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Why the World Needs More Iranian Women
A Comparative Analysis of Two Recent Movements in Iran and Pathways Out of Authoritarianism
Over the past few years, Iranian society has witnessed two major waves of protest. Both emerged from deep structural violence, political repression, and a long-standing authoritarian deadlock. Yet despite their shared context, these movements followed markedly different paths and produced profoundly different outcomes. This essay is not concerned with judging anger, intentions, or moral purity. Its central question is strategic and urgent: which forms of resistance actually make confronting an authoritarian system more possible, and which, however justified in their rage, end up making that struggle harder?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a consolidated authoritarian system whose survival depends on securitization, organized repression, and the systematic closure of civic space. In such a context, protest is not evaluated by its volume or intensity alone. Its effectiveness lies in whether it raises the costs of governance, fractures regime legitimacy, and expands the terrain of social resistance, or whether it instead supplies new justifications for repression and strengthens the state’s security apparatus.
From this perspective, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement represented more than a moment of mass mobilization. It demonstrated how resistance could still move forward under severe repression: slowly, unevenly, and at great cost, yet in ways that were tangible and socially transformative. By contrast, a more recent protest wave has raised difficult questions about political efficacy. Despite widespread anger and urgency, it remains unclear whether this trajectory has widened possibilities for resistance or narrowed them by accelerating securitization and eroding earlier gains.
This article offers a comparative analysis of these two movements, focusing not on emotional narratives but on their concrete political consequences. Centering the role of women, feminist ethics, and nonviolent resistance, it argues that pathways out of authoritarianism depend less on shock or escalation than on strategies that preserve life, dignity, and the capacity for sustained collective action.
Woman, Life, Freedom: An Accumulated Feminist Resistance, Not a Sudden Explosion
Contrary to how it may have appeared from the outside, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement did not emerge from a vacuum, nor was it the product of a single emotional rupture. Its strength and durability can only be understood by looking at the long, slow, and often invisible process that preceded it. Women’s resistance in Iran began years, even decades, before 2022, through forms of everyday defiance that were gradual, costly, and rarely spectacular. This struggle was not organized around a leader, a manifesto, or a promise of immediate liberation, and precisely for that reason it proved resilient.
Much of this resistance took shape in lived experience rather than formal politics. It unfolded in decisions about clothing, presence in public space, access to education and work, and the insistence on bodily autonomy in a system built on control. These acts were often dismissed as minor or symbolic. Yet over time, they quietly altered social norms and shifted the relationship between power, obedience, and the female body. What appeared incremental accumulated into a shared social terrain in which refusal became imaginable, and later, collective.
This long process helps explain why Woman, Life, Freedom was able to sustain a clear ethical horizon even under severe repression. Its commitment to nonviolence was not a performative stance or a sign of political naivety. It reflected a deeply learned awareness of how violence functions within authoritarian systems, especially for women, who have historically borne its most intimate costs. The movement carried within it an understanding that entering the logic of violent confrontation meant stepping onto ground where the state held overwhelming structural advantage.
As an Iranian woman watching these shifts from both proximity and distance, I found this aspect decisive. The movement was not driven by the fantasy of a decisive break or a heroic overthrow. Instead, it drew its force from survival, persistence, and the refusal to let daily life be fully absorbed by authoritarian control. That orientation shaped both its language and its practice.
Another defining feature of Woman, Life, Freedom was its resistance to leader-centered politics and nostalgic visions of power. It did not hinge on a single figure, a family name, or a promised future order. As a result, it was difficult to capture, redirect, or dismantle through targeted repression. The movement existed across society rather than at its apex, embedded in networks of everyday relations rather than concentrated in a symbolic center.
For this reason, even without achieving regime change, the movement produced tangible outcomes. It raised the social and political costs of governance, eroded the regime’s moral authority, and expanded the scope of everyday noncompliance. Perhaps most importantly, it generated new possibilities for sustained civic resistance, fragile but real, that extended beyond moments of mass protest.
Recognizing this background matters. Without it, Woman, Life, Freedom is easily reduced to a spontaneous uprising that flared and faded. In reality, it was the visible expression of a long feminist struggle that had already reshaped society from within. It demonstrated that pathways out of authoritarianism do not necessarily run through shock or escalation, but can emerge through the slow accumulation of ethical, social, and collective power.
Nonviolence here meant refusing to mirror repression, not its absence. This distinction matters, especially for outside observers who equate repression with violent resistance. The movement ignited at the detention center where Mahsa Amini died, a place where women of all levels of hijab coverage had experienced a shared and deeply familiar form of control. Choosing symbolic defiance over violence, protesters adopted “Woman, Life, Freedom” as both slogan and horizon: cutting their hair, burning scarves, and publicly refusing enforced veiling. Long after street protests subsided, women continued to resist by remaining unveiled despite immense financial, social, and emotional costs. They faced denial of service in banks, government offices, cafes, and restaurants, as well as fines and vehicle impoundment. These acts did not signal escalation, but endurance.
Nonviolence as a Strategic Response to Authoritarian Power
In the context of an authoritarian system, nonviolence is often misunderstood as a moral preference or a personal disposition. In reality, it functions as a strategic response to a deeply asymmetric balance of power. Regimes such as the Islamic Republic are structurally prepared for violent confrontation. Their security forces, surveillance apparatus, judicial systems, and propaganda machines are designed precisely to absorb, redirect, and ultimately dominate moments of open conflict.
From this perspective, violence does not destabilize authoritarian power; it consolidates it. Escalation allows the state to activate its most effective tools, to unify fragmented power centers, and to reframe repression as security. Nonviolent resistance, by contrast, disrupts this logic. It denies the regime its preferred battlefield and forces it into forms of control that are more costly, more visible, and harder to justify.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement operated with a tacit understanding of this dynamic. Its commitment to nonviolence was not abstract or idealistic. It emerged from lived knowledge of how quickly violence closes civic space and how easily it can be used to legitimize mass repression. By refusing to mirror the state’s coercive language, the movement limited the regime’s ability to portray itself as a besieged authority responding to chaos.
Nonviolence also made participation more sustainable. Under conditions of severe repression, resistance can only endure if it spreads into everyday life and remains accessible to a broad social base. When the threshold for participation becomes physical confrontation, the field narrows rapidly. Many withdraw, not out of indifference, but out of rational fear and responsibility. Woman, Life, Freedom expanded resistance precisely because it lowered that threshold.
Socially, these achievements permeated every space. Tolerance for being uncovered grew even within traditional environments and conservative families, a shift clearly visible to any external observer. It was no longer necessary to be female, or even politically engaged, to recognize the normalization of women’s agency and the profound transformation of public space.
Crucially, nonviolence preserved internal plurality. It allowed disagreement, hesitation, and difference to coexist without being immediately framed as betrayal or weakness. This openness prevented the rapid moral polarization that authoritarian systems often exploit.
This does not mean nonviolence guarantees success. It means that under authoritarian conditions, nonviolence can keep the struggle alive. In systems designed to exhaust, intimidate, and isolate, the ability to persist without surrendering the terrain of everyday life is itself a form of power.
When Feminist Resistance Refused Patriarchal Containment
One crucial aspect of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement is often overlooked: it did not accommodate patriarchal expectations, and for that reason, it was never fully absorbed or normalized by dominant power structures, including those outside the state.
Almost immediately after the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” reached its peak visibility, counter-slogans began to circulate. One of the most telling was “Man, Homeland, Prosperity,” a reframing that attempted to recentralize masculinity, nationhood, and economic order. This shift was not accidental. It reflected discomfort with a movement that placed women, bodily autonomy, and everyday life at its core rather than sovereignty, strength, or restoration.
Equally revealing was how quickly Woman, Life, Freedom was declared “over.” Long before its social effects had dissipated, it was narratively buried. Attention moved on, not because resistance had ended, but because it no longer fit dominant political imaginations. This discursive closure created space for alternative projects that promised clarity, hierarchy, and leadership. It is no coincidence that monarchist narratives gained momentum at precisely this moment. Notably, on the very day Reza Pahlavi called for people to take to the streets, he removed “Woman, Life, Freedom” from his profile on X, signaling a symbolic break with a movement that resisted patriarchal consolidation.
The contrast becomes sharper when examining the origins of the more recent protest wave. Unlike Woman, Life, Freedom, which emerged from long-standing feminist and social resistance, the recent movement was triggered primarily by protests and strikes in the bazaar. In Iran, the bazaar is not simply an economic space, but a deeply traditional and male-dominated institution. Its political demands have historically centered on economic stability and market autonomy rather than broader questions of social freedom, gender equality, or bodily rights.
This does not delegitimize economic grievances. But it does shape the horizon of protest. When a movement is anchored in structures that prioritize order, transaction, and hierarchy, its capacity to sustain emancipatory, feminist, and plural demands is limited. The center of gravity shifts from transforming social relations to negotiating power within them.
Woman, Life, Freedom disrupted this logic. It refused to translate women’s struggle into nationalist restoration or economic bargaining. It unsettled patriarchal systems rather than reassuring them. That unsettling quality, rather than any supposed failure, explains both its marginalization and its enduring threat.
How the Recent Protest Wave Narrowed the Space for Resistance
Critiquing the recent protest wave does not mean dismissing the anger, urgency, or suffering that fueled it. The question is how this trajectory affects the actual capacity of society to resist an entrenched authoritarian system.
In contrast to Woman, Life, Freedom, which gradually expanded civic space even under repression, the more recent wave has often accelerated the closure of civic space. As radicalized language and violent rhetoric become more prominent, repression no longer requires elaborate justification. Protest is redefined as threat, and securitization becomes self-evident.
This shift has immediate effects. Security institutions are re-legitimized. Everyday noncompliance becomes riskier and easier to criminalize. Spaces that have survived earlier phases of resistance are rolled back with alarming speed.
Escalation also raises the threshold for participation. Resistance narrows, not because society withdraws its support, but because the costs become incompatible with ordinary life. The result is contraction rather than expansion.
Perhaps most damaging is the erosion of earlier gains. Informal freedoms and fragile social advances do not disappear dramatically; they erode quietly. Fear returns to public space. Self-censorship spreads. From the perspective of long-term struggle, this represents regression rather than progress.
Monarchist Narratives and the Reproduction of Authoritarian Logic
The growing entanglement of protest with monarchist narratives requires serious scrutiny. This is not a question of nostalgia, but of political structure.
In its current form, monarchism within the opposition emphasizes leader construction, concentration of authority, and the marginalization of dissent. Critics are often dismissed through intimidation or gendered attacks rather than engagement. Women who question leadership claims are disproportionately targeted, revealing how dissent is expected to be managed in a future order.
From a feminist perspective, this is a fundamental contradiction. Woman, Life, Freedom articulated women as political subjects, not as symbols or instruments. Monarchist discourse that tolerates misogynistic enforcement stands in direct opposition to that vision.
Strategically, leader-centric narratives weaken decentralized resistance and benefit authoritarian systems that thrive on polarization. Even when articulated in the language of liberation, they risk reinstalling familiar structures of domination.
What follows is not a comprehensive account, but a pattern I repeatedly encountered. In my experience with monarchist spaces, I noticed a tendency toward enforced conformity rather than political dialogue. Opposition, particularly from leftist or feminist perspectives, was dismissed through ridicule, intimidation, and gendered slurs. Critique was treated as deviant behavior, creating an atmosphere of conditional belonging where participation required strict alignment with narrow slogans and symbols. This exclusivity was reinforced through symbolic dominance. Images of the crown prince often overshadowed the faces of those killed in Iran, while certain chants were actively policed and foreign symbols were deployed to provoke specific external audiences. These dynamics echo authoritarian patterns that prioritize loyalty over accountability and social pressure over collective deliberation.
From a feminist perspective, these dynamics are revealing. A movement that relies on misogyny, homophobia, or verbal aggression to police its boundaries reproduces the same structures of domination it claims to oppose. Woman, Life, Freedom moved in the opposite direction. It was defined by its capacity for inclusion. Monarchists, republicans, and a wide range of marginalized groups were able to coexist within it, shifting the focus away from singular leadership and toward collective autonomy. This stands in stark contrast to exclusionary tactics that narrow a movement’s horizon and erode its democratic potential.
Violence, Shock Imagery, and the Illusion of External Salvation
Images of extreme violence and mass death demand moral attention. Yet under conditions of information blackout, they also generate political effects that are rarely neutral. Shock travels faster than context. Horror replaces deliberation.
In this environment, suffering risks becoming fuel for escalation. Calls for sanctions or military intervention are framed as moral necessity. History shows that such interventions rarely protect civilians and often consolidate repression.
For Iran, external pressure strengthens the regime’s security narrative and shifts the cost of conflict onto ordinary people. War does not weaken authoritarianism; it militarizes society.
The danger is not exposure, but instrumentalization. When death becomes a political currency, resistance loses its ethical ground. The most dangerous illusion is salvation imagined from outside.
Which Path Makes an Exit from Authoritarianism Possible?
Comparing these two trajectories returns us to a single question: which paths expand the capacity to live, resist, and dissent under authoritarian rule, and which quietly shrink it?
Woman, Life, Freedom did not offer quick victory. It offered endurance. Through feminist resistance, nonviolence, and decentralization, it expanded civic space and weakened authoritarian control over everyday life.
The alternative trajectory narrowed that space. It exhausted society rather than power. It strengthened securitization while claiming urgency.
Defending Woman, Life, Freedom is not nostalgia. It is a political standard. A standard that asks whether a movement preserves life, plurality, and endurance, or sacrifices them to speed and spectacle.
If there is a viable exit from authoritarianism, it will not come through recycled patriarchal power, normalized violence, or fantasies of external salvation. It will come through slow, contested, and deeply human forms of resistance that refuse to devour their own foundations.
Although Iran is an ancient nation that has existed within its current borders for millennia, its struggle for democracy is relatively young. While monarchist nostalgia may captivate many, achieving democracy requires far greater patience and persistence. This remains the path toward more lasting achievements with fewer costs, even if its slow pace fails to soothe the urgency of a limited human lifetime.
Woman, Life, Freedom offered a glimpse of that possibility. The question is whether its lessons will be recognized, or buried under louder and far more dangerous alternatives.