Green Women of Iran: The Role of the Women's Movement During and After Iran's Presidential Election of 2009

The aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent presidential election of June 2009 is well-known to the world by now. After massive protests against the rigged election, the government and its security forces brutally attacked the peaceful demonstrations of people in the streets of Tehran and other cities.1 In what is now understood as the first popular uprising after Iran’s revolution of 1979, we saw women, religious and non-religious, traditional and secular, young and old, rich and poor, in fact women from all walks of life, at the forefront of these protests, at times even outnumbering men. Watching images and videos from these demonstrations, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Iran’s body politic was invaded by feminine power. The extraordinary peaceful heroism of women demonstrators has awakened us in the West to the massive presence of women in Iran’s Green Movement. What I saw, and millions others around the world had a glimpse of, was women marching in thousands, chanting, singing, holding hands, carrying banners and defying the police, military forces, basij militia and plainclothes agents (all part of the multi-layered and extremely complex security machinery that the Iranian regime has managed to assemble in the last thirty years) through peaceful and nonviolent means. These are scenes to be remembered, cherished and pondered for a long time to come. We all witnessed how these brave women were beaten up, arrested, and killed; many are now in jail, many have gone into hiding and many others are among the dead, some murdered in cold blood by snipers. The world watched Neda Agha-Soltan, a twenty-six year old philosophy student who participated in a peaceful demonstration in Tehran, bleeding to death with a single bullet in her heart. Her image came to epitomize both the victimization of Iranian women and their courage, agency and self-determination in writing their own history. From the systematic nature of these targeted killings of women in the street we now know that these murders were committed as a technique of intimidation to create an atmosphere of fear among families, especially among the more traditional segments of Iranian society, who are usually fearful of their young females’ presence in the public. Recently, there have been several reports, some from the highest members of the clerical establishment, that point at routine rape and sexual assault of arrested young men and women in Iran’s prisons.2 The presence of millions of women in these demonstrations speaks volumes about the gendered bodies physically enunciating their existence as women in the public sphere. The majority of Iranian women are young (70% of Iran’s population is under 30), educated (63% of university students in Iran are women), and literate (the literacy rate among women is 90%). There are currently more than 40 women’s groups and more than 700 women civil and human rights activists in Iran. The Iranian women’s movement, in its three long decades of struggle, has shaped and influenced the democratic aspiration of Iranians in content, method, philosophy and even in the aesthetics of its resistance. I want to argue that what we are witnessing in Iran is a logical consequence of years of active participation of women and