How women are defying despots

As leaders of recent mass protests in China, Russia, and Iran, women gained a “new understanding of female agency.”

The Monitor's View

This year’s celebration of International Women’s Day, held every March 8, could be a bit different. Over the past year, women in three of the world’s most oppressive countries – China, Iran, and Russia – have either led mass protests or become the face of anti-regime resistance. Many say their participation shattered a mental glass ceiling, allowing them to express individual sovereignty and a social equality often denied under the three autocracies. 

A good example is Cao Zhixin, an editor at Peking University Press who helped lead a group of women in a peaceful protest last November against the harsh impact of China’s rigid lockdowns against COVID-19.

“She was scared but excited,” one of Ms. Cao’s friends told The Guardian. “She had never seen a public assembly before and that was her first time. After they let out their long-repressed emotions, they felt liberated.”

These initial protests then exploded into anti-regime demonstrations across 31 cities, lasting for days with women on the front lines. It was China’s biggest uprising since the 1989 Tiananmen movement and forced the ruling Communist Party to quickly abandon its COVID-19 restrictions. Chinese leader Xi Jinping “had to bow to female protesters,” wrote China expert Katsuji Nakazawa in Nikkei Asia.

Ms. Cao became famous when a video she recorded in anticipation of being arrested went viral in January after she was formally charged. “Don’t let us disappear quietly from this world!” she said in the video. Her voice is now silenced as she remains in jail along with dozens of other protesters, including many of her friends.

In Russia, protests against the war in Ukraine were quickly suppressed after the Feb. 24 invasion. Yet the most famous protest came on television in mid-March. Marina Ovsyannikova, a female editor at Channel One Russia, held up an anti-war banner during a live broadcast. It said, “don’t believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to.”

She has since fled to France, but an online resistance to the war has since grown, relying on dozens of women activist groups working in an anti-hierarchical and collaborative style. As Ella Rossman, a Russian activist and historian in Britain, told The Moscow Times, the mobilization of woman activists has resulted in a “new understanding of female agency.”

In Iran, women-led protests began in September after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested for violating the female dress code and later died during police custody. The uprising that followed included many parts of society, leading to a violent crackdown but forcing the regime to pull its “morality police” from the streets.

The protests in Iran have been quelled, but many women and girls continue to shed their hijabs and uncover their hair in public. Perhaps most remarkable was that so many “men are willing to die for women’s freedom” in Iran, as actress Golshifteh Farahani told Le Monde. “Iranian women have already won.” That may be just the right message for this year’s International Women’s Day.