Iranian Women you Should Know: Sattareh Farman-Farmaian

November 11, 2015

7 min read

Iranian Women you Should Know: Sattareh Farman-Farmaian

Global and Iranian history are both closely intertwined with the lives and destinies of prominent figures. Every one of them has laid a brick on history’s wall, sometimes paying the price with their lives, men and women alike. Women have been especially influential in the past 200 years, writing much of contemporary Iranian history.

In Iran, women have increased public awareness about gender discrimination, raised the profile of and improved women’s rights, fought for literacy among women, and promoted the social status of women by counteracting religious pressures, participating in scientific projects, being involved in politics, influencing music, cinema... And so the list goes on.

This series aims to celebrate these renowned and respected Iranian women. They are women who represent the millions of women that influence their families and societies on a daily basis. Not all of the people profiled in the series are endorsed by IranWire, but their influence and impact cannot be overlooked. The articles are biographical stories that consider the lives of influential women in Iran.

IranWire readers are invited to send in suggestions for how we might expand the series. Contact IranWire via email ([email protected]), on Facebook, or by tweeting us.

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Sattareh Farman-Farmaian was a pioneer of family planning and a founder of a social movement to help women, children, prisoners and other disadvantaged groups in Iran. She became known as the “mother of social work” in Iran, but she narrowly escaped execution as punishment for her work when Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy in 1979.

Farman-Farmaian’s father, Abdolhossein Mirza Farman-Farma, was a rich and influential prince of the Qajar dynasty. Farman-Farmaian was born in Shiraz in 1921, the year that Reza Khan, the first king of the Pahlavi dynasty, overthrew the Qajar dynasty. Her father had seven wives and Farman-Farmaian grew up with 35 siblings.

She attended Tarbiat School, a Baha’i institution that Reza Shah shut down in 1933. She continued her secondary education at the American School for Girls in Tehran, which was founded by Christian missionaries.

Recalling a school outing when she was 18 in her memoirs, Daughter of Persia, she wrote, “All at once I realized what I must have known forever. That I must have more education, that whatever else happened to me, to serve Iran and its people was my destiny.”

Her father died in 1939 and in 1943, as World War II was still raging and Allied forces occupied Iran, she decided to continue her studies in the United States — an unusual move for an Iranian girl at the time, but her mother Masoumeh and her brothers supported her decision.

Farman-Farmaian successfully applied to attend Heidelberg College in Ohio, and in 1944, she set out for the United States via India. But her journey became an adventure in itself. The passenger ship she boarded from Mumbai (then Bombay) was torpedoed, and the passengers were rescued by a British warship and returned to Mumbai. A U.S. Navy troopship took Farman-Farmaian onboard and took her to Los Angeles. In LA, she met Dr. Samuel Jordan, the founder of Tehran’s American College, who arranged for her to study at the University of Southern California. She was the first Iranian to attend the university and received her Bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1946 and her Master’s in Social Work in 1948.

After graduating, she worked in Los Angeles helping immigrants in the city. She married Arun Chaudhuri, a student from India. They had a daughter, Mitra, but in 1952 her husband abandoned her and returned to India. She then left for New York, where two of her brothers lived. In 1954 UNESCO appointed her as a social welfare consultant to help with settlement of nomadic tribes in Iraq. Before going to Iraq, she returned to Iran to visit her family.

The First Social Work School in Iran

In 1958 Farman-Farmaian returned to Iran and founded the Tehran School of Social Work, which offered a two-year course to train social workers, and was the first of its kind in Iran. Shortly after, she helped to found the Family Planning Association of Iran with the help of Pathfinder International, an American NGO founded in 1957 to promote reproductive health, family planning and maternal health. The same year, she met Mohammad Reza Shah. He personally pledged to provide financial help for her school.

At the same time, Farman-Farmaian lay the groundwork for modern daycare centers, homes for senior citizens and healthcare centers for underprivileged neighborhoods. One such health center was established in Shahr-e Now, the impoverished red-light district of Tehran.

She used her family and personal connections to push through the National Bill for Family Planning, which many people believe would not have passed without her efforts. In 1972, she was appointed as a vice president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Farman-Farmaian also found time to write books about her experience and ideas, including Children's Needs (1960), Country Profile of Iranian Family Planning and Social Welfare (1965), Children and Teachers (1966), Prostitution Problems in the City of Tehran (1969) and Early Marriage and Pregnancy in Traditional Islamic Society (1975).

“Much of this work was made possible by her prominence and connection to Iranian leaders, including the shah and his wife, Empress Farah, who offered financial support to the welfare clinics built by Ms. Farman-Farmaian’s school,” an article in the Washington Post reported. When the 1979 Islamic Revolution deposed the shah, these connections were turned into accusations against her.

Accused of Dispensing Pills to Help the Shah

As accusations against her increased, Farman-Farmaian was taken to an ad-hoc interrogation center set up in a school. The interrogator told her that, by founding 40 welfare and family planning centers, she had prevented the birth of 5,000 children who could have fought for the Islamic Revolution. “By the orders of the shah, you travelled to Israel, studied in America and by helping to improve the standards of living you delayed the downfall of the shah,” said the interrogator.

The interrogator then explained how he had arrived at the figure of 5,000 children. “Your students have said that one of your courses was about preventing pregnancy and each student had to work one semester at one of the clinics that you had set up,” he said. “They said that in the family planning centers you gave women, without charge, pills that prevented them from becoming pregnant. The students estimate that this way, over one year, you prevented at least 5,000 thousand women from becoming pregnant.”

Farman-Farmaian was also accused of embezzlement and cooperating with Israel and the Pahlavi-era court. These and other charges were enough for the ad-hoc revolutionary courts to issue a death penalty verdict against her. But she was saved from execution with the intervention of Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, a highly influential and popular pro-democracy senior cleric who, before his death in September 1979, tried to give the revolution a humane face.

Almost immediately after her release, she left Iran for England and then the United States. From 1980 to 1992 she worked for Children's Services at the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services and received commendations for her work from the city of Los Angeles. Besides writing her memoirs, she also published another book in 1996, “Social Work as Social Development: A Case History”.

Sattareh Farman-Farmaian died at the age of 91 in May 2012 at her home in Los Angeles. “Long ago, I set out into the world with my arms wide open,” she wrote in her memoirs, “and I am sure that if I had it to do all over again, I would.”

Also in the series:

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Jinous Nemat Mahmoudi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Simin Behbahani

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Forough Farrokhzad

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Parvin Etesami

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Farokhru Parsa

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Jamileh Sadeghi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Fatemeh Daneshvar

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Fatemeh Moghimi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Googoosh

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Sima Bina

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Tahereh Qurratu'l-Ayn