Influence of the second wave of Feminism on the Iranian novel “Savushun”

A publication at the Romanian feminist journal Analize

Analize feminist journal, Romania, 19.10.2022

Iranian society before the Islamic Revolution was part of the global flow of ideas, and its creators used the achievements of world thought to criticize their reality. For example, the famous  “dependence theory”, which divides the world into an industrially developed center and an exploited periphery became fundamental to the understanding of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s essay “Occidentosis” (1961). It outlines a path for Iran’s development by overcoming the technological and economic backwardness created by quasi-colonial subordination.

In the same way, the successes of the second wave of feminism (which peaked in the West in the 1960s and 1970s) became the basis for understanding a novel written in a purely Iranian cultural context, Simin Daneshwar’s Savushun. Daneshwar is the first Iranian novel writer as only men wrote novels before her. The novel tells of the personal evolution of an educated woman from her subordination to social norms and patriarchal order to her open protest against the status quo. This evolution of the main character takes place on the basis of the inner ethical dynamics of the heroine, who has no role models, no support on which to rely for her emancipation. She freed herself from the oppressive order and, in this sense, became the pioneer of the Iranian women’s movement. In our time feminist movement is traditionally strong, but during the Second World War, when the action in the novel takes place, it was barely emerging.

The article proves that the novel “Savushun” is inspired by the rising second wave of feminism in the West. It examines the waves of feminism, presents the life of Simin Daneshwar, follows with quotes from the novel and analyzes the emancipation of the main character Zari, with which Daneshwar is obviously identified. The method used is called close reading.

Zari’s spiritual evolution in Savushun is determined by several factors: her desire for security and the integrity of her home and family, the contradiction between her first-class education at the British school in Shiraz and the corruption and devastation brought about by the war in the occupied British Southern Iran, the emergence and intensification of the courage in Zari to oppose the man-made order in which she is identified as inferior. This evolution takes place entirely with internal dynamics that make Zari realize that if she is simply the object of public relations, everything she cares about will be destroyed. She understands that society will not respect her until she forces it to do so. At the same time, her disagreement with the imposed rules is not a whim, but a deeply conscious sense of justice in a collapsing world.

Under the occupation in 1941, the novel depicts how divisive times have come in southern Iran – some cooperate with the British in their quest for power, others take advantage of the precarious situation and profit from arms smuggling, third group of people conspire against the government, while fourth group of people fight the typhus epidemic or treat the mentally ill. In this world in which everyone is struggling in their own way, Zari is trying to regain territory free from the hardships of war. Zari strives to serve Life while the other characters serve power. This is just one of the many signs that demonstrate that this novel, with its understanding of the role of women in society, corresponds to the concepts of the second wave of feminism.

Waves of feminism and Savushun

Feminism – the Western and international movement for emancipation of women, has produced a large body of works, which aim at understanding the complex relationship between man and women in modern society. 

The first wave of feminism discusses equality in political rights and property, writes American university professor of English Sally Ann Drucker.  The second wave of feminism focuses on gender inequality and discrimination against women. It goes by the slogan “The personal is political” and states that women’s social and political inequalities are inextricably linked. It calls on members of the “weaker sex” to understand that their  life is a function of the sexist power structures in society. It criticizes the definition of women exclusively through their husbands and their children as the main cause of social oppression.

Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique is another foundational text of the second wave of feminism. This author criticizes the sexist public attitude towards women, according to which their place is in the home and if they do not feel happy as housewives, there is something wrong with them. According to Friedan, the blame for this attitude is not precisely on the women themselves, but on society, which denies their creative and intellectual abilities. The feminist claims that every woman has the right to be dissatisfied. (Friedan 1963: 19,20,22)

The third wave (which began in the 1990s) is a kind of rebellion against the failures of the second wave, which is perceived by newer generations of feminists as too associated with the ideas of white Western middle-class women. Third-wave activists are interested in how ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality determine the fate of women. The third wave is also more internationally oriented. It fights against sexual harassment in the workplace or for reproductive rights. There are claims that in the last 10-15 years we are in a new, fourth wave of feminism, which is positive about non-binary sexual identities and is realized digitally. It includes the intensification of women’s protests around the world and the promotion of international solidarity of women. 

Some of the important postulates of the second wave of feminism are related to the understanding that man and woman are socially constructed forms of existence and not eternal and unchanging biological categories, whose social role is equally permanent. It is the patriarchal order that promotes men to the function of authority, while women are perceived  in traditional societies as subordinate. A problem for the second wave of feminism is that women have significant barriers when it comes to self-definition. Instead, they are defined as the “other” of men, of those who hold the power to name and define. Therefore, emancipation is intrinsically linked with developing an autonomy and women’s capability not to define themselves through their relation to men, but in a male manner, to have an existence of their own, and will to power.

“Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.… And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other”, writes Simon de Beauvoir in her famous book “The Second Sex”, which is a fundamental work of the second wave of feminism (De Beauvoir 1972).

The idea that women should be able to define themselves, not to be defined through their husbands or children, but to have their own ability to construct their social existence is one of the characteristic traits of the second wave of feminism. It is an idea which can be spotted also in the novel Savushun if close reading is applied. But there are also other feminist ideas that are impregnated in the text. 

Luce Irigaray has a famous understanding that there is only one subjectivity in the world – the man’s one, while the female subjectivity is in fact  just some kind of lower form of reality of the male’s one. Therefore, women’s emancipation is achieved when the woman transcends her “fallen” nature and achieves a male’s subjectivity – the only existing real subjectivity. 

“Irigaray argues that, since ancient times, mothers have been associated with nature and unthinking matter. Further, Irigaray believes that all women have historically been associated with the role of “mother” such that, whether or not a woman is a mother, her identity is always defined according to that role. This is in contrast to men who are associated with culture and subjectivity. While excluded from culture and subjectivity, women serve as their unacknowledged support. In other words, while women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her.

Based on this analysis, Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g. self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g. the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male. While Irigaray is influenced by both psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, she identifies them both as influential discourses that exclude women from a social existence as mature subjects. In many of her texts, Irigaray seeks to unveil how both psychoanalytic theory and philosophy exclude women from a genuine social existence as autonomous subjects, and relegate women to the realm of inert, lifeless, inessential matter. With this critique in place, Irigaray suggests how women can begin to reconfigure their identity such that one sex does not exist at the expense of the other. However, she is unwilling to definitively state what that new identity should be like. Irigaray refrains from prescribing a new identity because she wants women to determine for themselves how they want to be defined.” (IEP: Luce Irigaray)

This long quote is a key to understanding the evolution of the main female protagonist subjectivity in Savushun. As I will illustrate, Zari’s behavior in the first part of the novel is marked by fear because she is responsible for life, for nature in the sense of human society’s life force, while male characters are willing to sacrifice life, to destroy it and have courage to reject it. That leads to a construction of male and female roles in the novel very much in the sense, which De Bovoir gives to then in “The Second Sex”:

“The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the sex that gives birth but to the one that kills.

Here we hold the key to the whole mystery. On a biological level, a species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition.”

What De Beauvoir says and what matters with regards to Savushun is that the male characters in Zari’s life have courage to fight for power at the expense of their security, they are courageous and, on various occasions, they break the law. At the same in numerous cases they show their despise towards Zari because of her apparent “fear”. In the beginning of the novel Zari is stuck in the repetition of life and only cares not to allow war to destroy her place of security – her home and family. Under extreme circumstances she undergoes evolution which allows her at the end of the novel to develop courage, to reject orders, “to transcend life through existence”, to define herself, thus developing the “male” subjectivity and obtaining emancipation.

What is even more remarkable about the novel is that the emancipation in the sense of the second wave of feminism is anchored in the Iranian tradition, with Zari happening upon  on Iranian cultural notions to achieve subjectivity. 

Thus we reach an expansion of the territory of feminism – peripheral spaces of knowledge and experience get integrated into the wider movement for female emancipation. And theory is enriched by practice. There are universal elements in feminism, such as: the idea of woman as reproducer of life and man as the spirit, ready to sacrifice or reject life, the idea that courage and determination allows for being active subject in the world, while fear makes one undergo humiliation, until “a call of consciousness” (a Heidegerrian term) demands by way of discontent that respect by others is given; the idea that women can achieve emancipation by way of developing “male” subjectivity, as they don’t have an independent subjectivity of their own. But Savushun also offers particularism – it is a novel about how emancipation takes place in a non-European territory. And its message is that in regions such as the Middle East where patriarchy and tradition is strong, emancipation is achieved or should be looked for within the local tradition.

Simin Daneshwar in the 60s (source: Public Domain)

The personality of Simin Daneshvar

Simin Daneshvar’s life in many ways corresponds to the social female profile and the spirit of the times, typical of the feminists of the second wave of the West. She is a member of the middle class, well educated and a pioneer in many aspects of Iranian society of her time: she is the author of the first works of fiction written by a woman in Iran, teaches at a university, was educated at Stanford…

Simin Daneshwar was born on 28th April 1921, in the city of Shiraz, southern Iran. Her father is a doctor and her mother is an artist. She graduated from an English school where pupils were taught in English and Persian. She then received a degree in Persian literature from the University of Tehran. At that time, she was already writing texts for Radio Tehran and the Iranian press, translating information from English.

In 1948, Daneshwar published The Extinguished Fire (Atash-e Hamush), the first collection of short stories in Iran written by a woman. In 1949 she defended her doctorate. The topic of her doctoral dissertation is “Beauty according to Persian literature”. These bold steps in the career of a woman intellectual were followed by her marriage in 1950 to the leading Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad. He remains, to this day, one of the most famous names in Iranian literature with many books and studies on the problems of Iranian society at the time and their possible solutions.

In 1952, Daneshwar received a Fulbright scholarship and studied creative writing at Stanford University. After returning to Iran, she taught at the University of Tehran. In 1968, she headed the Union of Iranian Writers, a key anti-censorship organization, which fighted for the democratic and economic rights of Iranian writers.

In 1969, Daneshwar published the novel Savushun. This is also the year in which her husband died, and the story of the novel and the image of the main character contain parallels with the life of Daneshwar, including the fact that Zari’s husband also died. Daneshwar taught until 1981 at the Faculty of Art History and Archeology of the University of Tehran. In 1981, Daneshwar published a study on her husband entitled Jalal’s Sunset. Daneshwar left this world on 8th March 2012. During her lifetime, she was one of Iran’s leading intellectuals.

The novel Savushun

Savushun has more than 20 editions in Iran alone, with more than 500,000 copies sold. It has been translated into 17 languages, including English (two different translations), Italian, French, German, Spanish and others. The novel tells the story of the British occupation of southern Iran during World War II (1941). Each of the characters in it recreates a certain life choice and position in the Iranian society of that time. The main character – Zari –  is married to a husband who has huge areas of arable land and this ranks him among the country’s elite. His brother wants to pursue a political career and has excellent relations with the British. But Zari’s husband, Yousef, sympathizes with his compatriots and is reluctant to sell his grain to the occupying army. He prefers to provide food for ordinary people. This leads to one of the main plot contradictions in the novel – Yousef increasingly turns against the British, while Zari tries to maintain peace and security in his home.

Zari, like Simin Daneshwar, is a graduate of the British school in her hometown of Shiraz. There she learned the manners, self-confidence and principles of social relations in Western society. However, the environment in which he finds himself in Iran is patriarchal. Both the men and women in the novel treat Zari as if she were a subordinate, not empowered, she must comply with them. That is why at the beginning of the novel we see in different ways – through the author’s speech or through the dialogues, a main character who obeys, despite the fact that at some moments there is a feeling that justice is on her side.

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” is a famous thought of Simone de Beauvoir, which shows that women and gender are generally social constructs (Colibri 2020). Starting from his subordinate position, Zari walks a path that leads to its emancipation, until the appearance of the necessary courage to make it equal in public relations.

Zari’s subordination

The novel begins with the wedding of the district governor’s daughter, to which Ezzat-ud-Dowle, the district governor’s influential wife, wishes and receives Zari’s beautiful earrings for her newly married daughter. They are supposedly taken only for the ceremony, but immediately after giving them, the situation turns as if they were given as a gift and remain in the possession of the governor’s family. They are practically stolen. Zari swallows this. (Daneshvar 2012: 19)

The next time authorities intervened in Zari’s life was when, through Yousef’s brother, they requested d for their son Hosrow’s favorite horse, Sahar, so that the governor’s daughter could ride him. Zari is again unable to refuse. Eventually, she surrenders Sahar and tells her son that the horse is dead. She even fakes his grave. (Daneshvar 2012: 254). However, the boy’s mourning is short-lived. He learns that the horse has been taken away and goes with his friend to free him, whereupon he is detained by Indian soldiers. The latter were part of the British occupation corps, which at the time was still an empire and controlled India. His father’s intervention leads to a happy ending. Eventually, events unfolded so that Hosrow managed to regain Sahar. (Daneshvar: 301)

These situations show that Zari always tries to respond to the demands of society without having the power to say “no” to actions that, in her view, are violations of her personal boundaries. There are servants in her home, but she herself is to some extent enslaved by social morals. Her husband and son show her in different ways that she is inferior to them in public relations because she is afraid. It is telling that both Yusef’s brother and Zari’s son Khosrow refer to her or to women in general as “cowards”. It is a claim that is correlates with the understandings of the second wave of feminism, which sees women as reproduces of life and defined by their caring for husbands, sons, family matters. 

At that point in in the novel Zari still can’t define herself. She hasn’t developed an emancipated subjectivity. She accumulates suffering and humiliation, but she sees her noble role as carer and reproducer of life. Meanwhile, the men in the home are taking resistance to action. As we have pointed out, her son tries and manages to regain Sahar. And her husband was involved in a conspiracy against the British and thwarted their army’s attempts to buy the grain from his warehouses. At one point, Yousef asks Zari why she is so submissive. The answer he receives is:

“Shall I tell you one more thing? You are the one who took my courage away from me … I’ve obeyed you for so long that subservience has become a habit with me.””(Daneshvar 2012: 277)

When Yousef tries to show tenderness by calling Zari a “kitten”, she first reveals her damaged ego and declares that she is a human being. (Daneshvar 2012: 273)

Courage as a criterion for freedom permeates the entire work. Zari is constantly worried whether the war will not destroy the family’s comfort, whether it will not harm her husband and children, or the achievements in her life. She knows what is right, but she tends to back down and resign herself to avoid unnecessary headaches. Her thoughts show the gradual evolution of her personality towards emancipation. Her internal monologue almost leads her to the idea that women can be independent creatures. She wonders if they can exist separately from the men and children they care for.

“In bed under the mosquito net, despite Yusef’s cool hand caressing her warm abdomen, despite his kisses, Zari seemed to have forgotten all sexual response. Instead, she kept thinking about her past, and wondering whether she had always been a coward or whether she had become one. Was Yusef really to blame? For one instant she even concluded that marriage was wrong at its very basis. Why should a man be tied for a lifetime to a woman and half a dozen children … or conversely, for a woman to be so dependent emotionally and otherwise on one man and his children that she couldn’t breathe freely for herself? It had to be wrong. Yet she knew that all the joys of her own life stemmed from these very attachments.”(Daneshvar 2012: 273)

In that part of the novel Zari slowly moves to the message of the second wave of feminism that women should stop expressing themselves through their husbands, children, or their homes. Women become empowered when they have a career, aspirations, struggle, cause. It is this emancipation that is coming towards Zari.

Resistance

Simone de Beauvoir points out that a woman has the property of being seen by a man as an object and not as a full and equal person. Although, at the beginning of the novel, Zari does not show her ego and swallows humiliations, she has qualities, experience and a sense of justice that do not allow her to be indifferent, tolerant and obedient. In the course of the novel, Zari develops her personality and will to live.

A movement in the character of Zari appears during her visit to Ezzat-ud-Dowle. First, the influential woman talks about hairstyles and other things that Zari is not interested in because she is not vain. Ezzat-ud-Dowle then explains that her maid had been arrested. And she tries to persuade Zari to incite the maid to give false testimony in favor of her mistress after the maid was caught carrying illegal weapons given to her by the mistress herself. Zari refuses to carry out the plan. Ezzat-ud-Dowle tries to bribe her and promises to return her earrings, to which Zari replies emphatically that they no longer matter to her. (Daneshvar 2012: 324-384)

This is the moment when Zari realizes that her passivity has taken her too far in accepting what is happening in Shiraz. Indian soldiers walk the streets and want sex from women on the street. A mental hospital, where Zari volunteered, reveals the difficult social situation in the country. Zari’s husband rescues a soldier whose squad was killed and robbed by the Qashqai tribe. War is wherever one turns. And if Zari remains indifferent, the war will enter her home.

This is exactly what is happening.

Zari once again experiences her submission while her husband plots against the British at their home.

“While preparing the hookah for Yusef, she reflected that, regardless of her courage or cowardice, both her upbringing and her life-style made it impossible for her to participate in anything that would jeopardize life as she knew it. One had to be prepared, physically and mentally, for any action which smelled of danger. And she was ready only for those things which ran contrary to danger. She had neither the courage nor the endurance required. It might be different if she were not so attached to her husband and children. On the one hand were Yusef’s caresses, the words and the loving looks; on the other, witnessing the miracle of her children … no, a person like that could never take risks. True, she turned the treadwheel of her household, endlessly, every day; and it was no less true that from morning to night she laboured like Hossein Kazerouni with her feet and did nothing for herself with her ‘free’ hands—where had she read that “hands were the means to all other means”? But the smile, the look, the voice and feel of the people she loved was her reward. Each new tooth her children had, every new curl on their little heads, their voices chirping like birds, fashioning words which then trailed each other randomly into sentences; their angelic sleep, and the softness of their skin alone—all these had been her gratification. No, there was really nothing she could do. Her only act of courage would be not to hinder others who wished to be brave, and allow them to accomplish things with their free minds and hands—their means to all other means..

…If only the world were run by women, Zari mused, women who have given birth and cherish that which they’ve created. Women who value patience, forbearance, the daily grind; who know what it is to do nothing for oneself … Perhaps men risked everything in order to feel as if they have created something, because in reality they are unable to create life. If the world were run by women, Zari wondered, would there be any wars? And if one loses the blessings one has, what then? (Daneshvar 2012: 404)

This long quote shows another characteristic understanding of the authors of the second wave of feminism as Beauvoir – the woman as the equivalent of nature and life, and the man as a manifestation of power, of reason, subordinating this nature and life. It is characteristic of reason to fight, to fight for supremacy, to dominate. This is exactly what all the men in the novel do. This happens while Zari is always considerate of others, always thinking about the most sensible and trouble-free solution for her behavior. She knows that many battles are unnecessary, she is the bearer of an innate wisdom, which, however, has not been respected in southern Iran in the 1940s.

Thus we see that Zari is an educated woman from the elite, living in a patriarchal culture. Her thoughts on a better world built by women are a kind of quintessence of Daneshwar’s work. The woman – in this case Zari, stands outside the power relations, is far from the battles for domination and is able to offer change if she could emancipate herself. Daneshwar conflates woman and female logic with Life, they are the opposite of war – precisely in the spirit of the second wave of feminism.

Life is peaceful. It is reproduction and production. War is a game of men who have the courage and confidence to hold on to power. However, their actions are in a sense denying life and the feminine principle. They tell Zari directly that she is cowardly, that she is a woman, that she has to resign herself. In turn, Zari does not want to take the initiative into her own hands and fight like those who suppress it. She strives to enrich the world with her feminine qualities and strength. To give peace. To affirm life.

The turning point

The murder of Zari’s husband throws her off balance. An entire chapter of the novel follows the confused consciousness of the main character. The trauma is obvious. Zari trusted her husband. Without him, she loses support. But it is in his absence that she acquires the strength to be an autonomous person, to be independent and courageous. The main figure who kept her in subjection has left her.

The chapter of confusion is expressed through the Western literary technique “stream of consciousness”. It is the process through which Zari develops modern subjectivity. And that development takes place through numerous references in her confusion and soul searching to the Iranian tradition – to the tradition of mourning of Imam Hossein (whose martyrdom in Karbala is key to Shia Muslims) and to the mourning of the mythological pre-Islamic hero Siavush (the mourning ceremony is known as Savushun – which is also the name of the novel). Both figures are known for having been unjustly killed – just like Zari’s husband.

So Zari finds way to absorb her uncourageous, subordinate subjectivity into the subjectivity of her husband, thus achieving emancipation in the way, which Irigaray speaks about in the section on the second wave of feminism. Irigaray also lets each woman define her own way of achieving this subjectivity. That is helpful with regard to women from non-European zones because their path towards emancipation will most likely differ from those of women in the center of knowledge and experience, e.g. in Western Europe.

In this regard, Zari is assisted by her friend, a doctor at the mental hospital Abdollah Khan. He calls her: “I know you are a lady. A real lady. I know you are strong and brave enough not to run away from bitter reality. I want you to prove that it was worth having a husband like yours. ” (Daneshvar 2012: 584)

Courage comes not only from Zari’s understanding of justice, but also from her desire to defend what her husband was. The police and Yousef’s brother try to persuade Zari not to go to extremes during the funeral procession for her husband. However, she is no longer afraid. And she states that mourning is not forbidden. Therefore, she confronts the norms, she is no longer subservient. She has become an independent subject.

The novel begins with a wedding in which the Irish journalist McMahon shows sympathy for Zari and Iran. It ends with a funeral and again with McMahon’s words:

“Don’t cry, sister. A tree will grow in your home, many trees in your city and even more in your land. The wind will carry the message of each tree to the other. And the trees will ask the wind: “Did you see the dawn while you were coming here?” (Daneshvar 2012: 625)

The dawn of McMahon’s words can be interpreted both in relation to Iran, which is eventually liberating itself from occupation, and in relation to the new age of brave women like Zari. Her journey ends successfully. Left without a husband, she is ready to continue her work. And this is a kind of recreation of the life path of the author of the novel, who continued her life after the death of Al-e Ahmad, to become one of the great Iranian intellectuals, personalities and writers.

Conclusion

In the novel Savushun, the protagonist constantly strives to do what is right and what is expected of her by the public and her own norms in an abnormal world. She is a good wife and mother, helps the mentally ill, cares for the servant Kolu, etc. She also supports her husband in his struggle, despite the fear of what is happening and the prospect of war destroying her home.

Zari finds courage the moment she discovers that she, too, has her own struggle – whether for the memory of her husband or for justice in the occupation-torn society of southern Iran. She also realizes that her husband is revered by many people for his patriotic and socially responsible cause. Continuing his struggle, Zari emancipated himself from despotic patriarchal structures. She is no longer a good wife and obedient mother, but a fighter, an activist for a better world.

And the moment a woman gets the courage to stand up for her rights, the discrimination disappears or transforms – because her personality is no longer submissive and weak.

Simone de Beauvoir points out that woman is always described as Otherness, as something that belongs to the man, and has no identity in itself and is not defined individually. Zari’s growth in this sense is especially evident – in grief and respect for her husband, she defines herself, makes decisions and opposes the authorities, who want silence as if nothing had happened.

It is worth recalling the words of Daneshwar herself from her position as a woman in “Letter from Simin Daneshwar” (1988), published in the “Daneshwar Games House”: As an Iranian I have suffered and I have been patient, but I endure and have great hope and faith in the future for all nations—including Iran….As an Iranian woman, I have suffered from despotism of the grim, the exploitation of East and West, the limitations of a male-dominated culture, and a patriarchal system. But I have never lost hope.” (Daneshvar 1989)

Bibliography:

Colibri 2020

https://www.colibri.bg/blog/256/chovek-ne-se-razhda-zhena-chovek-stava-zhena

Beauvoir, S – The Second Sex, 1949, translated by H M Parshley, Penguin 1972;

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm

Friedan, Betty – The Feminine Mystique, New York, Dell Publishing, 1963

Zora 2019, The Iranian Classic Not Seen on Bestseller Lists https://zora.medium.com/the-iranian-classic-not-seen-on-bestseller-lists-1e9aa8c8d305

Daneshvar, S 2012: A Persian Requiem, London, Halban Publishers

Daneshvar, S. 1989: Daneshvar’s Playhouse: A Collection of Stories. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers

Daneshvar, S. Sutra and Other Stories. Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 1994-2008.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Luce Irigaray 

Subscribe to Cross-border Talks’ YouTube channel! Follow the project’s Facebook and Twitter page! And here is the podcast’s Telegram channel!

About The Author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to content