West's Selective Silence on Iran's War-Dead Women
Sahar Maranlou
Western feminist groups that broadly supported Iranian women's protests against mandatory hijab during 2022–2023 have remained notably silent as the same women and girls are killed in war. The author, an Iranian scholar, argues this selective silence reveals a deeper logic that determines which forms of gender violence gain global attention and which are ignored.
During 2022–2023, Western feminist organizations loudly supported protests in Iran, praising resistance against mandatory hijab. Now, as war kills women and girls and destroys their access to education, that same network has fallen notably silent.
The author, an Iranian woman and scholar of law, society and gender, argues this contrast is no accident. It exposes a deeper logic of selective solidarity that determines which forms of gender violence are recognized and which are ignored.
According to Iran's Health Ministry, 251 women and 216 children died in 40 days of airstrikes. Among them were victims of a missile attack on a girls' school in Minab that killed more than 165 children, most of them girls. U.S. aircraft bombed classrooms, burying them under rubble. Despite the scale and clarity of this violence, it has not generated the sustained feminist outrage seen in 2022.
When Iranian women removed their headscarves, images spread globally, amplified through academic institutions, activist networks, and media for weeks. In 2026, that attention has not been for hundreds of women and children killed by U.S. and Israeli missiles. The author writes: “What we are witnessing is not just an attention gap but a patterned retreat, a refusal to treat certain forms of violence as feminist issues.”
War has never been gender-neutral. Women and children are not random victims; they are primary targets. The destruction of schools is not only a humanitarian crisis but a feminist crisis. Night after night, mothers in Minab carry their daughters' belongings to cemeteries, sitting beside freshly dug graves until dawn. This is not private grief but the living aftermath of war, yet it is met with silence.
This silence cannot be separated from institutions that produce feminist knowledge. Universities are imagined as spaces of critical thought, but they are also shaped by power, funding systems, and political alignment. Silence is sustained through risk, caution, and the desire not to disrupt dominant geopolitical narratives. For Iranian feminist activists, their responses are shaped by geopolitical expectations, colonial standards of acceptability, and limits on what can be publicly challenged without career costs.
Western feminism mobilizes when violence can be framed as Islamic oppression or backward tradition but withdraws when violence is generated by Western-backed power. This silence is often justified by a false choice — that opposing war risks legitimizing the Iranian state. But the author insists: “Opposing both imperial violence and autocratic rule is entirely possible and necessary. Refusing to do so does not produce a more principled feminism. It produces a narrower one.”
If feminism cannot speak as boldly against the killing of girls as it speaks against dress codes, its claims to universality begin to crumble. Tonight, women still sit beside freshly dug graves, holding what remains of their daughters' lives.
