In January of 1936, Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and father of the last Shah of Iran, issued a royal decree banning women from wearing chadors and headscarves in public. Police were instructed to tear off the chador of any woman wearing one. My grandmother didn’t leave her house for the next three years.
The law was abandoned by the Shah’s son (while he promoted modernism in other ways), and the result was that, even without its enforcement, Iranian women at the time of Reza Shah went from being mostly housewives, covered in public, to mostly uncovered, educated, and working in the time of his son.
