Foroogh (also spelled Forough) Farrokhzaad was born January 5, 1935, into a middle-class family in Tehran, Iran, many decades before women experienced social liberation in the United States, let alone in Iran. Some Iranian women believe Farrokhzaad was the woman who began the movement for them. Had she been an American woman, Farrokhzaad's painfully personal poems might have been startling in her time, but to have written them as an Iranian woman was absolutely unthinkable. She was the first Iranian poet to ever write about a woman's perspective of life in Iran.

Farrokhzaad was born to a family of seven children, and by the age of sixteen she was married to her cousin, Parviz Shapur, a marriage her family did not approve of. The marriage ended in 1954, and Farrokhzaad lost custody of her son, Kamyar, who was given to her husband's family. These events stigmatized her socially, leading...