Cartoon by Ahmad Barakizadeh

My Story of Forced Hijab in Iran

By Mansoureh Hosseini Yeganeh

IranWire: At the time when I was born, the veil was not yet compulsory in Iran. However, I was raised in a religious and traditional family that observed hijab even before the 1979 revolution.

Until my teenage years, I never saw a woman without a headscarf, except during women’s meetings or gatherings with the immediate family. I thought the world had always been like this and that all women dressed in dark colours, kept colours and beauty behind closed doors, away from male strangers.

In the society in which I reached womanhood, my body was never appreciated, and I was always ashamed of exposing my body. Now that I have distanced myself from that society for many years and I no longer wear hijab, I sometimes feel ashamed of my body and I ask myself, “Is it really possible to wear this dress without feeling shame and guilt?”

This is a narrative and a message from a land in which those who were born some 40 years ago never saw women in the streets dressed in clothes they freely chose to wear. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that women in Iran have never been seen as liberated.

Women: The First Victims

The last thing the revolutionaries of February 1979 thought about was the issue of women's clothing after the establishment of a religious government.

During the reign of the first Pahlavi monarch, women were at one stage forcefully compelled to remove their hijab, though later, the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, never involved himself with the hijab issue. At the time, Iran was going through a period when everyone in society dressed in whatever fashion they choose, and women didn’t imagine they would become the first victims of a theocracy that emerged with the advent of the Islamic Republic.

Many unveiled women attended the demonstrations and gatherings against Reza Pahlavi. And some stories even suggest that the Radio and Television’s female employees who wanted to participate in these gatherings went to hairdressers beforehand to look well-groomed at these meetings. But gradually, appearing without hijab became very rare and then stopped altogether.

Women were instead advised to "temporarily" wear some form of head covering to engage in a show of unity. Later, men and women took part in separate marches. 

At that time, no one forced women to wear hijab! Some women thought that displaying a unified appearance on a temporary basis might help attain the goals of the demonstrators much faster.

And when the newspapers published photos of women of the royal family in swimsuits on the seaside, the same women who did not believe in hijab but were wearing it to achieve their political goals quickly hid their family photo albums, fearing that the pictures might fall into the hands of the revolutionaries. Little by little, it become evident that hijab was no longer just a piece of cloth that would be worn temporarily and taken off at will >>>