Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (1989): A Review

Title: Women without Men

Author: Shahrnush Parsipur

Publication Year: 1989 (translation 1998, 2011, 2026)

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

Pages: 192

Source: ebook @storytel.tr

Genre: literary fiction, Magical Realism

Awards: longlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize

Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men creates a magical world where the supernatural and the real intertwine to expose how women in 1950s Iran are suffocated by patriarchy, religion, and the confines of the domestic sphere. The novel follows five women from different social backgrounds whose paths converge in a garden in Karaj. Each woman suffers under patriarchy in a distinct way and each ultimately takes a different path and reaches a different kind of ending. The book does offer a form of closure for each character, but not an easy or triumphant emancipation. Some remain entangled in, or even complicit with, patriarchal structures—either by internalizing them or learning to manipulate them for survival. What I value most is the novel’s willingness to dwell in this darkness and refuse the comforting lie that “if you just try hard enough, you’ll be free,” or that suffering automatically makes you stronger.

Another aspect I deeply appreciate—one that famously led to Parsipur’s imprisonment—is her blunt confrontation with sex, the female body, religion, and patriarchy. She takes core pillars of Iranian cultural identity—orthodox Islamic structures, Sufi mysticism, and ancient Persian/Zoroastrian myths—and relentlessly turns them inside out.

Parsipur first severs the traditional link between female spiritual worth and patriarchal notions of purity. In conservative Shi’a tradition, a woman’s holiness is bound to modesty, ritual cleanliness, and obedience to male religious authority. Parsipur gives the most intense, direct experience of divine grace not to a chaste woman, but to a prostitute. Her naked, desperate prayer on the bathhouse floor and her subsequent transformation into pure light bypass clerics, law, and social judgment. Through her, Parsipur insists that spiritual transcendence has nothing to do with “decency” as defined by men.

She then rewrites the logic of Sufi enlightenment. Classic Sufi narratives reserve the arduous journey toward annihilation in divine light for male mystics. Parsipur gives Munis her own version of this journey—seven years, seven deserts—only to have the Kind Gardener refuse her final request to dissolve into light. He calls that total escape a form of cowardice and sends her back into the dark world instead. In doing so, Parsipur inverts the Sufi ideal: for an intellectual woman, true wisdom is not to vanish into abstraction or self-annihilation but to return to the flawed, material world and become a grounded, ethical presence—a schoolteacher: the only path to emancipation is through education.

Parsipur also reimagines Zoroastrian creation myths in which human life begins with a masculine, cosmic act: Gayomard’s death, his semen fertilizing the earth, and the emergence of the first human couple from a plant. Mahdokht’s story reverses this trajectory. Repulsed by the violent, shame-filled sexual order of mid-century Iran, she uses magical realism to move backward into myth, not forward from it. Rather than being born from a plant to enter human sexuality, she becomes a tree precisely to escape sex and the penetrative, male-dominated economy it represents. Her attempted withdrawal from humanity, however, fails on its own. The tree remains barren until breast milk—rather than semen—nourishes it. By replacing male generative power with a distinctly female, nurturing fluid, Parsipur symbolically breaks the patriarchal cycle of creation myth.

Mahdokht’s eventual explosion into a “mountain of seeds” completes this subversion. Instead of producing a single, heterosexual couple destined for marriage and reproduction, she scatters countless seeds across the world, untethered to any marital or legal structure. Life no longer begins with male semen and ends in rigid social contracts; it radiates outward from a reclaimed female body, from solidarity and nurturance rather than possession and law.

Even the seemingly benevolent figure of the Kind Gardener is not spared. At first he appears to be the ideal exception—the gentle, spiritual man in a world of male violence. But Parsipur uses him to dismantle the fantasy of the perfect patriarch, the enlightened Sufi master, and the romanticized “fatherly” guardian of nature. His eventual dissolution shows that this figure is not a viable model for real life; he functions only as a fleeting catalyst within the liminal, magical space of the Karaj garden. The myth of the perfectly kind, all-wise man is revealed as just that: a myth.

By systematically overturning religious doctrines, mystical traditions, and foundational myths, Parsipur argues that genuine liberation for Iranian women cannot be found inside existing cultural scripts—whether ancient or modern. Neither a return to origins nor immersion in any of these rhetorics can heal the psychic damage of patriarchy. Instead, liberation requires shattering these inherited narratives, fertilizing what remains with the raw, unregulated power of female solidarity, and then choosing to live in the messy, ordinary world.

This is why Munis’s final choice matters so deeply. She does not dissolve into light, merge with the soil, or seize state power; instead, she returns to the city as an ordinary schoolteacher. In that decision, Parsipur locates true freedom not in mythic transcendence but in the hard, everyday labor of reshaping the future from the ground up through education—step by step, day in and day out. I wish it were otherwise, that there were a magic potion to erase the darkness once and for all—but the darkness persists.