‘Women Without Men’: The feminist novel that Iran’s regime has failed to silence since the ’80s

For more than three decades, Iran tried and failed to silence Women Without Men (Zanan bedun-e Mardan in Persian). Shahrnush Parsipur’s novel exposed the brutality of Iranian patriarchy with rare clarity. It did so long before global audiences recognised that violence.

Published in 1989, the book was banned almost immediately and Parsipur was imprisoned twice for writing openly about women’s sexuality and autonomy – an act of artistic courage the Islamic Republic deemed intolerable.

Despite the regime’s attempts to erase it, the novel endured. It moved through underground networks and crossed borders with quiet determination. Today, Parsipur lives in exile in Northern California after years of harassment. At 80, she remains one of Iran’s most fearless literary dissidents.

Women Without Men follows five women who flee violent marriages, stifling social expectations, and political chaos. Together, they build a sanctuary in a garden outside Iran’s capital, Tehran.

The book is now available in translation by Faridoun Farrokh in the UK for the first time. It still reads as a fierce, mystical act of feminist refusal, echoing the Woman, Life, Freedom movement – a Kurdish slogan that became a rallying cry for women’s rights when it was adopted during the 2022 Iranian protests. The book also lays bare, yet again, how violently regimes react when women claim the right to live unbounded.

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