The long journey of Sattareh Farmanfarmaian‎‎‎‎

‎‎‎In the summer of 2000, Zahra Jamshidi a first year student in the Social Science Department of the Alameh Tabatabaii University came across the Department Head on a staircase landing. Facing him, she immediately asked if he was the one who had intended to execute Ms. Sattareh Farmanfarmaian.‎‎‎

‎‎‎”Not Execute,” replied the university professor. “But it was a revolution. We wanted to imprison her. We said she had ties to the royal [Pahlavi] family.  We knew this was not true. We said she was Savaki [member of the secret and reviled intelligence services]. But it was a revolution. Do you know what a revolution is?” '‎‎‎‎

‎‎‎Five years later, Ms Jamshidi received her PhD from a Paris university. The subject of her dissertation: Sattareh Farman Farmaian as the founder of social work in Iran. In her dissertation she portrays a woman who could not sit still. ‎‎‎‎

‎‎‎Years later she recounted her exchange with the department head to ‘Sattareh Khanoum’ (Ms. Sattareh) – now living in Los Angeles.  ‎‎‎‎"You did not do your job as a social worker,” replied Sattareh. “A social worker should guide his/her client towards a better life and a better path. You should have told this professor, 'It is so good that you are here, continuing the job that Sattareh started.'” She continued, “You know in those days, before the revolution, Savak interfered and tried to sabotage our work. Once they tried to demolish the school. I sought help from the Queen (Farah Diba). When the threat dissipated, I bought a bouquet of flowers and went to see the head of Savak. I told him I had come to thank him for his kindness and to ask for his help in building another welfare centre in Shahr-e Now – Tehran’s red light district.

At the age of 85, speaking about social work, Sattareh [pronounced Sat-ta-reh] Farman Farmaian, said, “A social worker should do anything to ameliorate his/her society. Those who think they can make the society better by changing the regime or through politics, are wrong. This is not right. One should start from the very bottom of  society. One should recognise the roots of the pain; otherwise one day it is the Qajar dynasty, the next it is the Pahlavis and then the Islamic Republic. Sitting in a room in Tehran is not the solution. Rooms are not useful at all. Sitting behind the desk hasn't been useful. One should go to the slums and sit on chairs that have no backs and ask the young man why he had made so many children. One should teach the women how to say 'no'. One should teach the men that their masculinity is not demonstrated by slapping women and children. To make the change, one goes wherever is necessary and can make a difference- be it the mosques or Shahr-e Now. You should not be afraid of lice. If you’ve never had lice, how could you understand what it feels like? If you have not used devil on your skin, how can you know what it feels like, when your skin burns?"

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‎‎‎‎The People who inspired Sattareh‎

‎‎‎‎Three men inspired and set the foundations for 'Sattareh Khanoum’s life; her father, Abdol Hossein Mirza Farman Farma; Dr Samuel Jordan, the first person who talked to her about social work and Mahatma Gandhi, from whom she learnt in practice. The first taught her to set her sights high and fly. Dr. Jordan taught her how to learn and Gandhi was her role model in demonstrating bravery and pride and connecting with the masses. This was how  Farmanfarma’s fifth daughter [among twelve], became among the most adventurous of the 32 siblings, after her father's death.‎‎‎

‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎She was born in Shiraz in the twilight years of Qajar dynasty with the grandeur of her father Prince Abdol Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma waning. As a child, she soon realised that according to tradition, a girl should grow up fast, learn to become a housewife, marry early, move to her husband's house and obey him.  Even if you were a child of Farmanfarma living in a compound, where teachers, tailors, drivers, cooks, bakers and even notary publics were in service. If you were a boy, however, one day you would be called upon to join the main events and your father would instruct you to go abroad for education and to become a man. And what a dream it was to 'become a man'. While the prince lived, his daughters were educated, but their fate was to be married off.

‎‎‎‎But these same daughters also spread their wings and set their sights high, and took flight as if ordered by their father. His second eldest daughter, Maryam [Firouz] took such profound action that she was sentenced to death by a military court. Even in her seventies she welcomed prison once more.

‎‎‎‎But Sattareh looked upon life and followed her dreams completely differently to her elder sister. As much as her elder sister was powerful and bold, she was emotional, caring, and able to remedy. From an early age she had friends and close relationships with the servants and employees in her father’s large compound.  She was very young when she sought permission to accompany the US ambassador's wife, Mrs. Dreyfus [who had gathered diplomats’ wives in Tehran for charity work] to the slums of South Tehran, where thousands of people lived in filth and disease. Ms Dreyfus, who had brought a medication from America to cure ringworm, selected Sattareh as her aid. Sometimes they were treating the poor with their white gloves until very late into the night.‎‎‎‎

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On one occasion she reached out to Dr Samuel Jordan - founder of the American college and Alborz high school (for boys)– and a friend of her father’s, to ask if he intended to build a girls’ school and institutions to help people as well. Dr Jordan told her that Iran should first build educational institutions and then proceed to social activities. She asked him about the existence of institutions in the United States who teach how to help people. The American doctor smiled saying they existed, "only if you manage to reach the US", as if it were impossible. At the time fewer than a hundred Iranian men had attain that particular dream of travelling to the United States for education.‎‎‎

‎‎‎Travel to the United States

‎‎‎Three years later when she banged on the Dr Jordan’s door in California, he could not believe his eyes. But the journey had not been easy.‎‎‎

‎‎‎To fulfil her wishes, she had to give up the comforts of her home and status. Her mother did not approve and was concerned about her safety. But her elder brother, Sabbar encouraged her and pleaded her case. She took an old suitcase filled it with a few clothes, a pair of comfortable black leather shoes and two books; one was the biography of Florence Nightingale. Her adventure began from the very start of her journey when in the dry and arid weather of Zahedan, she had to sleep in a coffee shop. She waited six days to catch the train bound for India. But she did not sit still, she convinced an Indian doctor to stay in the small hospital of Zahedan. ‎‎‎

‎‎‎In India, she came across the independence movement led by Gandhi and spent many days with his followers. She finally reached Mumbai, with her beaten up suitcase and into the care of the Namazi family. There, Moti'ol-doleh Hejazi, who knew Prince Farmanfarma from the time of his governorship in Fars Province, recounted stories for her and predicted that she too would have her own story to tell one day.

‎‎‎ ‎‎‎Her story unfolded, first as a lonely young woman, nearly killed while travelling aboard a French ship, under Japanese rocket fire. Then aboard an American ship – with 6000 people for 42 days - where nuns treat the sick and wounded and the stillness of the night was disturbed by the piercing screams and moans of the injured.  It was a testing time.  She recounts how she was the only one who could not sleep until she saw the shore. But it was not New York; it was Melbourne.

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‎‎‎Finally, 135 days after she left everyone and everything behind at the Tehran train station, she arrived at the home of Dr. Jordan.  A new chapter began. She changed her torn clothes for a new wardrobe and started a Sociology degree course at the University of Southern California.  During this time, she did not ask for financial support from Tehran, and opted to do odd jobs from cleaning to cooking and sitting as a model for Hollywood painting classes. Then one day the best news came from Tehran; it was now quite normal for her younger sisters and other women to pack their suitcases and head out to foreign lands with recommendation letters and travellers' cheques in hand, to get an education. In Tehran they said, Sattareh was the pioneer.‎‎‎

‎‎‎She followed her Bachelors Degree in Sociology with a Masters from the prestigious USC School of Social Work, becoming a qualified social worker. With the United Nations being established she was among the cohort of young, educated cadre employed by the institution to pursue its vision. She went on numerous missions to the Far East.  By 1954 she was offered a UNESCO posting in Iraq to support King Faisal’s plans of establishing a national social welfare system and means of settling nomadic tribes.   Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Shiekdoms and Muslim countries in the region became her field of operation. Meanwhile in Iran, Reza Shah had been toppled and Sattareh's schoolmate, Mohammad Reza Shah, had become king.  Her nephew, Dr Mossadeq had initiated a civil movement to nationalize oil. Interference by the British and Americans had led to violent incidences, but the country had settled into a new track.‎‎‎

‎‎‎In 1957, at a dinner party in Baghdad, Sattareh Khanoum met Abol Hassan Ebtehaj, then head of the Iranian Plan and Budget Organisation. When he realised that the young woman in the UN delegation was Iranian, he asked her to return to Tehran and that he would find her work. 

‎‎‎Sattareh Farman Farmaian's return in 1335 [1957] to the city of her birth meant that she could make her dreams come true. She had never told anyone that throughout the time of her studies and work in Thailand, China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, whenever she was among the poor, the illiterate and the nomads, she was thinking about Iran and asking herself why she was not doing this work in her own country.  

‎By 1960 the Tehran School of Social Work was founded by Farmanfarma's most rebellious and mischievous daughter. As the work developed she thought of establishing a family welfare centre, to take care of children whose mothers worked.  She discovered that a number of the mothers were sex-workers in Tehran’s red light district of the time, Shahr-e Now. A place known to many but never mentioned, as it were nonexistent.‎‎

‎When she head into Shahr-e-Now, she informed the local police chief that together with a number of female students, she would be spending a few nights in the area to conduct research. The police responded that high level permission would be required. Sattareh picked up the phone in the police station and called General Nassiri, the head of SAVAK, and asked for the order. He was the same man who had hunted down her elder sister, Maryam, a few years earlier.‎‎

‎During this period, Sattareh Farman Farmaian took the opportunity at every meeting or event, with each letter and ceremony to further establish the foundations of her vision and work: whether it was to address the issue of prostitution, offering healthcare or alternative livelihoods to the women; taking care of the families of drug addicts; putting forward measures for birth control; providing educational opportunities for the poor or defending women's rights. With 35 years of life experience and an unbelievable drive, this slim young woman ran day in and day out.‎

The flood in Javadieh [south of Tehran [date], which revealed the ugly face of poverty and the bloody slaughterhouse of the capital, was an opportunity to acquire two thousand square meters of land and a hundred thousand Tomans from Farah Diba, the Queen. From that time on, with her help, Sattareh built forty aid centres in poor and overcrowded neighborhoods across the country’s towns and cities.  When her study on prostitution was first published, Ms Farrokhrou Parsa [parliamentarian and Minister for Education prior to the 1979 revolution] said 'the men in our community are sweating with shame'.

Sattareh did not cry for anybody. True or false, she said that the last time she cried was when her father died. She believed that one should find a  and that crying is not one's job.

She built herself a small home in Galandouak [near Tehran] to distance herself from the aristocracy and hypocrisy. When friends and relatives asked how they could help, she told them to expand the university department and produce equipment for contraception. She was often seen walking on the mountains near Galandouak, speaking to herself, considering ideas that just a few days later would become reality.

Ms Elaheh Sadri, one of the graduate social workers, describes the first of Tir [July] 1960, when she read the newspaper advertisement for students' admission to the Tehran School of Social Work. She arrived at the school to find "a slim lady with gray hair, a resolute face and pertinent eyes, sitting behind her desk. She greeted me as soon as she saw me. A down-to-earth lady, serious and tolerant. She turned to me and said: "If you want to study in this school and become a social worker you must know that you will meet people who wash all their cups in a bowl of water and pour tea in the same cup for you to drink; and you should drink it without complaining. You have to sit on the floor of a room covered with a thin, rotten carpet and drink tea, listen to their problems and pains, and be sincere in helping them solve these problems."

The corrupt, inefficient and ignorant system of state bureaucracy was a hindrance but could not defeat her. Hundreds of people whose lives she touched, became social workers.  She was involved in establishing the Volunteer Health Corps [Sepah Behdasht]. As result of her work, thousands of people headed for a better life.

By two paths

This story has a painful ending.  Sattareh and her sister Maryam Khanoum, both loyal to their father, both admiring of and inspired by him, tried to build lives contrary to what tradition dictated. The day Sattareh turned her back to everyone, in Tehran's rail station, Maryam Khanoum was a living a celebrated life, hosting writers, poets and politicians in her luxurious home. The day Sattareh returned to Iran, her elder sister had been sentenced to death and forced to flee to the Communist world. Twenty years later, when the revolution took place and the younger sister had to leave behind all that she had created, Maryam Khanoum returned from exile, as a heroine accompanying her husband, Noureddin Kianouri [the leader of the Toudeh/Communist Party] to greet the rank and file members of the Toudeh Party. The sisters didn't see each other for seventy years.

Maryam Firouz died on 22 March 2008 in Tehran and Sattareh Farmanfarmaian died 22 May 2012 in Los Angeles. Both lived 90 years. Both became successful and well-known in the paths they chose.

On 12 February 1979, in Alavi School, in the middle of a chaotic meeting among the revolutionaries, I heard a woman's voice from a window shouting, "Hadji! Women cannot piss while standing, like men." This was Sattareh Farman Farmaian's voice. Two of her social work students had arrested her. Pointing a machine gun at her while she sat behind her desk, they had escorted her to one of centers of the revolutionary groups. The charges: spying for America, collaboration with Savak, strengthening the Shah's regime, travelling to Israel and so on.

At that time, Shahr-e Now, that Sattareh Farman Farmaian had studied and dedicated so much of her life to, had not been set on fire by Ayatollah Khalkhali. Kaveh Golestan, [the renowned photographer whose images of the women working in Shahr-e-Now are legendary] had not yet run into the fire to save a badly burnt young girl.  The insanity had not yet reached its peak.

During her one night of detention at the Alavi school, Sattareh slept on a pile of confiscated objects. The next day Seyed Ahmad Khomeini [the Ayatollah’s son] and Ayatollah Taleghani [a leader of the Islamic revolution who knew Sattareh from his time in prison and her work on behalf of prisoners] set to work. She was rescued, but Iranian social workers lost their mother, a woman who is honored by Harvard University as an influential personality in American society and who is mentioned in that university’s history as a leader in the domain of social work.

Her name is not on any buildings in Iran, not even on the Javadieh Family Welfare centre. But thousands, like Dr Zahra Jamshidi, remember her.

From: BBC Persian