Iranian Women March Against The Hijab
Iranian Women March Against The Hijab
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought seismic changes to Iran, not least for women. One area that has come under scrutiny is the way women dress and wear their hair - the old Shah, in the 1930s, banned the veil and ordered police to forcibly remove headscarves. But in the early 1980s, the new Islamic authorities imposed a mandatory dress code that required all women to wear the hijab.
In Iran, women's clothes have been a political issue since before the revolution in 1979. Back in the first half of the 20th century, women's clothes showed great variety: rural women wore a floral chador, secular and wealthier women wore Western clothes, and "the black chador was mainly worn in big cities by traditional and ultra-orthodox religious women." In the 1970s, things got more complicated:
The manteau only emerged in the 1970s as a political statement by young, educated women, many devoted to leftist or modern Islamist ideals. But after 1979, when the revolutionary government sought to impose black chador on all Iranian women, the meaning of both chador and manteau were transformed. In the early 1980s, a spectrum of women who might have looked nothing like each other on a pre-1979 street began to embrace the manteau as a compromise.
“This turned out to be the last day women walked the streets of Tehran uncovered. It was our first disappointment with the new post-revolution rulers of Iran. We didn’t get the effect we had wanted. But when I look at this photo, I don’t just see the hijab looming over it. I see the women, the solidarity, the joy – and the strength we felt.” – Hengameh Golestan