Farman-Farmaian was the first Iranian woman to be educated in the United States. The first ship she took to sail to California during World War II was torpedoed by the Japanese.
In the 1950s through the 1970s, she was a leader of efforts to fight poverty and improve education and childcare in Iran. With the revolution, she was forced to flee and returned to the United States where she wrote an autobiography that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Her family is renowned in Iran for its numerous accomplishments and its insistence on high education for all its members, regardless of gender.
Sattareh Farman-Farmaian was the 15th of 36 children born to Abdol-Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma (1858–1939), a prince of the Qajar dynasty, which was overthrown only a few years after Sattareh’s birth in 1921.
Her father was a major political figure under the Qajars, serving at one point as minister of war. It was her father who recognized talent in a young enlisted man and made an officer of that man, who later became Reza Shah.
In 1933, 12-year-old Sattareh Farman-Farmaian began attending the American School for Girls, a Presbyterian missionary school in Tehran. In 1943 she was accepted at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio, and left the next year for the United States.
She sailed to the United States from Bombay, but her ship was torpedoed and she and her fellow passengers were rescued by British destroyers who returned them to Bombay. Her second and successful effort was aboard the United States Navy troopship, USS General Butler, arriving in Los Angeles July 4, 1944.
The following day, Dr. Samuel M. Jordan, who had been involved with the American School in Tehran, met her in Los Angeles and convinced the admissions director of the University of Southern California to admit her. Farman-Farmaian was the first Iranian of either sex to graduate from the University of Southern California, completing her BA in sociology in February 1946 and a master’s degree in social welfare in June 1948.
She then worked at the International Institute, a Los Angeles settlement house for Asians and other immigrants.
In 1948, she married a University of Southern California film student from India, Arun Chaudhuri, and in 1949 gave birth to their daughter, Mitra. In 1952, her husband returned to India in an attempt to find film work through family connections. Several months later, he wrote to tell her he was unable to find work and, in effect, was abandoning her.
Farman-Farmaian left Los Angeles in September 1952 for New York, where two of her brothers lived, and took a job at Cities Service Oil, one of the companies that had been approached to assist Iran in marketing its newly nationalized oil.
In 1954, she joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a social welfare consultant in Baghdad to the government of Iraq, attempting to settle nomadic tribes. In the same year, she was granted a divorce from Chaudhuri.
In 1958, Farman-Farmaian returned to Tehran to open a private two-year school to train social workers, the Tehran School of Social Work, and served as its director. The school was the first of its kind in Iran. Soon after, she assisted in the founding of the Family Planning Association of Iran which attempted to educate young mothers on family planning and the use of birth control in accordance with Islamic law.
In 1966, the school built the first of many Community Welfare Centers, partially funded by Empress Farah, at which classes in literacy, child care, nutrition, and women’s health and hygiene were offered, each containing a family planning clinic.
By 1972, Farman-Farmaian was on the board of the International Association of Schools of Social Work and had become a vice president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She continued as director of the Tehran School of Social Work until 1979, when the revolution forced her to flee the country at the age of 58.
From 1980 until her retirement at age 70 in 1992, she worked for Children’s Services in the Los Angeles County Department of Social Services.
That year saw publication of her autobiography, “Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution,” which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and which remains a very popular work in the United States.
She also wrote “Social Work as Social Development: A Case History” (1996), “On the Other Side of the China Wall” (1977), “Early Marriage and Pregnancy in Traditional Islamic Society” (1975), “Prostitution Problems in the City of Tehran” (1969), “Children and Teachers” (1966), “Country Profile of Iranian Family Planning and Social Welfare” (1965), and “Children’s Needs” (1960).