Campaigns for equal citizenship rights in Iran, such as One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws, have received considerable attention both in Iran and internationally. These campaigns have drawn attention to how discriminatory laws, with respect to citizenship and nationality, prevent women from enjoying their constitutional rights as citizens. Stories about hardship caused by women’s legal incapacity to pass on citizenship to their children or to obtain residence permits for their spouses appear frequently in the newspapers. The frequency and regularity of these stories in newspapers and the popularity of campaigns for equal rights point to the salience of this issue in Iran, not only because Iran has a huge diaspora population all over the world, but also because Iran is one of the top refugee-receiving countries in the world. Until recently, citizenship problems were cast aside by the government as an ‘upper-class’ problem of Iran’s diasporic community. However, in the past two decades, a large number of Iranian women, primarily from low socio-economic background have married refugee men in Iran. What has the struggle for full citizenship meant for these Iranian women married to Afghan refugees? Not being able to pass citizenship, their children are not eligible for basic rights to birth certificates or schooling. Their husbands do not receive residence permits, and thus these Iranian wives must either move to Afghanistan, or divorce their husbands and surrender their children to them. The uncertain future of these families has magnified the unequal status of female citizens in Iran and has and served as an impetus for change in Iranian citizenship laws. The paper will explore the way citizenship is gendered in Iran, through the experience of Iranian women married to Afghan refugees and the legal framework that structures their lives. After examining how citizenship in general is gendered, the paper will examine the formal legal framework in the Iranian context that produces different relationships of women and men to the law and practices of citizenship in the state. These differential relationships to the state are highlighted in the complex interaction between citizenship, gender, and refugee policy that has shaped the lived realities of Iranian women.