iranian women are winning
"Women have always been the drivers of modern revolution in Iran. That’s why they’re punished."
Women are often erased from the revolutions that they spark.
Whether it’s the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street, women at the forefront of the biggest social movements have often been pushed to the sidelines or left out of the story altogether. But not this time, at least not right now in Iran. Much of the world is paying attention to the revolution being provoked by Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died while she was detained by Iran’s “morality police” because her head covering was a bit too loose, reports say. Iranian authorities have denied responsibility and instead claim she had a heart attack but accounts of other women who were detained with her describe a violent beating believed to have lead to her death.
To know what this all means and help you understand it a bit better, I reached out to my friend Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani, an award-winning journalist who is Iranian and has a sharp feminist lens on all things feminism and foreign policy. You may also remember her as the lone badass who challenged R.Kelly on his sexual assault allegations seven years ago with such tenacity that he walked out of the interview.
I asked Caro about the way that men and women seemed to be locking arms and how she can explain this stunning solidarity across genders. “I think this is a generation of Iranians that frankly feel more knitted together because of the economic strife and feeling subdued collectively about the future,” she told me. “They’ve watched the mullahs get fat and prosperous while they languish. It’s a powerful unifier. There’s also a kinship over freedom in a social sense. It’s just wrapped up with a financial sense of emancipation too.”
When I asked her if men in Iran were realizing that their freedom is tied to women’s freedom, similarly with Roe falling here in the US, she said that the repression of women by the state can make other forms of oppression more obvious. “Male freedoms have always been overt. When men see men being shot and detained (as is happening now) I think they feel a chill of autocracy. The wind was always blowing, they just never felt it/their gender was a windbreaker of sorts.”