We could all tick off a list of hardships they suffer from the images we receive in the West: forced veiling, harassment by extreme Islamists, unequal laws with physical punishments, and so on. But the reality of the past 25 years is more complex, and perhaps more hopeful.

The Iranian revolution united many groups, including women, against the Shah. Soon Ayatollah Khomeini’s clerics took over, outlawed opposition and reinstated Sharia, abrogating the reforms that the Shah had put into the 1967 Family Protection Law. The State imposed veiling and sexual segregation, and many women lost their jobs and were subjected to humiliating treatment.

But here is what we don’t often hear about. A lot of women, and opposition groups, fought back. For example, a few safeguards for women that the Family Protection Law put into marriage contracts were reinstated, though only with the consent of man and wife. University posts and most jobs were reopened to women, and a few female judges were appointed.

Some health and education programmes also helped women. It is little trumpeted that Iran is now close to total literacy among school-age girls — ahead of most of the Middle East.

Most dramatic is the birth control story: after a decade of pro-birth policies led to runaway population growth, Khomeini’s Government did a U-turn and launched one of the world’s most effective voluntary birth control programmes. This includes classes for newlyweds and free and publicised contraception. This, with education and urbanisation, has brought population growth to near replacement rate and falling, which in the long run will free women from all the negative effects of frequent pregnancies.

Women now make up almost two thirds of university entrants in Iran, entering professions such as law, medicine, journalism and the arts. Their achievements have been partially recognised in the West with the award of the 2003 Nobel prize to the human rights advocate Shirin Ebadi, and prizes to Iranian film directors.

Yet to many Iranians these very advances put into starker relief the unfair treatment women endure, which, as in much of the Middle East, has two sources — Islamic law, as interpreted by government, and a culture of male dominance. Similar forces were once potent in the West, but were worn down by centuries of economic and cultural change. Barely reformed Islamic law still rules in Iran and gives men the right to easy divorce, polygamy, to control women’s movements via “guardianship” and to marry girls as young as 13 (although average marriage ages are high). In Iran, as elsewhere, women’s dress and role have sadly become a key symbol of what it means to be Islamic.

But there is a twist in the tale. While in most of the Muslim world — notably Pakistan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq — there are powerful movements calling for stricter enforcement of Muslim law, including its sex inequality, Iran is different. Iran’s recent experience of misgovernment under clerics and reinstated Muslim law has the ironic advantage of creating a democratic and anti-Islamist political opposition. Most of the many students and educated classes in Iran, having experienced the reality of life under such a regime, now favour either its radical reform or civil law and an essentially secular state.

Although Iran’s reform movement has lost battles with conservative clerics since 2000 and may not have a large voice in the forthcoming elections, it is still fighting, and among its demands are women’s rights. The clerics who control the State have made some concessions on women’s dress and social mixing, but have cracked down on political opposition. Today the key struggle for advocates of women’s rights is for true democracy. Most want only moral support from the West, and to give it we have to stop veiling them in stereotypes.

Nikki R. Keddie wrote Modern Iran. Her forthcoming book is Women in Muslim Countries

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