What Iranian Women Want From Regime Change

I left Iran four years ago. What stayed behind were not only people and places, but a version of myself that had learned— slowly and carefully—to survive inside a system designed to oppress her. It was a type of oppression that lived in rules, glances, paperwork, and fear that had been normalised enough to feel invisible. 

 For Iranian women, politics is not something that appears only during elections or moments of national crisis. It is embedded in daily life, shaping choices so small they barely register as decisions until you leave the country and realise how much energy they once required. Even now, living in the United States, I sometimes feel its residue: a reflexive anxiety when I see a police car, a hesitation over whether my outfit might be considered “inappropriate,” a pause before I want to give my boyfriend a kiss in public. 

When Iranian women are asked what they want from regime change, the question is often framed as if the answer should be simple: less enforcement, or a loosening of restrictions. But this framing misunderstands the problem entirely. What Iranian women are confronting is not excessive regulation—it is the very core of a political system whose legitimacy has depended, since its inception, on their legal and bodily subordination. 

 This was not always the case. Before the Islamic Revolution, Iran had already undergone a significant transformation in women’s legal and public status. Under Mohammad Reza Shah, women gained the right to vote and to hold public office. The Family Protection Law expanded women’s rights in marriage, divorce, and child custody, limiting practices long justified as tradition. These reforms were not perfect by today’s standards, but they represented the first steps toward equity. 

 Farah Pahlavi, Iran’s former queen, played a visible role in embedding that social recognition into public life. Through her support of universities, cultural institutions, and national projects, she helped normalise the presence of educated, professional women in Iran’s civic imagination. This period is often remembered nostalgically, but it also serves as historical evidence. Iranian women recall, collectively, that their present condition is not cultural destiny. It is the result of a deliberate reversal. 

 The 1979 revolution promised dignity and justice. For women, the betrayal was immediate. Mandatory hijab was imposed within months. The Family Protection Law was repealed. Civil law was replaced by Sharia-based statutes, and the state reorganised itself around a hierarchy in which women’s autonomy became conditional. The speed of these changes made one thing clear: control over women was not just another byproduct of the new Islamic system—it was one of its pillars. 

The Islamic Republic maintains this control through two interlocking mechanisms. The first is legal control: a body of laws that systematically strip women of autonomy. The second is enforcement and social discipline: a system of surveillance, punishment, and public humiliation designed to ensure obedience. Together, these mechanisms restrict nearly every form of freedom of expression or choice for women. 

 I was eighteen years old, two months into my undergraduate studies in one of the most prestigious engineering programmes in the country. Admission was highly selective, and the state itself referred to students like us as “elite minds“. One afternoon, while walking with a friend near Enghelab (Revolution) Square to get coffee, I was stopped by the morality police. I was wearing a manteau and pants, and a headscarf—but my coat fell a few inches above my knees. I did not see the van until it was too late. I was pulled off the street and thrown into the back with other young women like me. 

 During the drive, a hijab-clad officer lectured us about how we were going to hell for dressing like that, telling us that our arrest was an act of mercy. At the detention centre, I was held for hours in a room with women arrested for sex work, drug charges, and theft. One woman repeatedly begged the guards for drugs. We were all placed together deliberately, our differences erased. The message was clear: no matter who you are, how educated you are, you can be reduced instantly if you don’t abide. 

 I hid my phone and recorded what I could—the tone, the insults— with the intention of sending it to the BBC. I remember clearly that this was the moment I decided I would leave my country for good. I was released after signing a statement promising it would not happen again. For Mahsa Jina Amini, a similar arrest ended in her death at the hands of the morality police. 

 There are countless stories like this, many of which remain untold. Beyond enforcement, the law itself codifies women’s subordination. A woman has minimal ownership over her own decisions. Women cannot obtain a passport without the permission of their father or husband. Marriage does not expand a woman’s rights; it transfers legal authority over her to her husband. A husband can legally prevent his wife from working if he claims her employment conflicts with family interests. Divorce is structurally unequal: men can initiate it unilaterally, while women must prove specific harms—such as abuse, abandonment, or addiction—often before courts predisposed to doubt them. 

 Sexual assault is often unreportable. Survivors risk charges of adultery or “immorality” if they come forward. There is no survivor-centered legal framework; male authority is presumed. In documented cases, women who killed men while defending themselves against rape were executed by the state. 

 Under the Islamic Republic’s penal code, a woman’s life has historically been valued at half that of a man’s, reflected in diya (blood money) being set at half. Fathers who kill their daughters in so-called “honour” cases are exempt from the death penalty and face minimal prison sentences. Abortion is illegal except in narrowly defined circumstances and requires bureaucratic approval. Legal guardianship of children ultimately belongs to fathers, regardless of who performs the labour of care. 

Beyond statutes lies a quieter damage. Living under a system like this requires constant self-monitoring. Iranian women learn to divide themselves as a survival strategy—to present one version in public and another in private. Emotional safety does not exist in public life. Every interaction requires calculation: what to say, how to stand, how loud to laugh, how visible to be. 

 And yet, Iranian women persist. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic attempted to exclude women from universities altogether. That effort failed. Today, Iranian women are among the most educated populations in the region—a fact the state cites as evidence of progress, but which, more accurately, reflects Iranian women’s persistence in the face of systemic denial. 

 This is why the language of reform no longer resonates with Iranian women. Reform assumes a legitimate system to begin with, it’s not applicable when the core of the system is the problem. The problem Iranian women face is not a set of policies that can be adjusted, but a theocratic system structured to oppress them. 

 For Iranian women, regime change is the logical outcome of decades of systematic humiliation under a system built on limitation. Iranian women have long outgrown it. They are educated, politicised, and uncontainable—and now the world is beginning to hear them. What they are demanding is a state governed by civil law, not religious doctrine: one in which citizenship is not mediated through gender, belief is not enforced through coercion, and institutions recognise women as full legal subjects, no lesser than men. 
 

What Iranian women want is a secular state. That demand has already been well articulated. The Islamic Republic stands in the way. 

 Forouzan was born and raised in Tehran before moving to the United States four years ago. She is a Project Leader at BCG, a Kellogg MBA, and an advocate for women’s rights 

(Views expressed are personal)