March 8
Kateh Vafadari had spent years organizing in secret — a veteran socialist feminist whose networks had survived SAVAK’s surveillance, whose experience spanned the clandestine opposition to the Shah. On the morning of March 8, 1979, she put that experience to its ultimate test. Five weeks after Khomeini’s triumphant return, on International Women’s Day, Vafadari helped orchestrate what became the largest women’s action in Middle Eastern history: an estimated 50,000 to over 100,000 women gathered outside Prime Minister Bazargan’s office despite snowfall. Protests continued for six consecutive days beginning March 8, with ranks growing daily.1
Their slogans cut through the revolutionary rhetoric with a precision that no philosopher in Paris had managed. “Dar sobh-e azadi, azadi nadarim” — “In the dawn of freedom, we have no freedom.” And: “We didn’t have a revolution to go backwards.” And a third that anticipated global feminist theory by decades: “Freedom is neither Eastern nor Western, it is planetary!” — simultaneously rejecting Western cultural imperialism and Eastern cultural relativism, asserting a universal claim that academic theorists would not formulate for years.2
Pro-Khomeini forces attacked the women with knives, stones, and bullets. Their counter-slogan: “Ya roosari, ya toosari” — “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.”3
The women who marched that day were not naive. They had participated in the revolution — marched against the Shah, supported the strikes, risked SAVAK’s attention. They were protesting not against the revolution but for it. They had been promised freedom and they intended to collect.
One Week
The revolution’s first governing acts had already answered them. The timeline of that single week remains one of the most compressed rollbacks of women’s rights in modern history:4
March 3: Women banned from serving as judges.
March 4: Only men could petition for divorce.
March 7: Mandatory veiling decreed. Khomeini called unveiled women “naked.”
March 8: International Women’s Day — 50,000 to 100,000 women took to the streets.
March 9: Women banned from sports.
In the same period, the Family Protection Law — which had raised the minimum marriage age to eighteen and granted women rights to custody and divorce — was abrogated entirely. The minimum marriage age for girls reverted to nine.5
Imagine building a career as a judge, handing down verdicts, earning the respect of your peers — and being told on a Tuesday that women cannot serve as judges. Imagine fighting for divorce from an abusive husband — and learning on a Wednesday that only men can petition. Imagine being nineteen and unveiled your entire life — and being told on a Friday that the state considers your face a provocation. Now imagine that you helped make the revolution that did this to you.6
The protests were not symbolic. They were a fight for survival by women who understood, before anyone else, exactly what had happened.
The Organizers
Vafadari was not improvising. She drew on years of clandestine organizing against the Shah — networks that had survived SAVAK’s surveillance, experience that told her exactly what a rollback of rights looked like at its inception.7
Haideh Daragahi, a literature professor at Tehran University, physically climbed the university’s locked gates to join demonstrators — an image of physical defiance that matched the intellectual defiance of her decision to march.8
Hengameh Golestan documented everything with her camera. Her photographs of the protests — women in diverse clothing, some veiled by choice, some bareheaded, all united in refusal — remain among the most powerful visual records of the revolution’s early days.9
Kate Millett — American feminist author of Sexual Politics — arrived in Tehran on March 5, 1979, at the invitation of Iranian women activists. She brought recording equipment and her partner, filmmaker Sophie Keir. For six days she recorded women’s voices with a portable cassette recorder — the same technology that had distributed Shariati’s lectures and Khomeini’s sermons, now turned to documenting the revolution’s first dissent. Her reaction to the organizing: “My God! In thirteen days they have organized thousands of people. It took us years to do that.”10
Millett was declared indésirable by the revolutionary government and expelled on March 18. Her 1982 memoir, Going to Iran, documented both the Shah’s brutality and Khomeini’s emerging tyranny, which “sanctioned fanaticism” and mandated the chador as “a compulsory symbol of female submission.”11
Later scholars noted that Millett sometimes imposed American feminist frameworks that missed the specificity of Iranian women’s organizing — she advised one demonstrator to “ignore men,” not understanding that organizing alongside men actually protected women from being branded counterrevolutionary. Her frameworks may have been imperfect. Her fundamental reading of the revolution’s trajectory was correct.12
Beauvoir vs. Foucault
The gender split among Western intellectuals in the spring of 1979 is one of the most revealing patterns in the revolution’s history.
Simone de Beauvoir responded immediately. From Paris, she founded the Comité International du Droit des Femmes — the International Committee for Women’s Rights — and sent a delegation to Tehran. On March 22, 1979, she delivered a speech that challenged four decades of revolutionary politics: “Until now all revolutions have demanded that women sacrifice their demands for the success of action led essentially and exclusively by men. I associate myself with Kate Millett’s wish: that this revolution be the exception.”13
Her warning was precise: “The new regime will itself be nothing but a tyranny if it does not take into account their desires and respect their rights.”14
This placed her in direct tension with Jean-Paul Sartre — who by 1978 was seventy-three, nearly completely blind, and still sympathetic to the revolution’s anti-imperialist dimension — and constituted a sharp rebuke to Michel Foucault, who had celebrated “political spirituality” without asking what that spirituality meant for the half of the population it would be imposed upon. French-language scholarship notes the contrast explicitly: “Revolutionary Islamic action seduced intellectuals like Sartre or Foucault… whereas Simone de Beauvoir was able to unveil the dark and strongly conservative side of the Iranian revolution by focusing on the question of women.”15
Foucault, who had told readers that there would “not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference,” said nothing about March 8. Nothing about the veiling decree. Nothing about the women attacked for refusing to cover. His silence on the women’s protests was a continuation of his dismissal of Atoussa H. — the anonymous Iranian woman who had warned him three months earlier that “the Western liberal left needs to know that Islamic law can become a dead weight on societies hungering for change.”16
The pattern was structural, not personal. Male intellectuals could treat the revolution as an abstraction — “a philosophical experiment in ‘political spirituality’” — because its immediate material consequences did not touch them. Women recognized those consequences because the consequences arrived at their doors first. As Iranian-French sociologist Chahla Chafiq identified: “The Left still considered the number-one enemy not to be Khomeini but the West!” and “none of these groups were attentive to the place of women and feminism, because feminism for us meant Western feminism.”17
The anti-imperialist framework made any critique of the revolution’s internal dynamics appear as collaboration with Western power. To say “this revolution is oppressing women” sounded, within that framework, like “this revolution is insufficiently Western.” The trap was nearly perfect. And the women caught in it were the ones who couldn’t afford to stay silent.18
Forty-Seven Years
In 2022, after the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in morality police custody, Iranian women returned to the same streets. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” — Jin, Jiyan, Azadî — came from Kurdish women’s movements. The protests were driven by Generation Z and millennials, organized on TikTok and Instagram, staged in part on the same Enghelab (Revolution) Street where the March 8, 1979 demonstrators had marched.19
These women needed no Western intellectual’s validation. They asked for none. They had forty-three years of lived experience with exactly the system that Atoussa H. had warned about, that Beauvoir had protested, that Millett had documented — and that Foucault had celebrated.
In 2023, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom was awarded to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in memory of Mahsa Amini — a belated acknowledgment that Beauvoir’s 1979 analysis had been right all along.20
The revolution’s first victims were its most accurate analysts. Forty-seven years later, the question is not whether they were right. The question is what it means that we keep rediscovering what they already knew — and that the women who see it first are still waiting to be heard.
This article is part of The Professors and the Prophet. For the full Foucault story, see Political Spirituality. For the revolution’s cultural overture, see Ten Nights.
Footnotes
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March 8 protests from multiple contemporary accounts; scale from Duke University’s description. ↩
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Slogans from protest recordings and contemporary reporting; “planetary” formulation from scholarly analysis. ↩
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Counter-protesters from contemporary accounts. ↩
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Gender rollback timeline from post-revolutionary government decrees. ↩
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Family Protection Law abrogation from legal records; marriage age reversion from Islamic Republic civil code. ↩
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Perspective-taking passage by the author. ↩
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Vafadari’s role from women’s movement records and scholarly accounts. ↩
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Daragahi from contemporary accounts and Iranian women’s movement scholarship. ↩
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Golestan’s photography from visual archives of the revolution. ↩
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Millett’s arrival and quote from her memoir Going to Iran (1982). ↩
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Millett’s expulsion and memoir excerpts from Going to Iran. ↩
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Critique of Millett’s approach from Mottahedeh, Whisper Tapes (Stanford, 2019). ↩
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Beauvoir’s CIDF and speech from International Committee records. ↩
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Beauvoir’s warning from her March 22, 1979 speech. ↩
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Sartre’s condition from biographical sources; French scholarship from academic analysis of the intellectual response. ↩
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Foucault’s gender quote from his Iran articles; Atoussa H. from Le Nouvel Observateur, November 1978. ↩
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Chafiq analysis from her published scholarship. ↩
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Anti-imperialist framework trap from multiple scholarly assessments. ↩
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Woman, Life, Freedom movement from 2022 reporting; Jin, Jiyan, Azadî from Kurdish women’s movements. ↩
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2023 Simone de Beauvoir Prize from award records. ↩