In the winter of 2017, a young woman named Vida Movahed climbed atop a telecommunications box on a busy Tehran street, took off her headscarf and hung it on a stick to protest Iran’s mandatory hijab rules. At the time, it led me to the archives to study the first women’s protests in Iran after the revolution that toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi . In February and March of 1979, the atmosphere in Iran was jubilant and hopeful. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had just returned from exile, and a national referendum on the creation of an Islamic Republic was still months in the future. The interim government imposed new rules and regulations, but these seemed haphazard and malleable in that flickering moment of possibility when protest and debate could still alter the country’s trajectory.

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