Amid Iran’s current turmoil, an essayist remembers two women in history, in an intimate reading of how their solitude birthed future movements of resistance
In a moment when Iranian women once again stand at the raw edge of revolution – veils torn off, chants rising above the old architecture of fear – Parisa Eftekhar’s essay “The Solitude of Women in Cogito” arrives like a spectral reminder that this struggle did not begin in the streets of Tehran in 2022, nor in the bloodied squares of the Constitutional Revolution a century before. It began in the minds and battered hearts of women who dared to think, to speak and to love on their own terms, often at the price of unbearable isolation.
Writing for Pecritique (Critique of Political Economy), Eftekhar revisits the lives of Sedighe Dolatabadi and Forough Farrokhzad. She invites us to see today’s cry for freedom not as an isolated rebellion but as part of a long, aching genealogy, one in which the loneliness of being a woman who thinks for herself is both the burden and the spark of collective change.
In her essay, Eftekhar unfurls a lyrical, searching meditation on two women whose restless minds collided with the iron gates of patriarchy and the hollow promises of modernity. Dolatabadi, the steely feminist who turned her divorce into a declaration of war against imposed silence and Farrokhzad, the poet whose raw sensuality scandalised a nation, emerge here not as icons, but as haunted individuals – women undone and remade, by the sheer act of thinking aloud.
Eftekhar threads her essay through with seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes’ foundational insight, almost a mantra, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) and interrogates what it means for women, especially Iranian women, to ground their being in thought. In the lives of Dolatabadi and Farrokhzad, the act of thinking is not a metaphysical anchor but a social liability, a path to exile. Dolatabadi finds refuge in activism and maternal care, not of her own children, but of a generation of Iranian girls educated under her watchful eye. Farrokhzad, by contrast, spills her alienation into verse, wrestling with estrangement from her father, her son, her lovers and finally, herself. Her poetry, searing in its emotional clarity, becomes a place where female subjectivity can live unapologetically, even if she cannot.
Modern love, with its shimmer of freedom, makes only a brief, bitter cameo. Eftekhar dissects it with clinical precision: too fleeting to fill the deep void of belonging, too fragile to hold the weight of longing. For these women and many others, romantic love did not liberate; it isolated. Yet loneliness, in Eftekhar’s telling, is not only a wound but a crucible. From it, Dolatabadi forged a women’s movement. Farrokhzad birthed a poetics of defiance. Their solitude was not sterile; it was generative.
What makes Eftekhar’s essay so timely, and indeed so timeless, is its insistence that the private griefs of women are not apolitical. They are symptoms of history, pressure points where philosophy, politics and gender collide. When Farrokhzad writes, “I am a lonely woman on the threshold of a cold season”, it is not merely a poetic metaphor but a historical diagnosis.
In the end, “The Solitude of Women in Cogito” is a quiet, radical provocation: a reminder that intellectual freedom, for women, has often meant existential exile. But within that exile lies a stubborn, dazzling refusal to disappear. Eftekhar shows us that to be a cogito woman is to suffer, but also, to insist on being seen.
Original article (“تنهایی زنانِ کوگیتو / پریسا افتخار”) by Parisa Eftekhar first appeared in Farsi on 25 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Pecritique is an Iranian Marxist journal. Self-described as a “field of dissent”, the journal offers provoking writing aimed at analysing, explaining and inspiring change in the economic and social life of Iran.
