Four years ago this week, a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Jina Amini died after being detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the country’s compulsory hijab rules.
She was a young Kurdish woman from Saqqez in western Iran, a region that has long suffered from economic deprivation and political marginalization. Yet within days, her name transcended geography, ethnicity and even Iran itself. It became the symbol of a movement whose defining words — Woman, Life, Freedom — would be repeated by women and men around the world.
The question now is no longer whether the movement mattered. It unquestionably did. The harder question is what it actually changed.
For those of us who grew up as women in Iran, the compulsory wearing of a hijab has never been an abstract political issue. Almost every Iranian woman of my generation has a story: being stopped on the street, warned about her hair or clothing, questioned, humiliated, threatened or taken into custody. The state turned something as personal as clothing into a daily encounter between women and governmental power.
Iran’s relationship with the veil is also more complicated than the Islamic Republic has ever acknowledged. Iranian society is religiously and culturally diverse, and many Iranians do not regard state-imposed veiling as synonymous with personal faith.
That accumulated experience is part of what made Amini’s death so combustible.
The protests that followed were met with extraordinary violence. The United Nations has reported that more than 550 protesters, including dozens of children, were killed during the crackdown. Thousands more were detained. Protesters were sentenced to death and executed.
The state also targeted those who told Amini’s story. Journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, among the first to report on Amini’s hospitalization, death and funeral, spent roughly a year and a half in detention and received lengthy prison sentences before eventually being released and later pardoned.
Yet repression produced something the government could not entirely reverse. Women began removing their headscarves. What began as an act of civil disobedience has become increasingly commonplace in streets, cafes and other public spaces across Iranian cities. Something that once almost automatically invited confrontation with authorities has become far more widespread. This is perhaps the movement’s greatest achievement: The law did not change, but the relationship between women and the law did.
It would be premature to declare the end of compulsory hijab wearing in Iran. The underlying legal architecture remains. Iranian authorities continue to enforce compulsory-veiling rules, including through prosecutions, business closures, vehicle impoundments and surveillance. The government’s more expansive hijab and chastity law was suspended but not repealed. Existing law still criminalizes appearing in public without an Islamic hijab.
Nor does the ability of many women to walk unveiled through parts of Tehran mean that they have achieved legal equality. The state can still impose dress requirements in government institutions and other official settings. More fundamentally, the legal system continues to discriminate against women in marriage, divorce, inheritance, child custody and freedom of movement. A married woman’s ability to obtain a passport and leave Iran can still depend on her husband’s permission. Iranian family law continues to give husbands powers and privileges unavailable to wives.
Woman, Life, Freedom therefore accomplished something profound but incomplete. It transformed social behavior faster than it transformed law. And the price of that transformation continues to be paid.
Before the wounds of 2022 had healed, another nationwide protest movement erupted this past January. According to Iran Human Rights, at least 100 people arrested in connection with those protests are now at risk of execution. Among the documented cases are at least five women and five people who were under 18 at the time of their alleged offenses. The organization says that since March 18, authorities have executed 31 protesters — 29 connected to the January protests and two associated with Woman, Life, Freedom.
These numbers are especially haunting because the movement was never only about women. Young men stood beside women. They marched with them, were arrested with them, and in some cases died or were executed alongside them. That solidarity marked an important evolution in Iran’s struggle for women’s rights. Gender inequality was no longer treated simply as a “women’s issue.” For a generation of Iranians, the treatment of women became inseparable from the larger question of what kind of political system they wanted to live under.
The extraordinary visibility of men standing beside women during Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrated how far parts of Iranian society have moved ahead of the state that governs them. That may ultimately be the movement’s most important legacy.
Four years after Amini’s death, Iranian women are different. Many have crossed a psychological boundary that will be extraordinarily difficult for any government to restore. Mothers have buried children. Families have endured imprisonment. Despite knowing the consequences, women are refusing to surrender control over their bodies.
But the Islamic Republic has not undergone the same transformation. Its governing structure remains authoritarian, and its laws remain discriminatory. Its prisons still hold political dissidents, and the machinery of execution continues to be used against protesters. War, sanctions and severe economic pressure may have pushed compulsory hijab wearing down the government’s list of priorities, but a temporary retreat in enforcement is not the same thing as recognition of a right.
The movement did not liberate Iranian women in law. But it did something that may ultimately prove just as consequential: It changed what millions of Iranians believe they are entitled to demand from the law. Laws can compel behavior for a time. Fear can enforce them for longer. But when a generation stops believing that an unjust rule has legitimacy, coercion becomes increasingly expensive.
Amini did not live to see what happened in her name. But four years after her death, millions of Iranian women understand freedom differently because of the movement she came to symbolize.
Pegah Banihashemi, a native of Iran, is a legal scholar and journalist in Chicago whose work focuses on human rights, constitutional and international law, and Middle East politics.
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