The Harvard Qajar Project aims to fill a void of resources on women of the Qajar era by developing a comprehensive digital resource that preserves, links, and renders accessible primary-source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds in Qajar Iran. The project is based on the fundamental recognition that the vast majority of the resources it aims to collect are not available in collections in publicly accessible institutions, but rather will come from private collections and from individual contributions by persons connected in one way or another to the Qajar era, be they members of the larger Qajar clan (princely families, families with Qajar connections, or direct descendants of the Imperial line), to members of clerical or merchant families, to Iranian and non-Iranian individuals at large with interest in the Qajar era. The project aims to digitize personal recollections (oral history), private photographs and papers, records of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and commercial deeds, which contain potentially valuable information on the lives of women at all levels of society. Given the fact that these documents and the individuals with personal memories are distributed over a geographically dispersed network of individuals and families, digitization in order to create an accessible archive for researchers seemed the most feasible approach to gathering and preserving this history. Given also the personal and familial value many of these documents represent to the individuals and families that currently possess them, digitization enables the project to overcome the reluctance of owners to part with their documents or collections and thus helps make accessible to an academic community at large what otherwise would at best be available only to a very few scholars and individuals who had knowledge of the existence of individuals with personal memories or the existence of these documents. This paper will particularly highlight one of the methods of gathering documents for the digitization project: interviews with individuals with personal recollections of the period under study.

In 1895 Sakineh, a young peasant woman from a village near Isfahan converted to Christianity. After her husband had abandoned and left her destitute, Sakineh took refuge with the missionaries of the Anglican CMS in Isfahan. Receiving work, food and clothing from the CMS she was soon willing to profess Christianity and receive Baptism. Her conversion roused a great deal of anger, suspicion and religious resentment among relatives, village neighbors, and the `ulama as well as the European business establishment in Julfa. She was beaten unconscious by her uncle. […] Sakineh's case escalated into a political fracas, embroiling Isfahan's clerical establishment as well as the political administration in Tehran and London. Professing Christianity or attending the missionaries' church service was generally a pragmatic way to receive medical services, education or sometimes simply food and shelter, which had little bearing upon people's real religious convictions. This was generally understood by all involved. Yet, a closer examination shows that it was frequently women who came to the missionaries for medical treatment and help. Like Sakineh, many found a nominal conversion the last possibility to escape a situation of abuse or total destitution. Her case caused a major fracas in the politics of Isfahan and was utilized for their own agenda by the missionaries, the local ‘ulama and the political establishment. Because of the ensuing diplomatic tension, the details of Sakineh’s case are well documented. At the same time there were frequent similar cases between the 1880’s and 1920’s, which tie together the mire of religious propaganda, women’s lives and gender politics. Analyzing the details of Sakineh’s case, this paper aims to explore conditions and context of ordinary women’s lives in late 19th and early 20th century Iran. It will also discuss the interaction of gender, religion and the politics of honor, which reverberated through 19th and 20th century Iranian politics. It will further address questions the complex function of women and missionary politics. Besides published materials such as Persian and European memoirs, newspapers and historical writings the research of this paper draws from British Foreign Office documents, missionary repositories, papers of Iranian, Austrian, and German archives.

I have recently gained access to a private family collection of 39 photographs of ‘prostitutes’ from the Qajar era in Iran. The women are clearly posing for the photographer or photographers; some are alone, sitting on a chair or leaning on a table; some recline on carpets with patterned curtains or textiles as a backdrop. Some are pictured with another woman in a similar pose, and some have a servant, slave, or eunuch posing respectfully beside or behind them. They are of varying ages and represent different ‘types’ of beauty. All have uni-brows, some have thin mustaches, and many are posing with bare legs. Only one has her name written under her photograph: Akhtar Khanum. Who were these women? Who were they posing for? Who photographed them? Who were the intended viewers of these photographs and what services were the women (or those with power over them) advertising by the act of posing? Heeding Afsaneh Najmabadi’s call to ‘read visual texts historically” this paper is an attempt to perform an analytical reading of these photographs. The analysis is informed by theoretical literature on the social construction of gender and sexuality, secondary literature on the history of gender and sexuality in Iran (e.g. A. Najmabadi, R. Matthee,W. Floor), as well as studies on similar topics in the Ottoman Empire, (e.g. Suraiya Faroqhi, Irvin Schick). Textual sources from the Qajar period, such as historical chronicles, memoirs, police reports, provincial and urban histories, and travel literature provide the contextual backbone of the analysis.

By drawing on contemporary Persian sources, this paper aims to reconstruct the literary lives of prominent women in the first 40 years of the Qajar period (circa 1795-1834). The sources for this study are Qajar poetry anthologies (sing. tadhkira) such as Mahmud Mirza’s Nuql-i majlis (circa 1830) and Qajar histories whose focus is the reign of Fath-‘Ali Shah (d.1834), such as Khavari’s Tarikh-i dhu’l-qarnayn and Nuri’s Ashraf al-tavarikh. Those women poets who feature in the Nuql-i majlis are almost exclusively royal (mostly wives or daughters of Fath-‘Ali Shah), although there are some exceptions to this. An analysis of their poetry, combined with the additional biographical information found in contemporary histories will be used to sketch a broader picture of the cultural and –in some cases- political life of leading women from the royal family, other branches of the Qajar clan, and a number from the emerging urban elite. Early nineteenth-century court histories, tadhkiras, and poetry have to date been underused by those wishing to write the history of women in early Qajar Iran. This study aims to redress the balance in this regard.