Reviewing relative features of women in Farsi Proverbs

The aim of this article is to become familiar with different views toward women and their rights from gender perspective and to describe the original and common Iranian culture about women focusing on one part of Oral Literature which is Proverb. The under review corpus of the study involves 382 proverbs that are collected from valid Persian books and Proverbs dictionaries. Regarding the importance of this subject, the qualitative analysis of content is used for analyzing this corpus; and we reviewed three pivotal and general areas about women by reviewing, separating and distinguishing proverbs which were somehow related to women. First, we review the physical and psychological features of women, then their moral and emotional features and finally their family and social relations. The findings show that the structure of above proverbs does not show the real status of women and focuses mainly on highlighting the negative aspects of woman character. Moreover, the varied status of women becomes obvious in reviewing the proverbs, since she is sometimes described with respectful and scholarly language and she is in climax; and she is sometime faced with unconscionable and partial judgments that consider her as Satan. Therefore, the article shows the status of women in Persian Proverbs and public views toward women in these proverbs and how much these views are different with the current social and women condition; due to this fact that the social view toward women is more positive today, the necessary condition for improving the status of women are ready now.