Kashf-e hijab

Kashf-e hijab (Persian: کشف حجاب‎‎ Unveiling) is an era in Iran's history. On 8 January 1936, pro-Western autocratic ruler Reza Shah Pahlavi abruptly issued a decree banning all veils (headscarf and chador), an edict that was swiftly and forcefully implemented. The government also banned many types of male traditional clothing, claiming that "Westerners now wouldn’t laugh at us".

To enforce this decree, the police were ordered to physically remove the veil from any woman who wore it in public. Women were beaten, their headscarves and chadors torn off, and their homes forcibly searched. Until Reza Shah's abdication in 1941, many women simply chose not leave their houses in order to avoid such embarrassing confrontations, and a few even committed suicide. A far larger escalation of violence occurred in the summer of 1935 when Reza Shah ordered all men to wear European-style bowler hats, which was Western par excellence. This provoked massive non-violent demonstrations in July in the city of Mashhad, which were brutally suppressed by the army, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 100 to 5,000 people (including women and children).

Western historians state that this would have been a progressive step if women had indeed chosen to do it themselves, but instead this ban humiliated and alienated many Iranian women, since its effect was comparable to a hypothetical situation in which European women were suddenly ordered to go out topless into the street. Historians often point that Reza Shah’s ban on veiling and his policies are unseen even in Atatürk's Turkey, and some scholars state that it is very difficult to imagine that even Hitler's or Stalin's regime would do something similar. The arbitrary decree by Reza Shah was criticized even by British consul in Tehran:

...
Wikipedia