Still trapped in a world characterized by gender inequality, the 19th century women began to realize that their assigned roles as domestic caregivers and partners were at odds with the societal transformations resulted by the advent of industrialization and urbanization. With a new and developed consciousness, the 19th century female writers and artists started to question and analyze the society’s expectations of women, attracting attentions to their own issues. In works of writers such as Charlotte Bronte, a female character like Jane Eyre retains her selfhood till the end of the story when her lover’s gaze is damaged by blindness—i.e. an unthreatening male gaze. The Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt presents her female characters completely covered and involved in active roles; these characters are neither presented for male audience’s pleasure nor they are objects of the male gaze.

At the same time, on the other side of the world in my birthplace Iran, a literary and mystic giant Fatemeh Baragani, better known as Tahireh Qurratul-Ayn emerged to change the course of women’s lives in Iran. Poet, scholar and the first women’s rights martyr in the world, she received religious training in her father’s court, and became a master of Persian language and religious studies. She left her husband and children very early on to become one of the top leaders of the religious Babi movement. She constantly engaged herself in private meetings or in public debates disputing the teachings of different sects of Islam, and often lectured in favor of women’s emancipation: “I was born to serve / the New Teacher” she announces in one of her poems, “and show my sisters / that we are equal.”

Twelve centuries after the advent of Islam, she became the first Muslim woman to expose her hair and body in a public gathering in Badasht, Iran. Her action was considered so overwhelmingly disgraceful that a man present at the meeting killed himself right then and there so not to witness such promiscuity and transgression against God. Such courageous act resulted in a decree by Nasseredin Shah (of Qajar Dynasty) sentencing her to death on August 15, 1853. She was later on murdered by a posse of men led by her husband, and her body was thrown into a well in an unknown location.

Her poems reflect her passion, depth of knowledge and her mastery of different forms of Persian poetry. Her words still resonate in Iran and have become the most important and all-encompassing slogan of Iranian women’s rights movement as their voice becomes louder: “You can kill me,” she wrote “but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.”