For more than three decades, the Iranian regime has failed to silence Women Without Men. Shahrnush Parsipur’s novella exposed the brutality of Iranian patriarchy with rare clarity long before global audiences recognised the extent of that violence.
Published in 1989, the book was banned almost immediately. Parsipur was imprisoned twice for writing openly about women’s sexuality and autonomy — an act of artistic courage the Islamic Republic deemed intolerable. Despite attempts to erase it, the novella endured, moving through underground networks. Today, at 80, Parsipur lives in exile, remaining one of Iran’s most fearless literary dissidents.
The story follows five women who flee violent marriages, social expectations, and political chaos. Together, they build a sanctuary in a garden outside Tehran. Now available in the UK, the book reads as a fierce, mystical act of feminist refusal. It echoes the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, the Kurdish slogan that became a rallying cry during the 2022 Iranian protests. The work lays bare how violently regimes react when women claim the right to live unbounded.
Set against the turmoil of 1953, the novella unfolds in a charged landscape. That year, a US- and UK-backed coup toppled Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and reinstalled the Shah to protect Western oil interests. That event reshaped Iran’s future, setting the stage for decades of instability, the revolution 25 years later, and the Islamic Republic’s tightening grip on women’s lives.
In this shadow, Parsipur exposes the intimate humiliations patriarchy inscribes onto women’s bodies. Virginity is weaponised as a measure of worth; menopause is cast as an insult; and sexuality is monitored, contained, and punished. Each character carries a wound from this system. Munis resists a brother who would rather kill her than allow her freedom. Faizeh absorbs the misogyny that confines her, while Zarrinkolah escapes a life in which her body is treated as a commodity. Mahdokht seeks rebirth as a tree, and Farrokhlaqa endures an affluent marriage that strips her of dignity.
These violences mirror the misogyny embedded in the political order, which disciplines women through shame, silence, and constant surveillance. The women’s retreat to the garden is not a mere escape, but a feminist rupture—a refusal to live within a world that insists on defining them. It is a choice to build a space where those rules collapse.
Through mysticism and magical realism, these transformations gain political force. Each metamorphosis is an act of resistance: women reclaiming autonomy and dignity in a society intent on erasing them.
The global cry of "Woman, Life, Freedom" carries the same insurgent energy that animates this novella. Reading the book today, it is clear how accurately Parsipur mapped the machinery of state violence, gender policing and systemic oppression – the same forces now driving women into the streets in Iran.
Elhinnawy is senior lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University
The Conversation