'Woman, Life, Freedom' legacy endures as Iran's regime persists

On September 16, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Jina Mahsa Amini collapsed in a Tehran hospital and died. She had traveled from her home in northwestern Iran to the capital, where she was stopped by the city's morality police. They said she was not wearing her headscarf properly. She was arrested. Within three days, she was dead.

For Iranian women, police violence over dress codes was routine. But Amini's death ignited something different—a wave of rage that moved across the country under a single phrase: "Woman, Life, Freedom." Protesters filled the streets for months. The regime responded with force, and the demonstrations were eventually crushed. Yet four years later, the movement's imprint remains visible across Iranian society in ways both subtle and defiant.

Pouran Nazemi, a writer, poet, and women's rights activist who has been arrested multiple times for her work, describes the uprising as the most significant social and cultural shift Iran has experienced in decades. From the beginning, the protesters had concrete demands: abolish the mandatory hijab and end state violence against the population. Those goals were not achieved. The regime endured. But something in the country's consciousness shifted. "The institutions still use physical violence and occasional arrests against us," Nazemi said. "But something fundamental has changed."

The Iranian government has not abandoned its enforcement of hijab rules. In fact, parts of the regime are now pushing for a new law that would impose harsher penalties on women who violate the hijab mandate in public. The bill has languished in parliamentary debate for years, with various state institutions clashing over its terms. In early September, lawmakers called on the Parliamentary Speaker to move the legislation forward to the president for signature. One official characterized women's uncovered hair as a "deep wound in the body of society."

Yet the lived reality for young Iranian women has shifted in ways that seemed impossible before 2022. A 17-year-old student told Deutsche Welle that she does not think twice about going out without a hijab. Like many her age, she posts photos and videos on social media showing herself in colorful skirts and summer clothes. Her mother, too, has stopped wearing a headscarf regularly, though she carries one as a precaution. This degree of everyday freedom would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It was only after the 2022 protests that large numbers of women began openly defying the government's dress code and making their own choices about coverage.

The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement did not emerge from nowhere. Mansoureh Shojaee, a women's rights activist and writer, points to an earlier chapter in Iran's long history of female resistance. In 2006, Shojaee and other activists launched the "One Million Signatures" campaign, a petition drive aimed at changing discriminatory laws affecting women. Activists went door to door, into universities and neighborhoods, holding workshops and organizing cultural events. They spoke about divorce, custody, inheritance, court testimony, and polygamy. The campaign became a model for feminist organizing in Iran, even though it never reached its goal of a million signatures.

From the start, the regime met this activism with arrests, police summons, and court proceedings. Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and human rights advocate who became Iran's first Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003, ran the Defenders of Human Rights Center until authorities shut it down. Her deputy, Narges Mohammadi, was arrested repeatedly and later won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize. Shojaee herself fled Iran in 2011 and now lives in the Netherlands, as have many other dissidents forced into exile.

Shojaee does not view "Woman, Life, Freedom" as a sudden break from the past, but as one chapter in a much longer story of resistance. The earlier campaign did not achieve its legislative goals, yet it changed how Iranians talked about women's legal and social standing. In that sense, the 2022 uprising built on foundations laid years before. The movement persists not because it won, but because the women driving it have learned that their power lies not in a single victory, but in the refusal to stop.