U.S. war against Iranian women

The following is a talk given at the International Working Women’s Day demonstration in Philadelphia on March 8, 2026.

We cannot observe International Working Women’s Day today without soundly denouncing the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran, and in particular, the impact of this brutal war on Iranian women.

Hundreds march on International Working Women’s Day in Philadelphia, March 8, 2026. WW Photo: Joe Piette

Among the first victims of U.S. bombs were 165 school children, mainly girls, in Minab, Iran. Apparently U.S. artificial “intelligence” claimed this was a military base, although the school was built on the site 10 years ago. On the same day, 20 female volleyball players were killed in another airstrike against Iran’s Fars Province.

Even before Feb. 28, women in Iran suffered from U.S. sanctions that limited their access to basic needs and health care. Sanctions created job losses which disproportionately impacted women. And restrictions on imports reduced access to essential goods, including sanitary napkins.

I decided to give this talk today, because last Saturday, during a protest against the U.S. war on Iran, a pro-Israeli, male counterdemonstrator tried to disrupt the event, shouting that we should be concerned about women in Iran. His actions reminded me that back in 2002, before the first war on Iraq, U.S. propaganda claimed they wanted to “save Iraqi women.” In the course of that war, between 500,000 to one million Iraqis died — the majority women and children.

This idea that U.S. imperialism wants to “save Muslim women” is, in the words of Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa, “the tired bullshit the West has used to actually destroy the lives of Muslim women for decades.” In a 2025 article on the “Status of women in Iran” (workers.org/2025/06/86431), Abulhawa made the following points:

• Prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the literacy rate for women under the Western-backed Shah of Iran was 42%. In less than a decade of the revolution, that number climbed to 98%.
• In Iran today, 70% of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) graduates are women — far exceeding the U.S. level, which stands at 53%.
• In Iran, the rate of intentional murder of women is less than one per 100,000. In the U.S., that number is nearly four times higher for all women. But there are stark racial disparities: Black and Indigenous women in the U.S. are nearly five times more likely to be murdered than white women.
• In Iran, women hold 27% of ministerial-level posts with 1,121 female judges and 25% of managerial roles in government.
• In Iran, the Law on Family and Youth Support mandates nine months paid maternity leave for public and private sectors, plus an optional four months of remote work during pregnancy, job security protections for extended unpaid leave and two weeks paternity leave. In the U.S., the only federal guarantee is 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave. 

Today the following benefits are available to Iranian women, but not U.S. women:

• Free maternity care and subsidized infertility treatments, free maternal and delivery services, including for uninsured women. Infertility treatments are heavily subsidized at 90%.
• Labor protections: Pregnant women are reassigned from hazardous jobs without pay loss; nursing breaks are offered until a child is two years old; workplace child care provisions are required.
• Family support policies under demographic law that include housing assistance, loans for married couples, job prioritization for parents, child care subsidies and retirement benefits for mothers with multiple children.
• Gender-affirming treatment: Iran legalized gender-affirming surgery (SRS) in the 1980s! In the U.S., SRS is a for-profit industry with no subsidies and increasingly under attack by Trump.

Trump and his henchman Marco Rubio’s agenda is for global U.S. imperialist domination. It includes the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Cilia Flores in early January. Shout-out to the protest in New York today outside the prison where she and Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro are being held.

And we cannot forget the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The United Nations found that the number of women and children killed in Gaza by the Israeli military in the first year following the Al-Aqsa Flood in 2023 alone was higher than in any other comparable conflict. And with world attention focused on the war on Iran, Israel has shut off access to food going into Gaza.

The Trump administration’s agenda targets millions of undocumented workers in the U.S. with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on communities and schools. Shout-out to the resistance in Minneapolis and the nearby demonstrations by 35 students in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

International Working Women’s Day was born in the struggle of immigrant women workers in the garment industry in New York City. It grew wings from the struggle of working and oppressed women in Russia that fueled the Russian Revolution for socialism in 1917. Its revitalizations in the U.S. in the early 1970s — which I was a part of — came as the result of movements linking opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the attacks on the Black Panther Party and the resurgence of the women’s movement.

We have a challenge today. Do we settle for reforms — if that is still an option — or do we recognize that if women and other gender oppressed people will ever be liberated, we have to tear down this rotten capitalist/imperialist system and replace it with socialism under which women’s rights will be fully guaranteed?