"One Million Signatures" Campaign: Demanding an End to Discriminatory Laws Against Women in Iran

Read more about the history of the campaign

Iranian women’s rights activists are fighting gender apartheid through the “One Million Signatures” campaign, which aims to collect one million signatures to demand an end to discriminatory laws against women. At present, men have the sole right to divorce and except in special cases, the right to custody of children. One man’s testimony equals that of two women. And certain positions, such as that of a judge, are closed to women. The campaign is a continuation of Iranian women’s century-long struggle for gender equality.

by Mahnaz Afkhami, former Minister of Women in Iran before 1979 and president of Women's Learning Partnership

The images from Iran in the last two weeks have stunned the world: hundreds of thousands of women and men marching peacefully, first in support of reformist candidates and later protesting the government's version of the results. Women played a prominent role at every level in this movement; in fact what unfolded in Iran would not have been possible without them. It is their quiet and thoughtful community organization, constituency building, message development, and pioneering use of the internet in recent years that accounts for the scope of the protest in Iran. Their grassroots mobilization has showed that more lies at the heart of democratization than burning tires and shouting slogans, and that a democracy requires more than ballot boxes and purple-inked fingers. And that accomplishment will prove consequential not only for Iran's future but also for the future of the whole Middle East.

As a student of the women's movement in my native land for nearly four decades and an intimate observer of their recent struggles, I can say with confidence that women's leading role in these events has been no accident. Iranian women began fighting for their rights over a century ago, at the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and have not stopped since. In the 1930s and 40s they formed their first effective associations. In the 1960s they struggled and succeeded in getting the right to vote and be elected and once in parliament they were able to replace archaic family laws with new progressive ones. In 1979, they joined the nation's drive for political freedom, but this time they did not get what they had fought for. The revolution swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power and in less than a month after his triumph, before there was a constitution or a government, the ayatollah annulled the new family law and decreed obligatory veiling and gender apartheid.