This paper examines the efforts of two women to improve the quality of life in Iranian rural communities, one who edited and wrote in a magazine aimed at providing resources and support, and another who worked directly with the peasantry – respectively, Shams ol-Moluk Mosahab and Najmeh Najafi. For nearly a decade between 1955 and 1962, Mosahab’s magazine Zendegi-ye Rusta’i (Rural Life) provided coverage of rural health and sanitation, nutritional information, cooperative marketing, water conservation, and other agriculturally relevant topics, with Mosahab’s prose deliberately crafted to be easy for out-loud recitation in teahouses and other traditional gathering sites in mostly illiterate Iranian villages. At the same time, Najmeh Najafi worked on the ground in a series of such villages to try and guide their residents towards similar goals but with more attention to fostering rural industry, significantly in the village of Sarbandan, Damavand. Both Mosahab and Najafi received funding and operational support from American non-governmental foundations, including the Near East Foundation, Ford Foundation, and CARE International, whose archives have provided this paper with information on the local reception of Mosahab and Najafi’s strategies, as well as insight into the gendered ideologies of American development workers in Iran during the period. Through a comparative analysis of Najafi and Mosahab’s approaches, challenges, and successes as reflected in these archives and in the published record of both women, the paper offers new insight into the popularization and institutionalization of rural development policy in mid-century Iran. This paper further takes the case of Najafi and Mosahab to argue that despite strong social and cultural barriers, women's labor and knowledge were and continue to be crucial for Iranian agricultural improvement, with their contributions undervalued and overlooked by both their American and Iranian contemporaries and in the scholarly literature.