An unprecedented flourishing of women’s literature—a literary renaissance, really—is one of the collateral, unexpected benefits of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Finally, the pantheon of Persian literature is integrated in terms of the gender of its producers, consumers, and objects of representation. Women are publishing a record number of books and best sellers—fiction, nonfiction, poetry (exceptionally few of which are available in the English language)—and winning some of the most prestigious literary awards. For the first time in Iranian history, a woman—Simin Behbahani—is Iran’s national poet. Whereas there were a handful of women novelists before the 1960s, there are 370 of them now—thirteen times as many as ten years earlier and about equal to the number of men novelists.1 Often women’s novels outsell those of their male counterparts. While the average Iranian novel has a print run of about 5,000, several books by women have enjoyed printings of over 100,000 copies. The same phenomenal growth can be seen in the number of women working as literary translators. Whereas in 1997 Iran had 214 women translators, the number soared to 708 six years later. The number of women publishers almost doubled in that six-year period, rising from 66 to 103. Iran has the fastest-growing cyberspace and blogosphere usage in the Middle East, and here, too, women play a most active and defiant role.

The contribution of women to Iran’s rich written literary tradition is nothing new. It can be traced back more than a thousand years to Rabe’e Qozdari, a tenth-century female poet writing at the very beginning of Persian literature. However, until the mid–nineteenth century, women’s participation in published literature was sporadic and basically confined to poetry, which proved to be more woman-friendly than other public forms of art such as music, painting, sculpture, photography, or cinematography. Ali Akbar Moshir-Salimi, for instance, includes 294 women in his three-volume anthology about Iranian women writers from a thousand years ago published in 1956, and all 294 women are poets.2 Moreover, for a variety of reasons—access to education and leisure and the two essential conditions for creativity that Virginia Woolf insisted on: a room of one’s own and financial independence—writing, or at least publishing, was the prerogative of women of the court and high aristocracy.3 Out of the 107 poets anthologized by Keshavarz Sadr in his book Az Rabe’e ta Parvin, published in 1956, 43 are members of the court and the rest belong almost exclusively to the upper class.4