This article focuses on the women’s rights and gender equity movements in Iran. It highlights the innovative, creative and tenacious strategies employed by women dissenters to effectively channel their grievances on gender subordination to the authorities through nonviolent campaigns. It also examines how the women’s rights movement in Iran has effectively expanded to other frontiers of civic action beyond its own vision of gender equality. Moreover, it cites the three elements essential to the success of Iranian women’s movement identified by nonviolent scholar Paul Ackerman—unity, planning and adoption of nonviolent discipline.

Shaazka Beyerle