On Monday, Iran’s women’s national football team took the field in Australia. They lost 3-0 to South Korea. That was the least important thing that happened that evening. When the Iranian anthem played, the players stood in a row, hands clasped behind their backs, and stayed silent. Not one of them sang. Not one placed a hand over her heart. A handful of Iranian fans in the stands held up the pre-1979 Iranian flag, the one with the lion and the sun. Three days later they sang, and saluted. Both acts capture the same struggle.

Almost a week before, on February 28, the United States and Israel had launched a joint strike on Iran. The opening salvo killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Trump and Netanyahu each addressed the Iranian people directly, urging them to seize their own destiny. But military force can topple a regime without building a society. The American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan made painfully clear how much political reconstruction depends on forces already alive within a society.

The question that will determine Iran’s future is not a military one. It is cultural. And for generations, the answer to that question has run through the bodies of women.

The female body in Iran has never been a private matter. In the 1930s, Reza Shah banned women from wearing the hijab as part of a forced secularization campaign. Women who refused to uncover were attacked and jailed. In the final years of his son’s reign, female students began wearing the hijab as a deliberate act of defiance against the........

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