Iranian Women Shed Head Coverings as War’s Toll Distracts Authorities

President Trump’s war on Iran, while failing to spark the popular revolution he had hoped for, seems to have provided Iranian women with more freedom to dress and appear in public as they choose.Western news organizations enjoying rare access to the country in recent weeks report seeing large numbers of women walking through the streets and bazaars in modern dress and with heads uncovered, especially in Tehran but also in smaller cities and towns.“Women move through the city in sleeveless tops and short-sleeved dresses, loose trousers, and fitted jeans. Some wear head scarves by choice. Many do not. Cafes are busy, traffic crawls,” says a June 30 report from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which relies on anonymous informants and citizen journalists for its coverage from inside the country“No one appears to be watching or really paying much attention to what is going on,” continued the American government-financed news outlet, which quoted an unidentified woman in her late 30s saying, “I haven’t seen any hijab patrols in a very long time. Women dress as they like.”It was a very different story in September 2022 when a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died of injuries sustained at the hands of the nation’s notorious religious morality police for not properly wearing a hijab.The killing prompted months of protests under the banner “woman, life, freedom” that were eventually crushed as authorities killed more than 500 persons and arrested more than 22,000 others, according to a Stimson Center report.Despite the crackdown, the protests emboldened a growing number of women to throw off their head coverings, as police hesitated to conduct mass arrests for fear of sparking another uprising. “There are just too many of them,” one journalist told the think tank.Runaway inflation and economic collapse were the main drivers of the most recent protests in December and early this year, which were put down with the deaths of as many as 36,500 persons, according to leaked government documents obtained by Iran International, an independent news outlet.However, that uprising left the government even more reluctant to risk fresh unrest by strictly enforcing the nation’s hijab rules, and the trend accelerated with the February 28 start of the current war, which left the government facing a deep economic crisis.The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose reporters were allowed to visit Iran last year and again in recent weeks, remarked in a June 20 article on the growing freedom enjoyed by Iranian women since the start of the war.“On a CBC News trip to Tehran in May 2025, journalists saw plenty of women continuing to defy the ban but not in the numbers they are today and not in as many cities. More women can also be seen driving scooters or vespas, a rarity until now,” wrote the CBC reporter, Margaret Evans.Since the war began, the religious police and other authorities “don’t have time to care about women who wear the hijab,” one scarfless young woman told the news outlet. “They let us go free so we won’t protest,” said another. “They don’t want people to go to the street.”Mansoureh Shojaee, a women’s rights activist and author based in Western Europe, told RFE/RL that the new freedom is real, at least for now, but warned that there is no guarantee it will survive. “The Iranian government was forced to accept what women demanded regarding the hijab,” she said. “The violence and crackdown that existed before — it is not happening anymore. But that does not mean the law has changed.”Sana, a university student in the north-central city of Karaj, had a more hopeful view. “The road to full freedom may be short, or it may take many years,” she told RFE/RL. “But once a society decides to change, change becomes inevitable.”

Iranian Women Shed Head Coverings as War’s Toll Distracts Authorities

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