The fight against compulsory hijab in the Islamic Republic did not begin in 2022, and it did not begin as a quarrel over custom. It began in the first weeks after February 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered women in government offices to cover. On 8 March 1979, International Women's Day (17 Esfand 1357), women went into the streets of Tehran.¹ This archive files those titles, including "Women's protests against compulsory hijab," under one note. Woman Life Freedom is a later wave of the same demand. It is not the origin of it.²

Compulsory hijab is a state order. It is not a description of how Iranian women dressed before 1979. Under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, veiling was no longer a crime. Women who wore a chador and women who did not appeared in the same cities, schools, and workplaces. That mixed street is the baseline this note uses. Reza Shah's 1936 unveiling decree had been the opposite compulsion. After 1941 it was not enforced in the same way. Neither of those Pahlavi policies is the same as the Islamic Republic's later criminal dress code.³

Later commentary, including some European coverage that treats the scarf as inherited culture, sits badly against that record. Iranian women had already lived with and without hijab. The new state made one of those choices a punishable offence.³

Promises in exile, then the first order

In late 1978, from Neauphle-le-Chateau, Khomeini told interviewers that women would not be barred from universities, offices, or parliament, and that they had the same rights as men to education, work, property, and the vote.⁴ IranWire's later fact-check⁵ of those exile statements also records him saying Islam had never opposed women's liberation and that talk of violence against women in Islam was "false propaganda." A 1978 newspaper headline, later reprinted on a protest scarf, put his line as: "Regarding the wearing of the veil, there will be no compulsion."³ On 28 December 1978 he still said women need not wear a full chador, while adding that they must dress modestly and have hijab.

Iranian critics have described that gap as taqiyya, the Shia permission to conceal belief or intent. This note does not treat the theological label as a finding. It records the sequence. On 7 March 1979, the eve of Women's Day, Khomeini said women in government workplaces had to observe hijab.⁵ The next morning, women who arrived uncovered were sent home. The street protests began the same week.²

8 to 14 March 1979

A New York Times dispatch from Tehran dated 10 March describes the third day. Thousands of women left jobs and classrooms. One sit-in at the Palace of Justice involved 15,000 people. Demonstrators wore Western dress and did not wear the chador. Their demands included the right to choose clothing and equal civil standing. There were fights with Islamist activists and one stabbing. The paper wrote that the dispute had widened after Khomeini said women should wear the veil.¹

That dispatch recorded one visible part of the crowd. It does not prove that only secular middle-class women took part. The documentary The Iranian Women's Liberation Movement, Year Zero, shot in Tehran that week by Sylvina Boissonnas, Claudine Mulard, Michelle Muller, and Sylviane Rey, shows a broader street: high-school girls and women of different ages and classes, over six days, until intimidation and violence closed the marches. The Asian Film Archive's note on the film makes the same point. This archive holds a clip from that film in which a protester says hijab blocks her work and movement, and that if Khomeini continues she will leave Islam. It also holds street video from 8 March 1979 and a photograph of Maliheh Nikjoomand among the marchers. The film record⁶ and archive note on it⁷ match that wider crowd.

The March protests forced a short retreat. Officials then called the office order a recommendation. The retreat did not last.²

From offices and wards to the street

Enforcement returned in stages, first as a condition of work. Justice for Iran, citing Khomeini's July 1979 warning that offices must be "Islamified," records that from 14 July 1979 uncovered women were barred from government offices. In July 1980 the order was restated for all administrative premises. In Masjed Soleyman, between 10 and 15 July 1980, the same report lists three women fired from the central bank, 139 from the military, and 43 nurses fired for refusing hijab. Nurses had for a time kept short-sleeved white uniforms. That exception was withdrawn.²

On 5 July 1980, the Washington Post reported about 2,000 women in Tehran protesting Khomeini's order that female government employees wear "modest Islamic garb and cover their heads." They stood in mourning black in front of President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr's offices, facing jeering men. Eight women were arrested. State radio told them to "return to the arms of the nation." Few of the demonstrators, the paper wrote, thought they could avoid hejab.⁸

This archive's labeled items for this note are from 8 March 1979, including Year Zero footage. The 1980 workplace protests are in the printed record above. They belong to the same sequence even when a separate 1980 Women's Day tape has not yet been filed here.

Parliament had not yet made public hijab a crime. Justice for Iran writes that by 1981 uncovered women were already at risk on the street, and that the 1981 workforce-restructuring act made firing for "failure to observe hijab" legal. In 1983 the Islamic Penal Code set up to 74 lashes for appearing in public without proper hijab. Later street enforcement, including the morality police, grew from that law. Woman Life Freedom is the 2022 chapter of that longer fight.²

This archive

"Women's protests against compulsory hijab," "1979 Women's Day protests against anti-women laws," and "Women Protests on International Women's Day 1979" are gathered here. Later titles that name Mahsa Amini, 1401, or Woman Life Freedom stay on that note. Generic International Women's Day memorials from later years stay on their own pages.