Despite the traditional mistrust against autobiographies as critical documents, more historical theories have validated autobiographical accounts for their value in understanding the past and accessing it. For this reason, autobiographies stand out from the archive of early modern Iranian women's writings for providing information about a difficult-to-access aspect of the history of Iranian modernity. The existing scholarship on these autobiographies primarily focuses on their utility in understanding the largely unrecorded history of Iranian women's private lives and the constraints faced by the authors in using the self-revealing genre of autobiography given the sociocultural demarcations between private (andarūnī) and public (bīrūnī) spheres. This perspective, however, narrowly construes the potential that these life stories offer for the imagined future of Iranian women. This research examines early twentieth-century autobiographies by Iranian women, moving beyond societal and literary constraints, to focus on their imaginative visions for the future. It delves into how these narratives transcend mere historical recounting and reveals the authors' aspirations for change for women in the future within the context of their time and the limits of the applied genre. To do so, two important autobiographical accounts, Memories of Tāj-al-Saltanih (1924) and selected autobiographical poems by Zhālih Qā’im-Maqāmī composed between 1910 and 1930, will be examined. Tāj’s autobiography is regarded as "the only one so far by an insider" of the royal court, and Zhālih’s poetry, while regarded as a highly personal collection, derives its forces from imagination and offers a speculative future for Iranian women. Drawing on Gil Hochberg's concept of the potential of an imagined future within the past archive, this study approaches these autobiographies as a space where authors reflected on their present and actively engaged readers in the potential of a yet-to-come future, bridging the gap between current limitations and future aspirations. This alternative interpretation attempts to address the question of why these life stories should not be read solely concerning the constraints of their genre and their utility to access the history of Iranian modernity but with closer attention to the better and different future they imagined for Iranian women.