TITLE: The effects of SiminDaneshvar works on the 1960s and 1970sgeneration of Iranian women.

Most Iranian women did not enjoy an autonomous identity before the 1960s and1970s. They were considered to lack any intrinsic value while their raison d’êtrewas merely to serve men in the patriarchal system. Both domestic and politicalspheres were dominated by men. However, during the 1960s and 1970s femalewriters initiated attempts aimed at consciousness raising and defining anautonomous socio-political position and identity for women. Among the works ofthis literature are numerous works of fiction, mostly short stories, about the lives ofwomen. Many of those stories promoted gender equity and advocated female rightswhich finally changed the lives of Iranian women. SiminDaneshvar (1921 -2011) is among these female writers. In her story, Who I Say Hello to (1980), she represents the thoughts of a poor woman wholives in a society dominated by cruelty and injustice; accordingly, she cannot find anyone to be worth her respect. Daneshvar accomplishes to depict women’s miseryvery well in this short story. In her A City like Paradise (1961), she portraysthe fate of a dark-skinned woman from Southern Iran who is abducted by a cruelman as a child and sold to a family, exactly like a slave. As the majority of audience for fiction was generally women, especiallymiddle class ones, they pondered and empathized with characters only to detect thesimilarity of their own situations with theirs. This was among the factors thatinitiated a change in the socio-political status of women.