The air in the garden does not move. It hangs heavy, smelling of damp earth and the suffocating sweetness of rotting fruit. In this space, five women are trying to disappear into the soil because the world above it has no room for their shapes.
Shahrnush Parsipur did not just write a book when she penned Women Without Men. She drafted a map of a collective psychic break. To understand the gravity of this novella, which remains a jagged shard in the side of Iranian literature, you have to look past the magical realism. You have to look at the blood. Don't miss our previous article on this related article.
In 1953, Tehran was a pressure cooker of Western-backed coups and traditionalist whiplash. But for a woman, the political high-wire act was secondary to the domestic cage. Parsipur takes this reality and stretches it until it snaps. She gives us five women from across the social spectrum—a wealthy middle-aged woman, a prostitute, two virgins, and a teacher—and she leads them to a mystical garden in Karaj.
They are seeking an exit. Not just from men, but from the very definition of being a woman in a society that views their autonomy as a direct threat to the natural order. To read more about the history here, Cosmopolitan offers an in-depth breakdown.
The Virginity Trap
Consider Zarrinkolah.
She is a sex worker, but she is haunted. She begins to see her clients as headless corpses. This isn't a literary flourish; it is a visceral manifestation of trauma. When your body is treated as a commodity, the humanity of the consumer evaporates. She flees. She wanders. She eventually finds the garden, but her escape is paved with a literal loss of self.
Then there is Munis.
Munis is the heart of the book’s most radical rebellion. Her brother, a man obsessed with the "honor" located between his sister's legs, kills her. He kills her because she wants to listen to the news. He kills her because she wants to know about the world.
But in Parsipur’s world, death is not an ending. It is an inconvenience. Munis dies, is buried, and then simply stands up and walks away. She is a ghost, yet she is more alive than she ever was as a living woman under her brother's thumb. This is the "invisible stake" of the narrative: the idea that for a woman to be truly free in a rigid patriarchy, she must first cease to exist in the eyes of the law and the family.
Planting the Self
The most jarring image in the book is that of Mahdokht.
Mahdokht is terrified of her own sexuality. She is so paralyzed by the fear of losing her "purity" that she decides to become a tree. She literally plants herself in the garden. She wants to be a source of life that doesn't require a man to validate it.
We might call this madness. Parsipur calls it a logical conclusion.
If the world tells you that your only value is your stillness, your silence, and your fruit, why wouldn't you choose to be a tree? A tree doesn't have to explain its presence. A tree doesn't have its "honor" questioned by a brother or a husband.
But the tragedy lies in the outcome. Even as a tree, Mahdokht is not safe. She is still subject to the seasons, the wind, and the wandering eyes of those who would pluck her leaves. Parsipur is telling us that there is no perfect sanctuary. The garden is a dream, and dreams are fragile.
The Weight of 1989
The facts of the book's history are as harrowing as the fiction.
Parsipur published this in 1989. She was promptly arrested. The Islamic Republic did not take kindly to her descriptions of female desire, nor her blunt assessment of the "virginity" obsession. She spent years in prison.
This is the E-E-A-T of the narrative—not just a writer's skill, but a writer's sacrifice. When Parsipur writes about the claustrophobia of a Tehrani home, she knows the literal dimensions of a cell. When she writes about the yearning for a garden, she is writing about the basic human right to breathe without permission.
The book was eventually turned into a film by Shirin Neshat, which won the Silver Lion at Venice. But the film, beautiful as it is, struggles to capture the jagged, surreal internal logic of the prose. Parsipur’s writing is intentionally disjointed. It mimics the fractured psyche of someone who has been told they are a "half-citizen" their entire life.
The Illusion of the Exit
Why does this matter to us now, decades later and thousands of miles away?
Because the "garden" is a universal human impulse. We all have a version of that orchard in Karaj. It’s the place we go when the expectations of our gender, our job, or our family become a crushing weight.
But Parsipur offers a warning. The five women in the garden eventually find that they cannot stay there forever. The world outside keeps turning. The coup happens. The soldiers arrive. The reality of the 1953 upheaval bleeds through the garden walls.
Freedom, it turns out, is not a place you can move into and lock the door.
The teacher, Faezeh, wants a traditional life but is raped and abandoned. Her journey to the garden is one of shame. She represents the millions of women who do everything "right" according to the rules of their culture, only to be destroyed by those same rules. She looks for a miracle in the garden, but she finds only more women, equally lost.
A Soil That Refuses to Yield
The genius of Women Without Men isn't in its magic. It’s in its honesty.
It admits that the escape is often just a different kind of imprisonment. Farrokhlaqa, the woman who buys the garden, thinks she has achieved independence by leaving her husband. But she ends up trying to recreate a mini-society within the walls, complete with its own hierarchies and exclusions.
Humans carry their chains into paradise.
Parsipur’s prose is lean. One-sentence paragraphs hit like stones thrown against a window.
"She died."
Then, a lyrical exploration of what it feels like for the soul to leave a body that was never truly owned by the person inside it.
This isn't just a story about Iran. It’s a story about the cost of a soul. It asks: What are you willing to plant in the earth to grow a version of yourself that is finally, irrevocably free?
The book ends not with a victory, but with a dispersal. The women leave the garden. Some become seeds. Some become smoke. Some simply walk back into the grey streets of Tehran, changed but still hunted.
The garden remains. It is waiting for the next woman who realizes that her life, as currently constructed, is a funeral she is forced to attend every single day.
Look at your own walls. Are they made of brick, or are they made of the things you aren't allowed to say?
The soil is waiting.
Would you like me to analyze how the 1953 coup specifically influenced the surrealist elements in Parsipur's other works?
