Nahid Keshavarz says two weeks in an Iranian jail didn't deter her from helping try to collect one million signatures for a petition urging more women's rights and, if anything, prison showed the cause was worth fighting for.
Keshavarz is one of dozens of women who campaigners say have been detained since 2006 when the drive was launched. Most were released within a few days or weeks.
"No one wants to go to prison. But if we have to pay a price then we will, like women have all over the world," said the 34-year-old, who was held on security-related charges after collecting signatures in Tehran.
"It has become a daily part of my life," said Keshavarz, whose pink headscarf conforms to laws in the Islamic Republic requiring women to cover their heads in public. She collects names on buses, while out shopping and at parties.
She was arrested in April as she gathered signatures in the capital's Laleh Park. Of 25 women in her section of the prison, some were accused of killing their husbands, she said in Farsi with a friend interpreting.
"They married too early, lived in dire conditions, they had violent relationships, none of them had prior criminal records."
She was speaking at a sale of paintings by other women which was sponsored by activists to raise funds to help women jailed on various charges. One of the pictures showed a woman with her throat slit. A bloody dagger was the focus of another and a third showed handcuffed arms raised, with fists clenched.
Western diplomats and rights groups see the detention of women activists as part of a wider crackdown on dissent, which they say may be in response to Western pressure over Iran's nuclear work.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said this month the West used negative propaganda about women's rights in Iran as a tool to put political pressure on the country, whose nuclear programme Washington suspects aims to develop bombs. Tehran says it is intended only to generate electricity.
Iranian authorities have also clamped down on "immoral behaviour", including women flouting the strict Islamic dress code, since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005 with his pledge to revive revolutionary values.
The activists say their campaign is not focused on what they wear, even if outsiders see conservative dress codes as a symbolic and visible barrier to equality.
SHARIA LAW
The women, backed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, are concerned about what they regard as institutionalised discrimination that makes them "second-class citizens" when it comes to divorce, inheritance, child custody and other fields.
Iranian officials reject these allegations, saying the country follows Islamic sharia law.
Clerics argue that women are better protected in Iran than in the West, where they are often treated as sex objects.
"Women in Western countries are ... used as products," said Ayatollah Mahdi Hadavi, a senior cleric based in the Iranian seminary city of Qom. "Socially, they are not treated well."
