The sustained mobilizations of women, which began on March 8, International Women’s Day, are the most dramatic demonstration yet that the Iranian masses are determined to win the rights so long denied them under the hated Pahlavi monarchy. By their actions, Iranian women are advancing the revolution as a whole—from the workers’ fight to control their factories to the peasants’ struggles for land to the demands of oppressed nationalities for control over their destinies.

The sight of tens of thousands of women marching down the streets of Tehran has also inspired supporters of women’s liberation around the world. These were not only the largest feminist actions to occur anywhere on International Women’s Day. The protests also marked the dawn of the women’s movement in Iran, a country whose domination by imperialism and monarchy has trapped women in backwardness for centuries.

What sparked the outpouring in Iran was a March 7 statement by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that female government workers could not go “naked” to work, but “must be clothed according to Islamic standards”—the chador, or veil. The government had also made statements against equal rights for women in divorce, against coeducation, abortion, and laws outlawing polygamy.  
 
March 22, 1954
What is the meaning of the appearance of opposition in the capitalist class to McCarthyite fascism? Did the Wisconsin demagogue overreach himself? Is he about to be smashed? The harsh fact is that such hopes are premature to say the least. Actually the fight against the American form of Hitlerism has just begun.

For some time those in the capitalist class who profess to believe in democratic political forms have been critical of the Wisconsin super-witch-hunter. The criticism, however, has mostly been perfunctory, amounting to not much more than grumbling for the sake of the record.

Then all at once they changed when McCarthy laid profane hands on the army brass.

The military caste in America today, as in Germany during Hitler’s rise, is a natural breeding ground for fascism. It would take little to start McCarthyism raging through its ranks like smallpox in pre-vaccination times.

To hand this powerful, career-minded force to the Wisconsin upstart would give his movement a qualitatively different weight on the national scene.

Thus the calculated attempt to McCarthyize the army forced a section of the capitalist class, primarily the Eastern section, to ask itself: is it prepared to strengthen native fascism that much today? Is it ready to turn to fascist rule now or in the immediate future? Or to turn the timing over to the judgment of this ambitious pupil of Hitler?

The answer it gave was, “No, not yet.”  
 
 
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