Though it is hard to imagine today, many Iranians dressed like Westerners before the 1979 Islamic revolution. They weren’t barred from wearing shorts and t-shirts in their country’s desert heat, and women weren’t required to wear religious hair coverings. More than forty years after the revolution, the freedoms Iranians once enjoyed are a bittersweet memory, but have not been forgotten. Unfortunately for Iranian women today, government mandates mean that wearing religious covering is not a choice.

In retaliation against discriminatory theocratic laws, feminist activist Masih Alinejad started the My Stealthy Freedom movement in 2014, which encourages women to photograph themselves without their hair covered and to wear white hijabs on Wednesdays in solidarity with the movement. To Alinejad and fellow Iranian feminists, the hijab is a symbol of greater oppression than just mandated hair covering. Women aren’t fighting just to be allowed to remove their headscarves; they are protesting the slew of misogynistic laws that deny Iranian women agency over their lives. Married women cannot travel outside Iran without their husband’s written permission, and Iranian courts give women’s testimony half the weight of a man’s by law. A 2019 FIFA soccer event was the first sporting match since 1981 that women were permitted to attend as spectators, and the allowance was made only after Sahar Khodayari lit herself on fire in protest. These prejudicial laws are just the tip of the iceberg — Iranian women face discrimination at the hands of their regime in all aspects of their daily lives, big and small, and their protest comes at no trivial cost. Non-compliance with repressive religious laws often results in harassment by the Islamic morality police and is punishable by imprisonment.

Western solidarity is valuable to Iranian feminists’ cause but is something they rarely enjoy to the extent that their circumstances warrant it. The issues facing women in Iran are not easily reconciled with Western liberalism, which means they often go unaddressed or are outright opposed in these countries. Iranian activists for women’s rights have been criticized by left-wing politicians including Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), who in early 2020 shared a defamatory article containing misinformation about Alinejad and written by a conservative-funded think tank. The lack of support by prominent liberals for Iranian women, especially when juxtaposed with their resounding feminist narratives otherwise, is disappointing and a disservice to the advancement of women’s rights.

Alinejad acknowledges that Western liberals hesitate to get on board with Iranian feminism because they conflate support for the movement with Trumpian, prejudicial politics. In reality, the same rights that are rightfully championed to liberate Muslims in the West — freedom of speech, expression, and religion — are what Iranian women are fighting for, too. For them, these freedoms would invariably look different than what some imagine them to be for ethnic and religious minorities in the US and Europe, but that does not make them any less valid or necessary. The beliefs that Iranians should be free from repressive theocratic rule and that minorities elsewhere should be free to practice their faith openly can and should exist harmoniously because they are based on the same principle. Women in the U.S. and many Western countries enjoy the luxury of freedom of choice, but Iranian women are not so lucky. Indisputably, women in Iran deserve the same right to choose in all areas of their lives, and Westerners cannot reasonably call themselves feminists until they get on board with women’s rights everywhere.

To learn more about My Stealthy Freedom, visit their Facebook page and website.