page_title: Women in Iran
section_title: Women's clothing
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Iran / Women's clothing
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Intérieur d'une tente Kachkaï
context_page_description: The experience of Women in Iran has fluctuated dramatically throughout history. The history, contributions, aspects, and roles of women in Iran have been many and varied. Historically, the traditional view of the role of a woman was that a woman would be confined to the home where she would manage a household and raise children. During the Pahlavi era, there was a drastic change towards the segregation of women: ban of the veil, right to vote, right to education, equal salaries for men and women, and the right to hold public office. Women were active participants in the Islamic Revolution. Women are not equal under Iran's constitution, adopted after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which mandates legal code adhering to Sharia law. Women under law are treated as half a man; men inherit twice what a woman would, and compensation for the death of a woman is half of a man's. Iranian law still favors men, but women are allowed to drive, hold public office, and attend university. Not wearing a veil in public can be punished by law with up to 10 years of prison; when in public, all hair and skin except the face and hand must be covered.
context_section_description: For many centuries, since ancient pre-Islamic times, female headscarf was a normative dress code in the Greater Iran. First veils in region are historically attested in ancient Mesopotamia as a complementary garment, but later it became exclusionary and privileging in Assyria, even regulated by social law. Veil was a status symbol enjoyed by upper-class and royal women, while law prohibited peasant women, slaves and prostitutes from wearing the veil, and violators were punished. After ancient Iranians conquered Assyrian Nineveh in 612 BC and Chaldean Babylon in 539 BC, their ruling elite has adopted those Mesopotamian customs. During the reign of ancient Iranian dynasties, veil was first exclusive to the wealthy, but gradually the practice spread and it became standard for modesty. Later, after the Muslim Arabs conquered Sassanid Iran, early Muslims adopted veiling as a result of their exposure to the strong Iranian cultural influence.
  This general situation did change somewhat in the Middle Ages after arrival of the Turkic nomadic tribes from Central Asia, whose women didn't wear headscarves. However, after the Safavid centralization in the 16th century, the headscarf became defined as the standard head dress for the women in urban areas all around the Iranian Empire. Exceptions to this standard were seen only in the villages and among the nomads, so women without a headscarf could be found only among rural people and nomadic tribes (like Qashqai). Veiling of faces, that is, covering the hair and the whole face was very rare among the Iranians and was mostly restricted to the Arabs (niqab, battula and boushiya) and the Afghans (burqa). Later, during the economic crisis in the late 19th century under the Qajar dynasty, the poorest urban women could not afford headscarves due to the high price of textile and its scarcity. Owing to the aforementioned historical circumstances, the covering of hair has always been the norm in Iranian dress, and removing it was considered impolite, or even an insult. In the early 20th century, the Iranians associated not wearing it as something rural, nomadic, poor and non-Iranian.
  Attempts at changing dress norms (and perspectives toward it) occurred in mid-1930s when pro-Western autocratic ruler Reza Shah issued a decree banning all veils. Many types of male traditional clothing were also banned under the pretext that "Westerners now wouldn’t laugh at us". Western historians state that this would have been a progressive step if women had indeed chosen to do it themselves, but instead this ban humiliated and alienated many Iranian women, since its effect was comparable to the hypothetical situation in which the European women had suddenly been ordered to go out topless into the street. To enforce this decree, the police was ordered to physically remove the veil off of any woman who wore it in public. Women were beaten, their headscarves and chadors torn off, and their homes forcibly searched. Until Reza Shah's abdication in 1941, many women simply chose not leave their houses in order to avoid such embarrassing confrontations, and a few even committed suicide.
  A far larger escalation of violence occurred in the summer of 1935 when Reza Shah ordered all men to wear European-style bowler hat, which was Western par excellence. This provoked massive non-violent demonstrations in July in the city of Mashhad, which were brutally suppressed by the army, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 100 to 5,000 people (including women and children). Historians often point that Reza Shah's ban on veiling and his policies (known as kashf-e hijab campaign) are unseen even in Atatürk's Turkey, and some scholars state that it is very difficult to imagine that even Hitler's or Stalin's regime would do something similar. This decision by Reza Shah was criticized even by British consul in Tehran. Later, official measures relaxed slightly under next ruler and wearing of the headscarf or chador was no longer an offence, but for his regime it became a significant hindrance to climbing the social ladder as it was co
caption: Qashqai nomads are among few ethnic groups where women generally don't wear headscarves.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "200", "Image YResolution": "200", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2005:03:19 10:24:15", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9907", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1319", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "940"}