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Every March 8th, the global discourse on feminism undergoes a predictable bifurcation: Western corporations engage in “pink-washing,” while global institutions issue platitudes about progress. Yet, in 2026, as reports of suspected chemical attacks on schoolgirls in cities like Qom and Borujerd continue to surface, the reality of International Women’s Day is stripped of its celebratory veneer. For the 150 schoolgirls recently targeted, feminism is no longer a theoretical pursuit of “glass ceilings”; it has become a desperate battle for the right to breathe within a classroom. To understand why these girls are now the primary targets of a paranoid state, we must look beyond the immediate headlines and analyze the three-way collision of feminist history, Iranian theocracy, and the long, destabilizing shadow of American intervention.
The lineage of International Women’s Day itself is rooted in radical defiance rather than institutional grace. It began not as a UN mandate, but as a 1908 socialist uprising in New York City, where 15,000 women marched for shorter hours and better pay—a “First Wave” focused on de jure legal and labor rights. This momentum eventually gave way to the Second Wave’s focus on bodily autonomy and the Third and Fourth Waves’ emphasis on intersectionality and digital mobilization. However, while the West moved through these phases, Iran’s feminist trajectory was violently derailed. The 1953 CIA-backed coup against the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh did more than just secure oil interests; it hollowed out the secular, liberal middle class that would have been the natural custodian of Iranian feminism. By installing an autocratic Shah, the US inadvertently turned the mosque into the only viable site of political resistance, ensuring that the 1979 Revolution would be draped in a theocratic banner that viewed female autonomy as “Gharbzadegi”—a “Westoxification” to be purged.
Today, the targeting of schoolgirls represents a strategic evolution in the Islamic Republic’s response to the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. These girls are the demographic heirs to the Fourth Wave, utilizing digital connectivity to reject the state’s “patriarchal bargain.” However, their vulnerability is compounded by the US’s “Maximum Pressure” campaign. Since 2018, the imposition of over 1,600 individual sanctions has led to a 40% inflation rate in essential medical supplies and a 15% drop in total national welfare. This economic strangulation has not “liberated” women; it has fortified the regime’s hardliners. By framing the Iranian woman’s body as a site of geopolitical leverage, Washington has inadvertently validated the regime’s paranoia, allowing it to paint every schoolgirl seeking an education as a “soft war” agent of a foreign power.
The data is damning: while the US justifies sanctions in the name of human rights, the resulting poverty disproportionately forces girls out of schools and into early marriages as a survival mechanism. Iranian women are “first in line” for a feminism they helped reinvent, yet they are being met with medieval tactics because the international community treats them as pawns in a nuclear standoff. If India and the broader Global South are to offer a meaningful response, it must be one that demands accountability for the Iranian regime while simultaneously rejecting the cynical sanctions that isolate the very activists we claim to support. On this International Women’s Day, the history of feminism is not a linear path of progress; it is a cautionary tale of how the noble pursuit of equality is sabotaged when the hammer of a paranoid theocracy meets the anvil of a failed Western foreign policy.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.