Recent World Bank and United Nations data on health, literacy, reproductive life, labor force participation and political participation reveal favorable trends in the status of Iranian women. I suggest that it is the action of women, the agency of women, acting together with men, but specifically and consciously as women, that may be a crucial factor accounting for these trends. Though post-revolutionary Iran presents a context in which religious law historically unfavorable to women prevails, they have successfully made claims upon the state, based on their activity in the revolutionary period.. The Republic of Iran (IRI), committed though it was to a legal regime that had for centuries embedded discrimination against women, nonetheless had to rely upon the active support of women for its creation and continued legitimacy. Thus, despite adopting a variety of retrograde gender policies, it also encouraged women to be politically active and in return was required to respond to the demands that activism threw up. To examine how shari'a, or divine law, currently the foundation of the IRI's legal regime, has been negotiated, modified, procedurally adapted, and legislatively changed by and in respect to women, I use the law of marriage and divorce as an example and discuss its post-revolutionary course, examining the formal changes in marriage law after the revolution when shari'a became the law of the state and its surprising subversion, leading first to the informal retention of the pre-revolutionary law of marriage and divorce and then to its formal re-codification.. Subsequently, I discuss why this occurred and what it reveals about the current status of women in Iran. First, I examine the situation of women before and during the revolution, afterwards looking at the impact on the legal regime of the politics of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period to explain how women gained sufficient power to reorient the IRI's understanding of shari'a in respect to marriage and family, as well as other matters like education and employment. Then, I examine the phenomenon of Islamic feminism and the attempts to reconceive a religious jurisprudence that eliminates misogynistic tendencies. In the end, I conclude that in Iran, shari'a, like other law, is open not only to interpretation but to modification and change, through a process of political and social negotiation.