Ms. Afshar relates that she had a very privileged childhood, where she was surrounded with servants and nannies. While attending the prestigious Jeanne d’Arc School for girls in Tehran, she said, “I read ‘Jane Eyre’ and I thought: Well, if you left me on the side of a road, I wouldn’t know which way to turn. I’d better go to this England where they make these tough women.”
She persuaded her parents to send her to St. Martin’s, a boarding school in Solihull, England, outside Birmingham, where she spent three years. She then went to the University of York and graduated in 1967. In 1972, she received a doctorate from the University of Cambridge on Land Economy.
Ms. Afshar worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture for several years. She often traveled to small villages and towns. “I loved talking to the women,” she recalled, “who were not even aware of the Islamic rights they had: the right to property, payment for housework, all kinds of things.”
She also worked as a journalist for Kayhan International, an English-language newspaper, and wrote a gossip column called “Curious,” attending parties as she covered the social life of prominent Iranians.
In 1974, Savak, the shah of Iran’s feared secret police, summoned her over her involvement with left-wing intellectual groups, her brother said. The incident scared her enough to flee to England. She was reunited again with Maurice Dodson from the University of York, a math professor she had known as a student. They started dating in 1970, and they were married in 1974.
Ms. Afshar travelled to Iran with her husband during March 1975’s Persian New Year. She visited Iran for the final time in 1977, two year before the Islamic Revolution.
Source: NY Times