than 100,000 Iranian women poured into the streets of Tehran to protest. They were loud, and they were right.

The regime ignored them, then silenced them, then built an entire legal architecture of gender apartheid around their bodies.

This is not ancient history.

A modern, educated, increasingly equitable Iran existed within living memory.

The Islamic Republic took it. And Iranian women have been fighting to restore it ever since.

In 2022, Jin, Jiyan, Azadi — Woman, Life, Freedom — became the moral spine of Iran’s modern uprising.

When 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini was beaten to death by morality police for “improper” hijab, the country ignited.

Girls burned veils in the streets as protests spread to over 285 cities.

Across every ethnic, class and generational line, Iranians united to demand the end of the Islamic Republic’s stranglehold on their lives.

The regime’s answer was methodical and brutal: Thousands were killed.

Women were deliberately shot in their faces, breasts and genitals — a consistent pattern of targeted punishment.

All the girls maimed and murdered in so-called honor killings, all the girls arrested, coerced, raped or tortured in prison; this violence is not episodic.

It is written into the law. It shapes daily life.

And it has continued for 46 years.

Yet not until a US airstrike this month killed 165 children, mostly girls, at a school built on a naval base in Minab, did Western feminists suddenly erupt.

Those children’s deaths were a terrible tragedy.

But it’s not feminist to speak loudly about girls killed by American bombs after falling silent about girls shot in the face by Basijis or sold into marriage as children.

That’s politics wearing the mask of compassion.

The lives of Iranian girls cannot be worth more or less depending on who does the killing.

Inside Iran right now, women are living through overlapping terrors.

My sources there, a network of independent journalists and activists, communicate with me sporadically — despite the regime’s deliberate Internet blackout — via brief, fragmented bursts through unstable VPN connections.

A female teacher in Tehran described the daily weight of an economic collapse so severe that a handful of grocery items costs the equivalent of $70.

The poor face something she could only call catastrophe.

She described waking in the night not knowing if the sound was a bomb or a Basij raid, knowing that without air-raid sirens her only warning is the sound of fighter jets.

Women’s views on the airstrikes and foreign intervention are not monolithic, and that complexity deserves to be heard without distortion or political co-option.

Some women inside Tehran describe a grim, exhausted pragmatism: a sense that 80% of the people around them see no internal path to change and have accepted, however painfully, that outside pressure may now be the only force capable of breaking the regime’s grip.

One woman described wishing that President Donald Trump would stick to his campaign pledge and remove the Islamic Republic — not because she loves war, but because she loves Tehran too much to see it die slowly.

But other women firmly reject the airstrikes, and not in defense of the regime.

A Tehran journalist described being shattered by morning strikes, her city smelling of gunpowder, a close friend suffering a mental breakdown from the sound of explosions.

Her message to those cheering from abroad: Come here, live this, experience what devastation means for real bodies and real minds.

Another woman described watching Israelis on television run to bomb shelters, warned by sirens, people holding each other — and feeling crushing bitterness.

“We have no shelters,” she said. “We have no sirens. We have a regime that is not ours, one that only threatens us.

“The Iranian people are very alone. This much humiliation would melt stone.”

That has been the story since 1979.

It was the story in 2022, when Western feminist institutions largely failed to match the courage of the women burning their hijabs in Tehran’s streets.

It is the story of late February 2026, when viral posts on X reduced Iran’s freedom movement to a mocking pornography punchline — women “finally being able to do OnlyFans” — a joke that reproduces the exact logic of the Basijis, who called protesters whores before opening fire.

It’s the same dehumanization wearing different clothes.

Women who marched in 1979 knew what they were losing and said so loudly.

Women who are inside Tehran right now, jolting awake to the sound of explosions, smuggling testimonies through Starlink, watching their families threatened and their wrestlers executed — they know exactly what they are living, and what they want.

They want what Iran had before the Islamic Republic took it.

They want, as one female teacher put it with devastating precision: life.

The world should finally start listening to them.

Roya Rastegar, a first-generation Iranian America, is co-founder of the Iranian Diaspora Collective, a pro-democracy organization amplifying the voices of people inside Iran.

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