Zahra Khanom Tadj es-Saltaneh, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetZahra Khanom Tadj es-Saltaneh
Persian princess and memoirist of the Qajar Dynasty
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Tehran, Tehran Province, Iran
About Zahra Khanom Tadj es-Saltaneh
- Taj Saltaneh or Taj al-Sal?anah (1883 – 25 January 1936; Persian: ????????????), was a Persian princess.
- Memoirist of the Qajar Dynasty, a daughter of Naser al-Din Shah, the King of Persia from 1843 to May 1896 by his wife Turan es-Saltaneh.
- She was the love interest of the Persian poet Aref Qazvini, who wrote his poem Ey Taj for her. Taj Saltaneh was a trailblazer for women's rights in Iran and a feminist.
- She was a prominent founding member of Iran's underground women's rights group Anjoman Horriyyat Nsevan or Women's Freedom Association (the Society of Women's Freedom), working for equal rights for women circa 1910.
- She secretly organized and attended underground women's rights meetings telling her children and grandchildren that she was attending religious sessions.
- She once led a women's rights march to parliament and was an avid supporter of Iran's constitution revolution. She was a writer, a painter, an intellectual, and an activist who hosted literary salons at her house once a week.
- She was fluent in Arabic and French and played the violin.
- She was the first woman in court to take off the hijab and wear western clothes.
- The first to write a memoir and a vocal critic of the monarchy- her father Naser el-Din Shah and brother Mozafar el-Din Shah's rule.
- She blamed many of Iran's problems then, including poverty, lack of education for masses and women's rights, on incompetent monarchs.
- Her voice was a lone female voice advocating for change and democracy. Her memoirs were published under the title of Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity 1884 – 1914 (1996), edited with a preface by Abbas Amanat and translated by Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati.
- They were well received, the Times Literary Supplement describing them thus: "In somewhat unusual and cumbersome style, Taj's memoirs, written in 1914, cover a thirty-year span of a rapidly changing era [...] A curious blend of the reconstructive and reflective, Taj al Saltaneh's memoirs bring home the intense conflicts of a life straddling the harem and modernism." (March 4, 1994) Her hand-written memoir is in the archives of Iran's National Library. She was married to Sardar Hassan Shojah Saltaneh, an aristocrat and the son of the defense minister Shojah al-Saltaneh.
- They had four children.
- Taj divorced her husband, breaking a taboo and becoming one of the first women in the royal family to get a divorce.
- In her later years, she dedicated her life to writing, reading and raising her beloved granddaughter Taj Iran, with whom she had a special bond and heavily influenced her upbringing.
- She lived with her daughter Touran Douleh until she died. She is buried in the Zahir od-Dowleh Cemetery in Tajrish.
- Her life and her writing and her role as a feminist is a subject of Middle Eastern studies in universities from Tehran University to Harvard.
- In 2015 Harvard acquired from her descendants their family photos, writings, anecdotes and stories about Taj Saltaneh's life for its archives.
Read more at Wikipedia