An intimate and honest chronicle of the everyday life of Iranian women over the past century<br><br>“A lesson about the value of personal freedom and what happens to a nation when its people are denied the right to direct their own destiny. This is a book Americans should read.” —<i>Washington Post</i><br><br>The fifteenth of thirty-six children, Sattareh Farman Farmaian was born in Iran in 1921 to a wealthy and powerful shazdeh, or prince, and spent a happy childhood in her father's Tehran harem. Inspired and empowered by his ardent belief in education, she defied tradition by traveling alone at the age of twenty-three to the United States to study at the University of Southern California. Ten years later, she returned to Tehran and founded the first school of social work in Iran.<br><br>Intertwined with Sattareh's personal story is her unique perspective on the Iranian political and social upheaval that have rocked Iran throughout the twentieth century, from the 1953 American-backed coup that toppled democratic premier Mossadegh to the brutal regime of the Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini's fanatic and anti-Western Islamic Republic. In 1979, after two decades of tirelessly serving Iran's neediest, Sattareh was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and branded an imperialist by Ayatollah Khomeini's radical students.<br><br><i>Daughter of Persia</i> is the remarkable story of a woman and a nation in the grip of profound change.