When the Zanan-e Emrooz magazine started publishing again in June 2014, after eight years of suspension, women’s rights activists in Iran felt a spark of hope that there would be further opportunities to demand women's rights. However, the life of the magazine was short-lived. After less than a year and only publishing 11 issues, the Press Supervisory Council ordered its closure on April 27, 2015. The council's speaker said the suspension was due to Zanan-e Emrooz “encouraging the anti-social and religiously unsanctioned phenomenon known as white marriage.”

In Iran, "white marriage" is a reference to unmarried cohabitation. Zanan-e Emrooz​ —​ previously known as the Zanan Magazine before its suspension in 2006 — had published a special report on white marriage in Iran in its October 2014 issue.

Though this marked the magazine's second suspension, many journalists concerned with women’s issues consider the accusation of “encouraging white marriage” as a mere pretext. Jila Bani-Yaghoub, a well-known female journalist in Iran who has spent time in prison due to her activism, told Al-Monitor, “The suspension of Zanan cannot be due to a few reports about white marriages. All administrations have had great problems with the issue of women’s rights and this is apparently their red line. This was the same in the administration of [President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and it is also [the same with] Mr. [Hassan] Rouhani.”

Zanan Magazine published its first issue in February 1992 and was first suspended in 2006, during the second year of Ahmadinejad's term, due to the magazine's "endangering the moral security of society." In its first series, the magazine touched on many taboo issues in Iranian society: equal marriage rights for women, women's right to divorce, gender-based employment discrimination, women's political participation, violence against women, the role of women in cinema and literature, and unequal criminal sentencing for men and women.