Tehran

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As the Iranian election and its aftermath have captured news headlines around the globe, much of the world has been surprised by the young Iranian women demonstrating on the frontlines. However, this is not a surprise to anyone familiar with Iranian society. Iranian women long have been involved in their country's sociopolitical affairs. They were essential political organizers as far back as the 1905 Constitutional Revolution; women also fought alongside men in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which might not have happened without their participation. Women played a prominent role in the election campaign of former President Mohammad Khatami.

Samaneh Oladi Ghadikolaei

The women involved at the center of the presidential campaigns come from all sectors of society. Many are young, with colorful headscarves hardly covering their hair, but many are dressed conservatively in full black, whether they are young or middle-aged. Education has a strong social value for the country's women, who see it as a means to increase their freedom, and since the revolution, the number admitted to universities has risen dramatically. Iranian women currently make up more than 60 percent of university applicants. Although they face discrimination in legal realms such as inheritance, custody, and court testimony, women in Iran have a more vocal role in sociopolitical realms than women in many other countries in the region. During the past year, they have achieved a series of small but significant victories concerning women’s rights in Iran, such as reforming family law.

During the campaign, the majority of Iran's female activists found a voice in the popular opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who promised to reform the many laws that treat women and men unequally. He campaigned with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a prominent academic and the head of Alzahra University from 1998-2006.

Zahra, a visible and very popular figure during the election, called for Iran to join the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Mousavi spoke against polygamy and against ethnic discrimination, stands reflecting changes in Iranian society.

In the events of June, Iran’s energetic youth and female activists once again used social networking sites to mobilize support for the presidential candidates. Immediately following the Interior Ministry's announcement of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory, large-scale demonstrations broke out. Supporters of the defeated Mousavi organized mainly peaceful protests, demanding a recount of the disputed votes. The protesters used aspects of Iranian political culture to navigate through strategies of civil disobedience. They have been depicting themselves as on the side of Islam, using religious symbols to represent themselves as pursuing the ideal of a just Islamic state. This has made it hard for the state to crack down on them. What started as an opposition movement quickly has turned into a broad social movement.

What we now are witnessing in Iran was made possible by decades of activism by Iranian women and men. But now, more than 70 percent of Iranian society is younger than 30, born after the Islamic Revolution. Iranian-born U.S. academic Hamid Dabashi has argued persuasively that the new generation of Iranian youth is no longer divided along the ideological lines of that revolution. They are demanding rights mandated by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Mousavi has urged his followers to fight for their civil rights by implementing the tactics of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. His followers have begun calling him “the Gandhi of Iran.” His image is carried aloft in the enormous opposition demonstrations that have taken place in Iran; his name is chanted in rhyming verses that summon Shi’a Islam’s most sacred martyr, Hossein. Mousavi's supporters set up a human chain across Tehran, a stretch of 12 miles. They sing street poetry and fly green balloons in support of their presidential candidate, having picked that color as their symbol. Tehran has never seen anything like this "green wave."

However, it is also worth mentioning that incumbent President Ahmadinejad’s supporters staged a mass rally, which got little to no coverage in the Western press. These supporters also held peaceful demonstrations in support of their elected candidate. Both campaigns have used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to mobilize their support. Thousands of pictures and videos of these events were uploaded to Facebook, revealing to millions of others what was really going on in Tehran's streets.

Iran’s demonstrations are historically groundbreaking, and are causing many people in the Middle East to ask themselves why they can’t do the same. Women activists in the region hope that the prominent role women are playing will have a crossover effect on the struggle for women's rights in their own countries. Many also hope it will help shatter Western perceptions of Middle Eastern women as being suppressed in a male-dominated culture.

The people of Iran have come to accept women's public role and their right to participate in any realm of society. Regardless of whether their preferred candidate ends up winning Iran's presidential election, women have emerged ever more strongly as a force to be reckoned with in the country's politics.

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