Women Of Deh Koh Analysis

In Erika Friedl’s ‘Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village,’ a beautiful, multi-faceted mosaic is painted, illustrating the every day lives of women in a modern Iranian mountain village dealing with the adversities of domestic power politics, childbirth, infertility, marriage, and old age. According to Western standards, the situations of these women are primitive and oppressive. However, to the women of Deh Koh, their situations are all they know of life. The village is sustained on gossip between the intermarried and extended families that live there. While it would seem that in a village such as this that the men would be the most controlling aspects of the women’s lives, that is not the case. The women are the ones who are exerting pressure on each other in the village by the webs of gossip weaved in an effort to stay connected in a world where they feel …show more content…
The lines of gossip in Deh Koh almost seem to have as much life in them as veins in ones body or a hidden river somewhere. In a very amusing chapter, Friedl compares different relatives’ versions of how Golgol and Ali married, separated and reunited. Referring to Golgol’s husband, Friedl writes: “Ali liked her well enough, but his mother and his sister were jealous. They filled him with lies and tales behind her back.” (94) The women of Deh Koh manage to sustain an animated way of life notwithstanding scarcity, unforgiving weather, and largely hostile customs. Always deprived of a spot in the public arena (even more so in the past decade since the revolution), there were little opportunities for the women of Deh Koh to go out, leaving the house only to do their shopping and go to the water faucet. Instead, the women of Deh Koh shape and control the home sphere, and in interweaving their homes between intermarried and extended families, they shape and control the sphere of the