How Women Have Led Iran’s Resistance Since 1979

Iran has a way of making the whole world look up at once. Over the past week, protests and strikes have spread again. This time, amid what international media described as “a rapid economic decline and grievances over multiple ongoing crises.”

But if you zoom out, this moment in Iran does not start on December 28, 2025. It starts with women. It starts with the state trying to legislate what women wear, where they stand, what they sing, and who they are allowed to become.

Iran is in the streets again

According to Al Jazeera, “shopkeepers took to the streets and closed down businesses in downtown Tehran on December 28.” This sparked demonstrations that “have now been recorded in most of Iran’s 31 provinces.” Protests and strikes spread “over the past week” as Iran faces “a rapid economic decline” alongside overlapping crises.

And yet, even when a protest wave begins with inflation and currency collapse, it often moves quickly into something deeper.

Before anything else, Iranian women protested the Islamic Republic’s first rules

History places women at the beginning of the post-1979 protest history. Women’s protests started less than two weeks after the revolution. Thousands marched in Tehran to oppose Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s decree mandating the hijab.

That decree followed a ban on alcohol, the separation of men and women in universities, schools, pools and beaches, and “limitations on broadcasting music from radio and television.” Women who marched faced “threats” and “pro-state mobs who attacked them with sticks and stones.” The hijab later became mandatory, with noncompliance punishable by law. This also became a pillar of the Islamic Republic and a root of decades of tensions that culminated in the Mahsa Amini protests of 2022 and 2023.

Iran’s student protests taught the regime how to terrorise campuses

In July 1999, massive student-led protests erupted after hardliners closed a reformist newspaper. The response turned brutal. Police and Basij forces “raided the dorms of the students at night and brutally attacked them in their sleep.” They beated the students and reportedly set rooms on fire.

The demonstrations spread beyond Tehran to campuses in cities including Tabriz, Mashhad, and Isfahan. “Multiple students were dead, dozens injured, and hundreds jailed” by the time security forces quelled the protests days later.

Then came a detail that still reads like a chilling footnote to impunity: the judiciary decided none of the security forces involved would be imprisoned. Only one officer faced a fine for stealing an electric shaver.

The Green Movement in Iran showed how one woman’s death can become a symbol

What is now known as the Green Movement, between 2009 and 2010, is considered Iran’s largest protests since the 1979 revolution, triggered by outrage over the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Protesters asked, “Where is my vote?” and the state escalated violence over weeks with batons, tear gas, and “eventually live ammunition.”

Then the image that many people still remember: the death of Neda Agha Soltan.

It’s an image that shook the nation and turned her into an international symbol. The 26-year-old philosophy student was filmed “bleeding on the pavement in Tehran after being shot in the chest while protesting.”

For their part, state television and authorities rejected eyewitness accounts. They claimed the video was fabricated with “propaganda” at work, and tried to pressure her parents to corroborate their version of events.

And as the protests slowed, the state tightened its grip online. “Iran’s internet crackdown significantly intensified amid the Green Movement,” with services including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube blocked in the aftermath.

Iran’s economic shocks kept igniting uprisings, and the state kept perfecting blackouts

In late 2017, demonstrations began in Mashhad over economic hardship. They spread to more than 100 cities within days. Slogans quickly turned against the establishment amid anger over the cost of living and unemployment.

In November 2019, the government increased petroleum prices “up to 200 percent overnight,” sparking nationwide protests. The crackdown escalated quickly; IRGC units and riot police fired live ammunition, water cannon, and tear gas.

Then came a tactic that would echo in later uprisings. Iran imposed “a near total internet blackout” for close to a week, leaving “tens of millions of people without a connection.”

On casualties, Amnesty International said “at least 304 protesters were killed,” while Reuters cited an unnamed Interior Ministry official who said the death toll was closer to 1,500. Al Jazeera also reported a parliamentary report later acknowledged “only about 230 deaths” as authorities blamed foreign influence.

Mahsa Amini, and how women in Iran forced the world to hear “Women, life, freedom”

In 2022 and 2023, protests erupted after Mahsa Amini died in police custody following her arrest for alleged noncompliance with mandatory hijab rules. She died after collapsing at a “re-education centre.” And authorities insisted she had a stroke and pre-existing health conditions, while her family said “she may have been beaten.”

Outraged Iranians protested for months, “predominantly around the issue of women’s rights but also about broader topics such as extremely limited personal, social, internet, and press freedoms, as well as deteriorating economic conditions.” The slogan “Women, life, freedom” became central, and many people openly defied the morality police afterward.

The Conversation also frames the scale and cost of that uprising starkly. Women flooded the streets “in more than 160 cities across Iran,” and the Iranian diaspora mobilised too, including “more than 80,000 people marching in Berlin on one day alone.” According to a United Nations fact-finding mission, an estimated 60,000 people were arrested, and 550 people were killed. Similarly, “facial recognition technology and traffic cameras were used to track down women who refused to wear the hijab in public.”

Iran didn’t get a neat political victory, so women turned resistance into routine

The Conversation argues the state drove the Women, Life, Freedom movement underground, but it did not extinguish it. “Yet, Iranian women continue to resist in various ways every day, keeping the spirit of the movement alive,” Shadi Rouhshahbaz, Associate Research Fellow at Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, wrote, based on interviews with Iranian women inside Iran and in Australia.

One Iranian woman in Australia told her, “At first, I was very angry and heartbroken when the opposition coalition failed. So many young people have died for change over the years. But I keep telling myself that no one taught us how to form coalitions or live in a society inclusive of plural opinions.”

Inside Iran, resistance often looks quiet until you realise how much courage it takes to live openly. A 30-year-old woman from Isfahan said, “My daughter was born in 2023. How can I continue to live this double life now that I am a mother? Even though Isfahan is a religious city, I no longer wear the scarf [hijab]. When my daughter grows up, I want her to see me and my true beliefs as her role model: a strong and free mother.”

Iran’s government answered women’s defiance with what Amnesty called a “war on women and girls”

Two years after the Women, Life, Freedom uprising, impunity for crimes “reigns supreme” in Iran. Amnesty reported “no effective, impartial and independent criminal investigations” have taken place into serious violations during and after the 2022 protests, including security forces’ “extensive and unlawful use of force and firearms.”

Amnesty also said authorities have “further escalated their assault on human rights,” “waging a ‘war on women and girls’” through intensified enforcement of compulsory veiling and by expanding their use of the death penalty “to silence dissent.”

On enforcement, Amnesty reported authorities launched a nationwide campaign called the “Noor Plan” in April 2024, increasing patrols to enforce compulsory veiling. It described tactics including “dangerous car chases,” mass vehicle confiscations, imprisonment, and “flogging and other penalties amounting to torture.”

Amnesty also described a July 22, 2024, case in which police fired lethal ammunition at a car in which 31-year-old Arezou Badri travelled, leaving her “gravely injured,” according to media reports Amnesty cited, as agents sought to confiscate the vehicle for veiling enforcement.

On violence against girls, Amnesty cited an August 2024 video and quoted Nafas Hajisharif, 14, saying: “They were pulling me by my hair, shouting at me and cursing…when they took me inside the van, they threw me onto the floor. One female agent hit me, put her knee on my throat, and hit my head hard. My head was stuck between the seats, and they were kicking the side of my torso.”

Videos and slogans from Iran’s 2026 protests keep circling back to women

Many are describing the current wave as “a historic anti-regime protest” that erupted on December 28, 2025, in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and spread across Iran. Similarly, international outlets agree that women “lead from the forefront,” pointing to videos it said show women “burning ‘hijabs’,” burning portraits of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and leading chants.

The longer historical timeline makes one fact hard to ignore: the Islamic Republic’s earliest mass dissent after 1979 began with women protesting compulsory hijab, and the largest recent uprising in 2022 and 2023 centered on women’s bodily autonomy and public presence.

So even when a new protest wave begins with currency collapse, women’s resistance often supplies the language, the symbols, and the stakes.