Comparative Analysis of Women’s and Men’s Written Memoirs in the Sacred Defense

Mohammad-Mahdi Behranvand
Translated by Kianoush Borzouei

2025-11-25

Introduction
The written memoirs of the Sacred Defense constitute one of the most significant sources for apprehending the human, cultural, and social layer of the Iraqi-imposed war against Iran. These recollections, far beyond mere historical narration, reflect the inner world of individuals who lived at the very heart of unfolding events. Each page stands as a testament to the emotions, faith, fear, hope, and steadfastness of a nation that, under its most perilous circumstances, reconstituted its collective identity.

Within this corpus, the divergence between the perspectives of women and men in representing the war is a subject whose comparative study can deepen our understanding of the spirit of the age during the Sacred Defense. Men, for the most part, occupied the battlefield and directly confronted the enemy, whereas women bore the heavy burden of support, caregiving, child-rearing, and household management. These distinct experiential realms produced two markedly different narrative forms: one grounded in action and decision-making in the theater of war, and the other rooted in emotion, judgment, and resilience within the theater of life.

This article analyzes these two narrative modalities and examines their thematic, linguistic, and psychological differences, offering a comprehensive portrayal of how these perspectives complement one another in the collective memory of Iranian society.

1. The Nature of Men’s and Women’s Memoirs

1.1 Women’s Memoirs

Women’s memoirs of the Sacred Defense are often anchored in the rhythms of everyday life and in deeply human experiences. In these works, women recount managing the household under bombardment, enduring long queues for basic supplies, worrying about their children, caring for the wounded, and bidding farewell to husbands departing for the front. Works such as Da (Zahra Hosseini) and I Am Alive (Ma’soumeh Abad) exemplify narratives in which women convey suffering and faith in a sincere, profoundly human register.

In these accounts, an emotional and descriptive expression typically supplants militaristic or formal language. Women speak more openly of inner states and sentiments, capturing affective details with remarkable precision. From a sociological perspective, these narratives constitute invaluable sources for understanding the role of women in sustaining the social and moral resilience of the community. They were not merely observers but active agents behind the frontlines — women who, through faith and patience, safeguarded the vital bond between family and battlefield.

1.2 Men’s Memoirs

By contrast, men’s memoirs are predominantly imbued with the atmosphere of combat. Male narrators speak of assaults, artillery fire, shrapnel, embankments, and split-second decisions. In works such as The Foot That Was Left Behind or Nour-al-Din, Son of Iran, physical ordeals and life-or-death determinations form the core of the narrative. Men dwell less on emotional minutiae and focus more on action, responsibility, tactical choices, and the ebb and flow of victory and defeat.

From historical and organizational standpoints, these memoirs offer rich material for studying command structures, the morale of combatants, and battlefield strategies. Simultaneously, they mirror an elevated ideal of masculinity — one in which courage is interwoven with faith, and the violence of war is tempered by humane compassion.

2. Human and Psychological Dimensions

2.1 Women: Resilience and Empathic Fortitude

Women’s memoirs constitute a vivid gallery of resilience in the face of anxiety, deprivation, and longing. In a context where bombardment, scarcity, and the prolonged absence of men had become routine, women — relying on faith, social solidarity, and active participation — sustained the emotional equilibrium of their households. Narratives of waiting for a husband’s return, raising children in the father’s absence, and caring for the wounded exemplify their profound inner strength and empathic depth. These accounts offer valuable psychological insights into crisis management, emotional regulation, and cultivating hope under extreme force.

2.2 Men: Courage and the Confrontation with Death

Men’s memoirs, above all, unfold within the arena of death’s constant shadow. They depict moments of choosing between survival and duty, and the inner experience of fear intertwined with faith. Combatants recount the final moments of comrades, the shouts and chaos of the battlefield, and the haunting silence that descends after an operation. Beneath these narratives emerge themes such as struggle of the self, spirituality at the edge of peril, and collective bonding forged through danger.

2.3 A Psychological Comparison

Women endure within the sphere of emotion and the continuity of life; men shine within the realm of peril and the imminence of death. Together, they constitute complementary facets of a shared collective psyche — one preserving life, the other safeguarding honor. From a social-psychological perspective, the memory of the Sacred Defense would be incomplete without the interplay of these two narrative currents.

3. Values and Ethical Transmission

Within Sacred Defense literature, women embody the virtues of patience, sacrifice, solidarity, and quiet devotion, while men embody courage, responsibility, loyalty, and active faith. The interweaving of these two moral trajectories completes the ethical architecture of the Sacred Defense.

Women’s memoirs impart an ethic of resistance in the everyday — how hope can be nurtured amid hardship. Men’s memoirs impart an ethic of duty in the face of peril — how one may risk one’s life in defense of truth.

Together, these ethical paradigms form the foundation of the “ideal revolutionary human being” — one who fights in the trench yet perseveres in the home.

4. Style and Form of Narration

The language of women’s memoirs is gentle, descriptive, and affective, reconstructing the atmosphere of daily life through concise sentences and tangible imagery. They often employ maternal and colloquial vocabulary to transmit emotion. By contrast, the language of men’s memoirs is direct, structured, and operational. Their narrative architecture is typically linear and driven by event rather than emotion.

This divergence reveals two modes of knowing: inner knowing in women’s memoirs and outer knowing in men’s. Together, they offer the researcher a fuller lens through which to understand war — not merely on the battlefield, but within the lived experience of the people.

5. Influence on the New Generation

One of the principal aims of writing and studying Sacred Defense memoirs is to transmit lived experience to generations who did not witness the war. In this regard, the memoirs of women and men chart two distinct yet mutually reinforcing pathways. Through emotionally charged and family-centered narratives, women cultivate in younger readers an affective understanding of sacrifice. Men, through battlefield-centered narratives, instill a more rational and duty-oriented comprehension of jihad, responsibility, and decisive action.

In educational settings, combining these two narrative types can foster a “multi-layered understanding of resistance.” For example, reading Da alongside Nour-al-Din, Son of Iran or Crossing the Night shifts students’ attention from a single narrative template toward a more holistic understanding of the human being under crisis. Likewise, in Rahian-e Noor field trips, the presence of female narrators alongside male veterans offers the younger generation a more balanced experience of the war. This synthesis yields a more humane and ethically grounded image of the conflict.

6. Challenges and Limitations

Despite their immense value, Sacred Defense memoirs present several challenges for comparative study:

1. Limited Accessibility of Women’s Memoirs: Many women’s memoirs remain unpublished or unavailable to researchers.
2. Narrative Bias: Some works — particularly official memoirs — emphasize only specific aspects of the war and avoid recounting painful experiences or failures.
3. Linguistic and Generational Distance: The language and idioms of that era are unfamiliar to today’s youth and require cultural interpretation for full comprehension.
4. Mythologization of Memory: In certain texts, experiential reality becomes interwoven with literary idealization, distancing the researcher from more empirical layers of truth.

Nonetheless, these very challenges can give rise to new avenues of inquiry in the sociology of memory and gender studies in wartime contexts.

Conclusion

The memoirs of women and men during the Sacred Defense constitute two complementary streams of a single profound truth: the truth of the human being confronted with crisis. Women, by sustaining the foundations of family, provided the emotional nourishment of society; men, through their presence on the battlefield, safeguarded national independence and dignity.

From the perspective of oral history, these two narrative forms are not oppositional but continuous. Women’s memoirs reveal the emotional depth of war, while men’s memoirs illuminate its epic dimension. Taken together, they offer a comprehensive and multi-layered portrait of the conflict — a portrait understandable only through the joint study of both.

Ultimately, the comparison of men’s and women’s written memoirs is not merely an exercise in identifying gender-based differences in war narratives. It is, above all, a step toward reconstructing the collective memory of the Iranian nation — a memory in which both women and men stand as co-narrators of a singular truth: the truth of faith, sacrifice, and the steadfastness of the Iranian people in one of the most difficult chapters of contemporary history.