Woman, Life, Freedom

Woman, Life, Freedom, protest slogan that affirms that the rights of women are at the centre of life and liberty.

The slogan is best known in English-language media for its use within the context of Iran. In September 2022 protesters in Iran and abroad adopted the slogan after Jina Mahsa Amini died while in custody for “improper” attire. The death of Amini, a 22-year-old Sunni woman from Iran’s minority Kurdish community, was a reflection of the escalating and unrelenting authoritarianism of the Iranian regime at a time of deepening economic instability.

Origin of the slogan in the Kurdish women’s movement

While the circumstances surrounding Amini’s death made the slogan resonate throughout Iran and the world, it already had been in wide use among Kurdish activists. Although Kurds make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the Middle East, they lack a state of their own and face significant challenges in their efforts toward self-determination. When conflict broke out between the Turkish government and Kurdish militants in the 1980s, Kurdish women served as combatants and emerged as a powerful contingent in the fight against Kurdish suppression. Funerals for fallen Kurdish militants, which were banned by Turkey, became a catalyst for resistance, and they resounded with not only mournful dirges but also angry chants demanding change. Although Kurdish funerals were traditionally attended only by men, women often took part in these funerals.

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Even though women had become an integral part of the fight for Kurdish autonomy, the patriarchal social structure that pervaded Kurdish society still tried to constrain what women could do. In the early 2000s, as Kurdish women and girls continued to be killed for allegedly denigrating the honour of their families, women took charge to provide—and lead—proper funerals for the victims, who were otherwise denied funerals by the men in their family. Like those fighters who died at the hands of the state, these women who died at the hands of men were remembered with chants for change. Among those chants was “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”—“Woman, Life, Freedom.”

The chant, the movement, and the notion of the centrality of women were amplified by the vocal support of Abdullah Öcalan, the ideological architect of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and they flourished alongside the development of a theoretical paradigm, jineology (Kurdish jineolojî; a combination of jin, “woman,” and -ology, “area of knowledge”), that centres Kurdish women in knowledge production. The impulse can be summed up in Öcalan’s oft-cited expression that “until woman is free, a society cannot be free.”

Death of Jina Mahsa Amini and protests in Iran

After Jina Mahsa Amini was born, her parents registered her under the name “Mahsa,” Persian for “moonlike,” but nobody called her Mahsa. Instead, she was “Jina”—a Kurdish word for “life” that shares the same root as jin and jiyan. However, “Jina” was not allowed. The name was deemed unorthodox and foreign by the National Organization for Civil Registration, despite the fact that the Kurdish language and culture are native to Iran.

In 2022, when Amini was arrested, Iran’s regime was struggling to pacify a deeply disaffected populace. International sanctions on Iran, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russia-Ukraine War were all roiling Iran’s economy while the hard-line government of Ebrahim Raisi was cutting subsidies and increasing austerity measures. His government was also ramping up spending on security, surveillance, and censorship as Iranians were growing increasingly restless. As the country became embroiled in protests and strikes, especially in June and July, the regime intensified the enforcement of state-sanctioned dress and behaviour, as determined by the ruling class of predominantly Persian Shiʿi clerics. That enforcement gave the regime greater ability to suppress dissidents, and it had a disproportionate impact on women, as well as religious and ethnic minorities. It was in this context that Amini, a woman of Sunni and Kurdish background, was detained on September 13, 2022, on the pretext of teaching her proper attire.

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Three days later, Amini died while in custody. The exact circumstances of her death remain unclear, but it nonetheless fell firmly into the fold of both those Kurdish women who had died at the hands of a hostile state and those who had died after accusations of indecency. During her funeral, held in Saqqez (near Māhābad) in Iran’s Kurdistan province, a voice cried out: “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî.” Others in attendance began chanting the slogan, and women removed their headscarves. Meanwhile, women and men were taking to the streets across Iran, outraged over the slew of social ills symbolized in Amini’s death—the subjugation of women, the repression of minorities, religious chauvinism, police brutality, and government corruption. As they came together, the slogan began to echo from one city to another, in Kurdish, Persian, Azeri, and Balochi: “Woman, Life, Freedom.”