Naser Jaberi

Women and their issues have always attracted the attention of scholars in many branches of the humanities. The feminist movement is seen as a movement by women to achieve equal rights with men, which originated in Europe in the West. In Iran, the first feminist tendencies emerged after the Constitutional Revolution and gradually influenced Iranian writers as well. Ahmad E'ta (Ahmad Mahmoud), one of the prominent Iranian writers, has shown an interest in women and issues concerning them in most of his novels. The two novels Neighbors and Story of a City, which are sequential in their events and narrated by a single narrator, are among Ahmad Mahmoud's most significant works reflecting Iranian women’s issues during the 1940s and 1950s (from the struggle for the nationalization of the oil industry to the 1953 coup d'état). To examine Ahmad Mahmoud's approach to women's issues and the portrayal of women in these two works, the present research employs a descriptive-analytical method, drawing on the views of contemporary feminist critic Josephine Donovan, to provide a feminist critique of these novels. The research findings indicate that in both stories, the patriarchal discourse prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s dominates the narrative. Most women remain confined to the private sphere, and even their forced entry into the public arena has not led to any improvement in their social or economic status. Furthermore, the first-person narrator's depiction of women in these two novels suggests that, within the framework of the patriarchal discourse of these works, women are portrayed as foreign and "the other."