The woman who became a tree
Shahrnush Parsipur wrote Women Without Men in Paris in the late 1970s, submitted it to Iran's Ministry of Culture, and watched it sit in a drawer for a decade before it was published. When it finally appeared in 1989, it sold out in under two weeks. The government banned it. Then they arrested her.
It was not Parsipur's first time in prison. In 1974 she had been held for 54 days by the Shah's secret police after resigning from her television job in protest at the torture and execution of two journalist-poets. In 1981, following the revolution she had returned to Iran to witness, she was taken to Evin Prison without charge and held for four years and seven months. She spent part of that time writing what would become her epic novel Touba and the Meaning of Night in longhand, in her cell.
Women Without Men – frank, surreal, unsparing about female sexuality and the violence of virginity as a social construct – earned her two more arrests, in 1990 and 1991. By 1994, harassed to the point of breakdown by the morality police, she left Iran for good. She has lived in Northern California ever since, in exile, all eleven of her published books still banned in her home country. She turned eighty this February.
This month, for the first time, British readers can buy Women Without Men in a bookshop. Thirty-seven years after publication, Penguin International Writers has released it in the UK. It has just been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The prize is almost incidental to the story. The story is that it took this long.
Tehran, August 1953
The novel follows five women – a schoolteacher, a wealthy widow, a prostitute, a young woman under her brother's total control, and her friend – whose lives converge at a walled garden in Karaj during August 1953, the month of the CIA-backed coup that toppled Prime Minister Mossadegh. The coup is never named. It pulses in the background: trucks in the streets, radio broadcasts, sudden violence. Parsipur is not writing political history; she is writing what political history does to women's bodies.
What she does with those five women is extraordinary. Mahdokht, the schoolteacher, is so consumed by her own virginity – an obsession the novel presents not as eccentricity but as the logical endpoint of what Iranian society has told her – that she plants herself in the garden's earth and becomes a tree. Parsipur describes the metamorphosis matter-of-factly: clay hardening around her ankles through autumn, buds appearing on her limbs in spring, birds nesting in her branches. By summer she is a mountain of seeds carried by the river out into the world.
Munis, controlled absolutely by her older brother, dies twice – once from a fall, once from a knife – and rises from the grave both times with the power to read minds. Zarrinkolah, a prostitute, one day finds that all her clients have appeared without heads, the dehumanisation rendered literal, and sets out on a journey that ends with her body becoming translucent as crystal, giving birth to a morning glory, and ascending into the sky as a trail of smoke.
The novel's magic realism is not decorative. Parsipur herself noted that writing under censorship compelled her to encode meaning in imagery. Surrealism was a survival strategy. The flatness of the prose – the way Mahdokht turns into a tree in the same register that another character catches a bus – is not stylistic naivety but a deliberate refusal to mark the fantastical as exceptional. These things are extraordinary and ordinary at once, like the constraints on these women's lives.
The critical debate between Munis and her friend Faizeh about whether virginity is a "curtain" or "an orifice" – two pages that got Parsipur arrested – sits at the novel's heart. What Parsipur exposes is not just the violence of the concept but its systemic reach. As she shows, the prohibition extends back to childhood: Munis remembers never climbing trees "out of fear for her virginity." Patriarchal control doesn't begin with beatings and stabbings, though those appear too. It begins with a little girl too afraid to reach for a branch.
The sanctuary and the cage
The garden the women share is not utopia. Three of the five return to conventional society; one ends up married to the brother who killed her. Parsipur refuses comfort. The sanctuary is always also a confinement, a possibility rather than a solution. This is why the novel has survived as it has – passed hand to hand in Iran for three decades in photocopied editions, translated into more than thirty languages, adapted into a film that won the Silver Lion at Venice in 2009. It is not a fantasy of escape. It is a precise account of how women imagine freedom under conditions that make it structurally impossible.
When Mahsa Jina Amini died in Iranian police custody in September 2022, and the slogan Zan, Zendegi, Azadi – Woman, Life, Freedom – spread across Iran and the world, Women Without Men was already thirty-three years old. It had mapped the machinery of gender policing, the weaponisation of bodily purity, the household as the first site of authoritarian control, with a clarity that history has only confirmed.
Shahrnush Parsipur says she doesn't want to be called a feminist. "I want to be known not as a feminist," she has said, "but as a free woman." It is, perhaps, the most Parsipurian distinction possible – the insistence that freedom is not an ideology but a condition, as simple and irreducible as a woman deciding to climb a tree.
Women Without Men is translated by Faridoun Farrokh and published by Penguin International Writers.