If you’ve spent time on social media in the past decade, you may have seen memes of a Persian princess resurfacing in waves of popularity every few years. While the captions vary, they are typically along the lines of this viral post, which reads, “Princess Qajar, a symbol of beauty & smartness in persia. 13 young men killed themselves because she rejected them.” This narrative remains the same across all variations of this meme.
As a short, heavyset woman with bushy eyebrows and a mustache, the “joke,” of course, is that she is considered unattractive by our modern Eurocentric beauty standards. Peruse a typical comment section under these posts, and you will find people ridiculing her appearance and masculinizing her, something misogynists often do with Black and brown women.
Scholarly literature, like Harvard Professor Afsaneh Najmabadi’s book, “Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity,” suggests that mustaches on women were considered beautiful in Qajar-era Persia. But even if facial hair was considered attractive on women, why do we expect princesses or women in other positions of power to look a certain way? Why do we only grant women respect when we find them sexually attractive?
The entire story is a chauvinist fabrication that unjustly overshadows the true history of a remarkable woman and activist. First of all, the meme typically gets the purported history wrong, confusing two different women: sisters Princess Fatemeh Khanum “Ismat al-Doulah” and Princess Zahra Khanum “Tadj al-Saltaneh.” Their father, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, was the fourth shah of Iran’s Qajar dynasty and had 22 children.
While there is no documentation that suitors committed suicide over either woman’s hand, conveniently, making men the focus of a fictionalized story about real women diminishes their agency and shifts the narrative away from their supposed rejection and onto fabricated deaths.
There is little easily accessible information online about Ismat al-Doulah, but Tadj al-Saltaneh was a pioneering feminist and writer who used her privilege to amplify the silenced voices of women in her country. Her groundbreaking memoir, “Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity 1884-1914,” not only centers on female liberation and the fight for women to be educated but also her socialist, naturalist and anti-slavery beliefs.
Time and time again, history suppresses the accomplishments of brilliant women and reduces them to their relationships with men and physical appearance, intrinsically tying them to the narrative that historical women were insignificant. Today, Tadj al-Saltaneh’s story has been purposefully misappropriated and narrativized to promote cultural misogyny and a racist beauty standard while neglecting her true story. It’s time to change that.
Tadj al-Saltaneh was born into the royal harem of 500 to 600 people and raised there by servants until she was married off at 13. Her marriage was by all accounts unhappy given the nature of the arrangement, with both her and her husband ultimately having extramarital affairs. She would eventually seek out a divorce, which is extremely notable given that the action was considered “radical” at the time, especially since the reason was not her husband’s infidelity but rather her desire to see Europe.
Another radical decision she made regarding her marriage was her choice to get an abortion. Although she already had children, during one of her pregnancies, Tadj al-Saltaneh had her doctor administer medicine to induce an abortion out of fear for her life after witnessing her niece die in childbirth. It is not lost on me that her decision to assert bodily autonomy in a society intent on controlling her mirrors the challenges women around the world — and even in our own country — still face today.
In her later life, she learned French and studied the philosophy of European naturalists, which furthered her belief that both men and women had a right to freedom and independence. Her fascination with these European thinkers also inspired her to push the boundaries of how she dressed, frequently stepping out in Western clothing without her hair covered.
Most notably, she wanted women to become educated and join the workforce, believing it would not only benefit women but society as a whole. In her memoir, she writes, “I am sad and depressed that members of my sex, the women of Iran, are not aware of their rights and are not fulfilling their duties as human beings,” and that “If women in this country were free as in other countries, having attained their rights, they could enter the country’s political arena and advance.” Her advocacy for women’s rights and education significantly impacted the women’s rights movement in Iran, paving the way for future generations of women.
However, she didn’t just put pen to paper. Tadj al-Saltaneh helped facilitate the Women’s Freedom Association, where male and female intellectuals gathered in secret forums. In these meetings, only women could speak, allowing them to build their confidence in front of men and the public without domineering retribution.
It’s safe to say that Tadj al-Saltaneh accomplished a lot in just about 52 years of life, and yet we have reduced her to a thin layer of hair on her upper lip for a couple of fleeting laughs. As an Iranian woman, her story is particularly important to highlight given Iran’s current oppression of its female population and the American media’s normalization of white supremacist ideologies and beauty standards. Her story is one of personal power and radicalism, a testament to the ways race and gender intersect in shaping whose voices are heard and whose are distorted. Her “memeification” on Western social media platforms is not just an erasure of her achievements but a reflection of how women, especially those outside the West, are trivialized through a colonial and racialized lens.
This Women’s History Month, we owe it not only to Tadj al-Saltaneh but to every woman whose story has been erased, altered or neglected to restore their voices and honor them as they would have wished to be remembered.
Jordan Ori is a junior majoring in English and is a Pipe Dream Opinions intern.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.