![]() Photo: Washington Post By: Brianna Quinonez A major milestone for women in Iran is about be marked. For the first time in over 40 years, women will be allowed to enter a soccer stadium in Tehran, Iran to attend a soccer match. According to Reuters, this comes after an Irianian woman, named Sahar Khodayari, nicknamed Blue Girl, set herself on fire in protest that women should be allowed entry to all soccer matches. She later died, as the majority of her body underwent major burns. It is now known that her death was not in vain, but for a cause that she and many other women in Iran strongly believe: being able to attend public functions and being able to take part in society. According to Reuters, “Around 3,000 women’s’ tickets for the World Cup qualifier were snapped up when they went on sale last week”. Many women in the country didn’t want to miss an opportunity of them being able to take part in a public function in a public setting. Officially, women are not banned or considered criminals from going to men-only stadiums but they are refused entry. According to BBC, this unspoken rule of entry came after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, also known as the Islamic revolution, along with a stricter dress code for women. Although there was a basketball game in the past year that allowed women entry, they were separated from their male counterparts. This rule has been protested numerous times before. There have been several cases of women sneaking into soccer matches dressed up as men, employing fake beards and makeup to look like men when entering the stadium gates. There is also a movement called Open Stadiums. According to Twitter, Open Stadiums is “a movement of Iranian women seeking to end discrimination & let women attend stadiums.” This movement has been active for about 15 years now. Another quote from the Twitter account is, “And now, with the stadiums, it’s some sort of a symbol for women—if they can go to the stadiums, it means they break one of the walls in front of them. It will happen. You cannot stop us.”
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
StaffLearn more about the people behind the stories by clicking the button below. Archives
October 2023
Categories |