Rhythms of Iran, Echoes of Ireland: Silenced Voices of Sedigheh Dowlatabadi and Patricia Burke Brogan

Abstract

Beginning with the suffrage movement and gaining momentum after the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist scholarship inquired how history could echo justice if only one gender narrated it. This question has highlighted the necessity of revisiting prominent though forgotten female voices in history. Accordingly, the authors of this article examine and compare the plays of two writers to explain how women’s voices are represented as oppressed and silenced subjects who endeavor to break the mental and physical siege surrounding them. Iranian playwright Sedigheh Dowlatabadi (1882-1961) and Irish dramatist Patricia Burke Brogan (1926-2022) attempted to revisit the man-written narratives in their oeuvre in order to challenge the subjugated images of women in their plays The Dark Life and Eclipsed respectively. Unlike in Europe, the suffrage movement never gained momentum in Iran, though women received the right to vote in 1963. Only recently women's social activism found expression through the Woman, Life, and Freedom uprisings. In this article, within the comparative study framework, the authors not only explore the historiographical aspects of Burke Brogan and Dowlatabadi’s feminist dramatic aspects but also revisit their significance within the larger context of women’s activism.