Purdah or pardeh (from Persian: پرده, meaning "curtain") is the practice of concealing women from men. According to one definition:
This takes two forms: physical segregation of the sexes, and the requirement for women to cover their bodies and conceal their form.
Purdah exists in various forms in the Muslim world, India, and other cultures.[citation needed]
Muslim scholar Fadwa El Guindi observes that the Achaemenid rulers of Persia were reported by the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch to have hidden their wives and concubines from public gaze.
The wives were hidden in wagons and litters. It is likely that the custom of veiling continued through the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanid periods. This tradition of Purdah is reflected in the Shahnameh, the Persian chronicle in which women are generally referred to as pushide-ruyan (پوشيده رویان) "those whose faces are covered" or pardegian (پردگيان) "those behind the curtains".
Purdah was rigorously observed in Iran before it was banned under Rezā Shāh. The practice was also observed under the Taliban in Afghanistan, where women had to observe complete purdah at all times when they were in public. Only close male family members and other women were allowed to see them out of purdah. In other societies, purdah is often only practised during certain times of religious significance.
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
Plath was born during the Great Depression on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906-1994), was a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father Otto Plath (1885-1940), was from Grabow, Germany. Plath's father was an entomologist and was professor of biology and German at Boston University; he also authored a book about bumblebees. Plath's mother was approximately twenty-one years younger than her husband. They met while she was earning her master's degree in teaching and took one of his courses. Otto had become alienated from his family after choosing not to become a Lutheran minister, as his grandparents had intended him to be.