Announcement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Iran On the Occasion of March 8, International Women’s Day

We sincerely congratulate March 8, International Women’s Day, to all freedom-loving and equality-seeking women and men, to workers and laborers, to brave girls and steadfast mothers, to activists of social movements, and to all those who strive for a world free of discrimination, exploitation, and oppression.

On this day, first and foremost, we honor the memory of the sacrifices of women who, throughout the years of the Islamic Republic’s rule, fought for their violated human rights and lost their lives; women who stood against humiliation and violence in the streets, universities, factories, neighborhoods, prisons, and places of exile, and through their resilience became a guiding light for future generations. We salute all the girls and women who, in waves of repression, in protests and uprisings, and in daily resistance, did not fear torture, bullets, or prison. March 8 is, for us, a day to renew our commitment to them — to those who stood so that women could be human, free, and equal.

If March 8, from the very beginning, bore the mark of the rebellious spirit of working women, it is because the oppression of women is intertwined with class oppression. The working women who rose up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the textile factories of New York and Chicago took to the streets not only for women’s rights but for the dignity of all the oppressed. The advancement of the women’s liberation movement cannot be guaranteed without the active participation of millions of working and toiling women. The interests of working women and men lie in organizing within mass and class-based organizations and within their political party, standing shoulder to shoulder to fight against the various forms of oppression inherent in the capitalist system. No movement that ignores this connection will achieve real liberation for women. The struggle for equality between women and men is inseparable from the struggle against poverty, unemployment, job insecurity, repression of organization, and the commodification of human beings. True equality can only be achieved by transforming the relations that reproduce discrimination and turn women’s bodies and lives into arenas of control.

This year’s March 8 arrives under conditions in which Iranian society is breathing under the simultaneous pressure of political crisis, economic crisis, intensified repression, and a devastating war and insecurity. The continuation of this crisis has pushed the lives of millions to the brink of collapse, and the response of the ruling power has been neither improving livelihoods, nor ensuring political freedoms, nor guaranteeing human security, but rather securitizing society and intensifying state violence. The killing and repression of protests, including the crimes committed in last January, have shown that the Islamic Republic governs over a sea of public anger. In such a situation, women once again stand on the front lines of both suffering and resistance, both the first victims of discrimination and violence and the pioneers of change.

Iran under the rule of the Islamic Republic, as a clear example of a religious government defending a capitalist class system, from the very beginning placed the denial of women’s human rights as one of the foundations of its authority. Khomeini’s first political expression in 1963 was an attack on women and the basic rights they had gained at that time; a stance he emphasized and implemented in the early days after coming to power in March 1979. From that time on, the Islamic regime deployed the twin arms of religion and patriarchy against women and legalized the most brutal forms of violence and humiliation against them.

The imposition of compulsory hijab as a symbol of women’s subjugation, child marriage, the promotion of prostitution under the name of temporary marriage, legal leniency toward the killing of women under so-called honor pretexts, depriving women of child custody rights, denying women the right to be judges, restricting women’s right to travel without male permission, and institutionalizing blatant inequalities in testimony, blood money, and inheritance “where the rights of two women are defined as equal to one man” are only part of the Islamic Republic’s anti-women laws. These are the pillars of a system; a system that, to control society, has turned women’s bodies into its domain of power.

Yet, as vast as the brutality and repression of the Islamic Republic against women has been, the resistance and struggle of women over the past 47 years in society and in the workplace has continued without interruption; a resistance whose peak was the revolutionary movement of “Woman, Life, Freedom.” This movement showed that women are not “weak” or “second-class,” but capable, aware, courageous, and selfless, and most deserving of building a world free of war and bloodshed, and filled with peace, humanity, and compassion.

It was no coincidence that headscarves were burned, that women stood in the front lines of demonstrations, that instead of the sermons of religious clerics, revolutionary songs and poems were recited at graves, and that hopeful statements against the forces of discrimination and exploitation “religion, patriarchy, and capitalism” were written and distributed. “Woman, Life, Freedom” was not only a protest against compulsory hijab; it was a revolt against an entire order: an order of humiliation, poverty, and enforced obedience.

There are many unwavering women who fought in the prisons of the Islamic regime, did not surrender, and sacrificed their lives for their noble ideals. There are many fighting women who broke all the taboos of their time and, in the resistance and armed struggle in Kurdistan against the attacks of the Islamic government forces, fought heroically, lost their lives, and became symbols for thousands of revolutionary women and girls “names that will remain in the collective memory of the people. There are many rebellious women and girls who set fire to the compulsory Islamic hijab” this symbol of the brutality and barbarism of religious patriarchy, in squares and crossroads, raising the call for equality and humanity. There are many women who, in protests and daily struggles of workers, students, teachers, and retirees, in the uprisings of the past 47 years, took to the streets, shouted for freedom and equality, stood as shields against ruthless repression, and shook the worn body of the Islamic regime.

We emphasize that the struggle of women for freedom and equality can only succeed through reliance on organized mass power, through the expansion of independent organizations, and through a deep connection with the labor movement and the social movements of all the oppressed. We stress the necessity of strengthening and expanding women’s mass organizations, labor organizations, professional associations of teachers and nurses, workplace and neighborhood councils, and the unity of all freedom-loving and equality-seeking forces against the Islamic Republic.

This regime, with all its tools of repression and deception, seeks either to silence women or to divert their struggle into harmless and ineffective paths. Freedom and equality are not gifts of power but the result of conscious and organized struggle. The future will be realized by dismantling this entire order, by ending all forms of gender, national, religious, and class discrimination, and by building a free, equal, and prosperous society. Women in Iran are not objects of pity, but a force for change; and this force, when united with the power of the working class and all the oppressed, can dismantle the Islamic Republic and its anti-women and anti-human laws.

Long live freedom and equality

Forward to socialism

Central Committee of the Communist Party of Iran

March 2026