Sediqeh Dowlatabadi

# Pioneering Women | Sediqeh Dowlatabadi

## The Night the Stones Found *Zaban-e Zanan*

**Isfahan, 1920**

It was well past midnight.

Sediqeh Dowlatabadi sat at her desk, reading through the pages prepared for the next issue of her newspaper.

There were sheets of paper scattered before her, an inkwell, and a newspaper whose very name seemed audacious for its time:

***Zaban-e Zanan — The Women’s Voice.***

It was an age when many men still imagined that a woman’s place was beside a washbasin, not behind an editor’s desk.

At first, the paper had written about girls’ education, marriage, family life, and women’s rights.

But now it had begun to venture into far more dangerous territory.

Politics.

Suddenly—

**Crack!**

Sediqeh looked up.

The window shattered.

A stone came hurtling through the glass and landed among the pages of the newspaper.

The elderly servant froze.

“Madam… they’ve started again.”

Sediqeh looked at the stone.

Threats were nothing new to her.

A voice shouted from somewhere outside.

She did not go to the window.

There was no need to see who stood in the darkness.

She had heard their anger before.

Some said:

“What business has a woman publishing a newspaper?”

“What business has a woman speaking of politics?”

But this time, the fury directed at Sediqeh was not merely because she was a woman who refused to remain silent.

There was something else.

**The Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919.**

Vosough od-Dowleh, having received £131,000 from the British government, had agreed to a treaty under which British advisers were to assume an influential role in reorganising Iran’s army and financial administration.

Its opponents asked:

“If the treasury and the army of Iran fall under British supervision, what will remain of our independence?”

Sediqeh did not remain silent.

*Zaban-e Zanan* was no longer concerned only with schools for girls.

The newspaper had begun to challenge one of Britain’s most consequential political projects in Iran.

Another stone struck the wall.

The servant looked toward her anxiously.

“Madam… shall I put out the lamp?”

Sediqeh glanced at the papers before her.

“No.”

“They may attack again.”

She answered:

“If a stone were enough to silence me, I would never have printed a newspaper in the first place.”

She paused.

“I have opponents everywhere—from the government and the clergy to the bazaar, and among all those who fear women becoming stronger.”

Then she looked toward the broken window.

“But this stone… this one belongs to the British consul. I have put my hand into a hornet’s nest, and I have no intention of pulling it out.”

The old man shook his head with the weary simplicity of someone who believed he understood the world too well.

“Madam, why don’t you concern yourself with women’s affairs and leave politics alone? These Russians and British… neither is any better than the other. They are dangerous people.”

Sediqeh smiled.

Then she lowered her eyes to the pages again.

“To me, the independence of women and the independence of my country mean the same thing. One cannot exist without the other.”

By morning, the floor was covered in shards of glass.

Sediqeh bent down and picked up one of the stones.

For a moment, she held it in her hand.

Then she set it aside.

She gathered the scattered pages from the floor, returned to her chair, and sat down.

She took up her pen.

And began to write again.

Perhaps those who had hurled the stones believed that a few broken windows would be enough to silence *Zaban-e Zanan*.

But this was never merely about a newspaper.

For the first time, women were beginning to say:

**We will not speak only of the home.**

**We will not speak only of marriage and family.**

**The fate of Iran belongs to us as well.**

And perhaps that, more than anything else, was what frightened Sediqeh Dowlatabadi’s opponents.