Twenty years after the Iranian Revolution ended on 11 February 1979. Between 1977 and 1979, a number of non-violent civil resistance protests were unleashed, which contributed to the fall of the dictatorship of Monarch Pahlavi. But the Islamic Revolution has not been the first set of non-violent actions by Iranian citizens. Two of the first were the Tobacco Protests (1891-1892) and the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911). In both cases, the anti-smoking boycott, the bazaar strikes and the judgments of mosques are non-violent civil resistance techniques used by the Iranian people. In the case of the Tobacco Protests, citizens fought against the tobacco monopoly that the Qajar Dynasty intended to deliver to the British Empire, to create the first parliament elected in the Constitutional Revolution. Having said that, it is very difficult to know through the books the participation of Iranian women in history. We know that there they were fighting with their peers in the street or in the private space. But it is almost impossible to find reports that appear as active subjects.

It is not the only time that Iranian women have suffered invisibility in the country’s history, but it is a phenomenon that has been reproduced and systematized throughout the world. This invisibility promotes the western mainstream imaginary of Iranian women. Iranian women are passive subjects in this imaginary who have systematically lost their rights since 1979. Without taking into account, for example, the active role of the feminist movement in the country, with more than a century of history and continuity in the diaspora. One of the main struggles of Iranian feminism is the Yek Milyun Emzego-ye Laghv-e Qavnin-e Tab’iz Miz movement. Created in 2006, its main objective is to reform the laws that make women second-class citizens. Women from different backgrounds come together: Islamic, secular and pragmatic feminists. The movements generated in the diaspora My Stealthy Freedom and White Wednesdays are some more recent examples. Knowledge of feminist actions in Iran and in the diaspora helps us to dismantle the status of a woman’s taxpayer.