Weaponizing Feminism: White Feminism and “Liberating” Iranian Women
On Friday 13th June, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion against Iran where they attacked one of Iran’s nuclear facilities in Natanz, 140 miles south of Tehran, unprovoked, causing significant damage. Iran retaliated a few hours later and thus ensued the exchange of missiles from both countries over 12 days which resulted in the death of 935 people in Iran and 28 in Israel. On 22nd June, Donald Trump - the self-proclaimed ‘anti-war’ president- joined Israel by bombing three nuclear facilities in Iran. Following the start of this conflict, global discourse surrounding it has reproduced certain narratives we have heard time and again on the status of Middle Eastern women. Western media outlets have yet again reproduced these narratives in their coverage of the conflict, stating how women in Iran are living in inhumane conditions and are being systematically oppressed. While gender apartheid in Iran is a pressing issue, imperial feminism co-opts the struggles of Middle Eastern women to justify and generate support for illegal wars. They proudly claim they are fighting to ‘liberate’ Muslim women (the U.S invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq were famously known as feminist missions) but can we really bomb a country into liberation? Can we bomb our way to a feminist paradise? Does a feminist paradise exist anywhere in the world? Who are we to ‘liberate’ a population? In this article, we aim to provide a contextual analysis of women’s rights movements in Iran, critique imperial feminism, white saviourism, and our role as feminists, as human beings, in supporting women in Iran in their fight for gender equality.
History of Feminist Movements in Iran
Any discussion concerning the rights of Iranian women must begin with a comprehensive understanding of their socio-political and historical context, or else we risk oversimplifying and presenting an erroneous understanding of women’s rights movement and gender justice in Iran. Women's activism in Iran dates back to 1906-1911 after the Constitutional Revolution where the foundation for gender justice was built through the creation of several civil societies such as the Society for Women's Freedom and the Women's Revolutionary Association. This movement came as a result of awareness surrounding women's lower status in society and the desire to fight for their presence in politics and their access to education.
As with various women's movements in Iran and other parts of the world, these movements were intertwined with anti-colonial or anti-imperialist sentiments. While Iran was not colonised, Russian and British influence was prevalent in the region which paved the way for anti-imperialistic trajectories in the constitutional movement against the old monarchy (Tohidi, 2016). Anti-American sentiments became ubiquitous after the coup in 1953, supported by the CIA and British Intelligence Service, which overthrew a democratically elected, secular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh who wanted to nationalise Iran's oil industry, a plan that was unacceptable to the imperial powers. Women's rights advocates have had to carefully navigate between distancing themselves from imperialist outsiders and fighting for the individual rights of women and for universal values of human rights and freedom of choice.
Under the Pahlavi Dynasty and during the famous White Revolution in 1963, spearheaded by Mohammad Reza Shah, Iranian women achieved significant victories including the right to vote and participate in Iranian politics. The introduction of the Family Protection Law was one of the most significant achievements during this period. The law addressed an often overlooked manifestation of oppression - domestic life. Women were protected in the legal system under this law - there were strict rules on polygamy, both husbands and wives were required to go to court for a divorce and the grounds for which were now similar for both; custody of children would go through family court and could be given to either parent (Keddie, 2000). Between 1971 and 1978, female enrollment in college increased to 79%, employed women with bachelor's degrees or higher went from 17,000 to 109,000; in 1978, 2 million women were in the workforce (Moghadam, 1995).
Although one of Reza Shah’s rapid modernization programmes’ main purpose was to integrate women into the public sphere, he also introduced the Unveiling Act in 1936 which forced women to unveil in public which resulted in a lot of women choosing to stay at home to avoid humiliation and confrontation (Molana et al., 2023). In the era of modernisation, women gained significant social visibility in the modern workspace along with some legal reforms, however, with centralisation and a brutal dictatorship on the rise, along with anti-westernization sentiments, women's autonomous associations were subjected to state control (Tohidi, 2016). Thus followed the Islamist Revolution in 1979 that changed the trajectory of women’s rights and activism in Iran.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 and Its Effects On Women’s Rights
In 1979, after mass demonstrations and revolution, Iran transformed from a monarchy to a theocratic state of the Islamic Republic under conservative, religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini whose political system was built around his, and other religious leaders’, interpretation of Islamic scripture. Shortly after the revolution, the state established a sharia-based rule, as opposed to the combination of secular and sharia law previously, and many of the laws and policies introduced during the Pahlavi Dynasty came under direct control of the ulema (clerics) who furthered gender discrimination (Tohidi, 2016). It is important to note that women were active participants in street demonstrations where they wore the veil in protest of Pahlavi’s Westernised governance - Iranian women also wanted social and political change.
Despite having initially supported the revolution, women in Iran soon found themselves being stripped of most of the rights they had gained over the last few decades. Khomeini had made his views on women clear - he did not believe women and men were equal, particularly in regards to employability, sexual expression and domestic responsibility (Hanna, 2020). The majority of the new leadership did not accept the principle of gender equality; Islamists and political elites particularly felt that Iranian culture was distorted through Westernisation and that women had lost their honor during the Pahlavi rule (Hoodfar and Sadr, 2010) The new regime reinstated men back to the previous, superior position in Iranian society where they regained their right to divorce, polygamy and more. Women’s roles became entirely privatised and reduced to the domestic sphere, mandatory veiling was imposed with harsh consequences for those who fail to abide. Controlling women's bodies quickly became the focal point of the new regime. Laws of pre-modern societies that viewed women as inferior and subhuman were reintroduced such as Hudud (punishments, such as stoning), Diyeh (blood money) and Qisas (retaliation). Gender apartheid was being woven into the fabric of Iranian society.
Modern Day Women’s Activism
Women’s activism in Iran did not end with the revolution, it is an enduring movement that has grown, transformed and is still in pursuit of equality and justice. The Green Movement of 2009 is a modern example of women’s activism. In 2009, citizens of Iran were set to vote for a president, who is considered to be the highest official in Iran's political structure, second to the Supreme Leader, in what would be known as the most controversial and contested presidential elections in the history of Iran. Moderate presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was expected to win as opposed to former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi (Afary & William Avery, 2025). At the end, both candidates claimed victory, however according to Iran’s Interior Ministry, Ahmadinejad had won 62.2% of the votes (Berman et al., 2009). Mousavi contested this and accused them of electoral fraud. Following this revelation, millions of Iranians marched through the streets chanting “Where is my vote?”, a chant which would become the defining slogan of the Green Movement.
Women were at the forefront of this movement, advocating for equality and for a separation of religion and state. A famous example of their activism is the “My Stealthy Freedom” movement started by exiled journalist Masih Alinejad on Facebook in April 2014 where she posted a photo of herself driving through an Iranian city without wearing a hijab. MSF was later developed into a Facebook page where women in Iran were encouraged to share their photos without the mandatory hijab; political awareness, activism and freedom of expression took a new shape in the digital era.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom): The Case of Jina Mahsa Amini
The most recent, and perhaps the most famous women’s rights movement in Iran is the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ or ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ in Kurdish, or ‘Zan, Zandegi, Azadi’ in Persian, movement. On September 13th, 2022, 22-year old Jina Mahsa Amini from Saqqez, Kurdistan arrived in Tehran and was detained by Iran’s Morality Police, also known as the Guidance Patrol, outside the metro station. She was accused of not properly complying with the mandatory veiling law. Mahsa was beaten inside the van and died three days later as a result of her injuries. Iranian authorities claimed her death was caused by a heart attack however hospital sources and her parents said she sustained a brain injury due to trauma to her head.
Mahsa’s death sparked outrage in Iran, and globally, and started the massive social movement. For 82 consecutive days, women took to the streets of 160 cities in Iran (HRAI, 2024), showcasing their uncovered hair, burning their headscarves and cutting their long hair. The cutting of one’s hair is a practice of mourning in many cultures, including that of Iran. It is an act where one withdraws from life to demand accountability and showcases rage and anger - cutting one’s hair in public becomes an act of resistance. This practice is also specific to the Kurdish ethnic minority in Iran who have been systematically targeted by the regime since the beginning of the revolution. Reporting on the movement has often failed to provide relative context, particularly regarding Mahsa’s Kurdish background. Mahsa’s Kurdish identity is a critical component of the movement as it highlights the political oppression and marginalisation of Kurds in Iran (Molana et al., 2023). Any reporting that is devoid of this context only contributes to their marginalization
Iranian women’s activism and resistance during this period was met with violent repercussions resulting in the death of at least 530 individuals at the hands of anti-riot police. The regime violently cracked down protests using lethal force. Women were shot in their eyes and genitals, and there were reports of sexual violence against those detained. A rather surprising demographic in this movement were schoolgirls. Female students from elementary schools to universities showed their support and schools became sites for civil disobedience. Students from multiple universities gathered and lit candles in memory of Mahsa (Knaus, 2024). Female students led multiple demonstrations and were consequently attacked by the regime. In November, 2022, schoolgirls were targeted by airborne poison attacks while at school and were rushed to the hospital. Symptoms experienced included nausea, respiratory issues, fatigues and even death. Over a thousand girls have been poisoned since in what has been named as “biological terror” (Tizhoosh, 2023).
As evidenced in this section, women in Iran have been actively fighting for equality for decades and have continued to speak out, protest and disrupt everyday life by any means, however, Western media outlets continue to exoticise and oversimplify Middle Eastern women’s oppression through the veil (Molana et al., 2023). Iranian feminists have critiqued the Western liberal feminist media portrayal of movements led by women in Iran which lacks socio-political context and feeds into the orientalist image of Middle Eastern women. In order to understand this form of orientalism, we must examine the broader frameworks at play through which Iranian women’s lived experiences and political realities are systematically interpreted, particularly the roles of intersectionality, white feminism, and white saviorism.
Intersectionality, White Feminism and White Saviorism
While originally coined to emphasize the connection between racism and sexism, and to describe in bias and violence against Black women, the term intersectionality has become widely used to understand how different social categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and disability intersect and shape how individuals are positioned within systems of power and inequality. As Crenshaw (2017) explains, “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things” (Crenshaw, 2017).
Intersectionality thus challenges the idea that all women share the same experience of gender by drawing attention to the specific struggles faced by those whose identities, such as race, class, religion, or sexuality, overlap. When intersectionality is overlooked within feminist discourse, it inevitably centres the experiences of white, Western, middle-class women, subsequently marginalizing those whose identities are simultaneously shaped by other axes of oppression. In other words, without intersectionality, feminism is predisposed to reproduce the very systems of inequality it seeks to dismantle. Such single-axis frameworks constitute a core characteristic of white feminism, an expression of “feminism” that treats the experiences and priorities of white women as representative of all women, while neglecting the realities of those facing intersecting forms of oppression and discrimination (Crenshaw, 1989). However, the absence of intersectionality is only one facet of white feminism. As Rafia Zakaria (2021) observes in her book Against White Feminism, it can also manifest in less overt ways, even when intersectionality is outwardly acknowledged: “A white feminist may be someone who earnestly salutes the precepts of ‘intersectionality’—the need for feminism to reflect structural inequalities drawn along the lines of race, faith, class, disability, etc., as well as gender—but fails to cede space to the feminists of colour who have been ignored, erased or excluded from the feminist movement” (Zakaria, 2021). Zakaria shows us that white feminism is not defined solely by what it excludes conceptually, but also by how it functions in practice.
Closely tied to this is the phenomenon of white saviorism, a term used to describe the ethnocentric and neo-colonial belief that white individuals are uniquely positioned to rescue or uplift non-white communities, often in ways that are paternalistic, condescending, self-serving, or that undermine the agency of those they claim to help (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.).
This ‘saviourist’ logic has consistently shaped Western feminist engagements with Muslim-majority societies, including Iran, where women are often portrayed as helpless victims in need of saving by the West. Western media coverage frequently frames Iranian women as uniformly oppressed and voiceless. Such narratives often rely on misinformation and selective portrayals of Iranian women’s lives, fixating on visible markers like the hijab, morality policing, and legal restrictions, while ignoring the broader political context, the diversity of these women’s lived experiences, and the long history of feminist struggle within the country. As we have seen in previous sections, Iranian women have long been leaders in social and political movements, both before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. This is not to say that gender apartheid is not a reality in Iran, as it remains a deeply pressing issue. However, what must be resisted is the way white feminism and white saviourism distort these struggles to centre Western voices and solutions, often silencing the very women they claim to support. Equally dangerous is the way imperial feminism co-opts the oppression of Middle Eastern women to justify and build public support for sanctions, military aggression, and illegal wars.
From Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Iran, imperial feminist language has historically been employed to legitimize or mask imperial and militaristic agendas. The supposed "liberation" of Middle Eastern women is often used as a rhetorical tool to justify imperial aggressions (Abu-Lughod, 2013) (Asbali, 2025). Most recently, this logic resurfaced in Western responses to the illegal Israeli and American use of force against Iran, where airstrikes that killed hundreds of civilians were sanitised as acts of liberation. In an interview with Iran International, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the attacks using his feigned concern for (Muslim) women’s rights; “They've impoverished you. They've given you misery. They've given you death. They've given you terror. They shoot down your women, leaving this brave, unbelievable woman, Mahsa Amini, to bleed on the sidewalk for not covering her hair. I mean, this is an outrageous radical fanatic regime, and the time has come to defang them” (Iran International, 2025). This statement has sparked widespread outrage due to its blatant hypocrisy. It is deeply ironic that Netanyahu, whose genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has resulted in the deaths of over 28,000 women and girls, now positions himself as a defender of Iranian women’s rights (UN Women, 2025). It clearly illustrates how imperial feminist rhetoric can be weaponized to conceal underlying imperial ambitions, turning struggles for gender justice into tools for justifying violence and imperial aggression.
Solidarity vs Saviourism
While we have critiqued Western portrayal of and involvement in feminist movements in Iran and their role in perpetuating harmful narratives on Middle Eastern women, that is not to say there is no room for feminists outside of Iran in supporting Iranian women in their fight for gender equality. In fact, to abandon Iranian women in their fight when the West has played an instrumental role in backing regimes that carry out violence against women, is unjust and puts the burden of resistance solely on Middle Eastern women. Solidarity and empathy are fundamental to our shared humanity. Choosing to seek out the stories of people from different parts of the world and supporting one another in the pursuit of justice is a powerful expression of what it means to be human. Genuine solidarity is built through active listening and respectful dialogue, without assumptions of superiority.
Mohanty’s (2003) famous work on decolonizing feminist solidarity spotlights the necessity of intersectionality, decolonisation and transnationalism in feminist solidarity. She rejects the notion of a universal sisterhood which attempts to universalise gendered experiences and fails to recognise the different axes of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste and nationality which shape women’s experiences. Instead, she calls for a reflective solidarity which demands a deconstruction and decolonisation of feminism, particularly white and imperial feminism. She argues that women from the global south are often victims of the politics of feminism which places them in the periphery of power structures, she argues that feminism cannot be contained within geographical boundaries, instead we must recognise “how women in different sociocultural and historical locations formulate their relation to feminism”. In her book Against White Feminism, Zakaria (2021) provides us with the first steps to deconstruct and decolonise feminism and to pave the way to such reflective solidarity. She suggests that the path toward decolonising feminism lies in dismantling white supremacy within it and making space for the voices and experiences that have long been silenced. Zakaria’s call for collective solidarity insists on valuing, documenting and voicing the lived realities of women historically excluded from feminist discourse and urges feminists to recover and validate their histories: “ To make their experience explicit, feminists of all kinds must work to develop their own genealogies, to look at the women in their lives and in their histories who have not been considered "feminist" because they do not mirror the projects and priorities of white women. This work has already been started by the many writers committed to telling the stories of women of color” (Zakaria, 2021). So let us continue this work by actively centring the voices and experiences of women whose realities have been sidelined by white feminist frameworks. In the case of Iran, this means refusing to frame women’s resistance through Western liberal ideals or co-opt their struggle and oppression to justify imperial violence and illegal wars. Instead we must value, document and voice the stories Iranian women tell about their own lives. It is critical that their experiences are not only heard but that they actually influence the content and course of the feminist movement.
Women in Iran continue to bravely resist oppression in every aspect of their life. As feminists working and living outside of Iran, it is critical that we keep the spotlight on the state which continues to respond brutally to the uprising. We must use our privilege to amplify the voices of protesters and their marginalized identities, including Kurdish Iranian women and girls (Molana et al., 2023). To assume ‘feminists’ in the West have any right to ‘liberate’ them is not only false, but an extension of Western imperialism. A feminism which is not intersectional and decolonial is not feminism in the first place.
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About the authors:
Basudha Guha Khasnobis is a feminist from India and holds a Master’s degree in Gender, Violence and Conflict. Her experiences range from working as a research assistant to volunteering with NGOs directed towards tackling gender-based violence. She has a passion for research and is a fierce advocate for decolonial feminism and building meaningful solidarity.
Eva Kolkman is a feminist from the Netherlands with a Master’s degree in International Development. She works with various NGOs combating femicide, gender-based violence, and gender inequality. Additionally, she volunteers in civil Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean Sea.
