A History of Iranian Women’s Poetry

Ruhangiz Karachi is Professor Emerita of Literature at the Humanities and Cultural Studies Institute-Tehran. A pioneering scholar of women’s poetry and an accomplished poet, Karachi received her Ph.D. from the University of Bombay in 1985, from where she went on to author and edit 16 monographs, three collections of poetry, and numerous journal articles. Her scholarly monographs include: An Inquiry into Poems of Thoughtful Poetesses during the Constitutional Period (1995); A Descriptive Bibliography of Parvin E’tesami (1997); Forough Farrokhzad (2004); ‘Alamtaj Qa’im Maqami (2004); Eight Essays on Women’s Issues, 1591-1896 (2011), and A History of Women’s Poetry (2015). Her poetry collections include Women’s Nightmares (Ba kabus’ha-yi zan, 1998); Cross-Eyed Earth (Chashm’ha-yi luch-i zamin, 2001), and Selected Poems (Guzinah-i ash’ar, 2018).

The history of women’s poetry is the history of the identity of Iranian women in a society in which women poets, despite their traditional-religious limitations, have a thousand-year presence in the national art of Iran. By showing their creative art, women poets proved that art poetry is not exclusively masculine and unisexual. Women poets changed the traditional order of literature by composing poetry of the traditional order of literature which was not to the liking of men.