The 1979 constitution endowed religious authorities in Iran with exclusive access to key political institutions and offices. How has this impacted the position and opportunities for women religious authorities? Considering that a handful of women were surprisingly well-established as students and professors in Islamic seminaries before the 1979 revolution, how has the amalgamation of religious and political authority in post-revolutionary Iran impacted women’s access to positions of Islamic teaching and authority? We examine this question through the life and works of two Iranian female mujtahidas, Nosrat Amin (1886-1983) and Zohreh Sefati (1953-). Nosrat Amin is the most influential female religious authority of 20th century Iran, who in her own right endowed men with the permission of ijtihad. Zohreh Sefati is the most prominent female religious authority of the Islamic Republic and a member of the Women’s Socio-Cultural Council. Her writings were consulted when the legislature revised the age of legal maturity for boys and girls in the early 2000s. The trajectories of both women were strongly influenced by the socio-political environment in which and against which they defined themselves: While Nosrat Amin underwent her formative period as an Islamic scholar at a time when madrasas were slowly being replaced by secular public schools and religious courts by the apparatus of a modern state judiciary, Zohreh Sef?ti experienced the reversal of some of these reforms when the 1979 Islamic Revolution sought to Islamicize the entire legal system and expand the social and political status of Islamic seminaries. A comparison of the two women’s lives shows the extent to which political circumstances have shaped the opportunities for women to aspire to and acquire religious authority in 20th century Iran. The pre-revolutionary Pahlavi regime and the post-revolutionary Islamic Republic, although diametrically opposed on most policy realms, are surprisingly similar in their effect on religious education opportunities for women. Although the Islamic Republic established the first full-fledged hawza of the country in the mid-1980s, the state ordered the simplification of its curriculum in the mid-1990s, thus demoting the hawza from an institution of learning and scholarship to one of propagation. The paper closes by evaluating the state’s role in facilitating, but also regulating and circumscribing, opportunities for women to establish religious authority and thus to influence jurisprudential arguments of the ruling orthodoxy. The research relies on primary documents, personal interviews, as well as secondary literature.