An extremely small number of Iranian women have achieved anything in Iran outside of the home without dependence upon a relationship with a man or male patronage. The best known among them is the poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967), the most famous woman in the history of Persian literature.

Forugh Farrokhzad was born in Tehran into a middle class family of seven children. She attended public schools through the ninth grade, thereafter received some training in sewing and painting, and married when she was seventeen. Her only child, the boy addressed in "A Poem for you," was born a year later. Within less than two years after that, her marriage failed, and Farrokhzad relinquished her son to her ex-husband's family in order to pursue her calling in poetry and independent life style. She clearly voices her feelings in the mid-1950s about conventional marriage, the plight of women in Iran, and her own situation as a wife and mother no longer able to live a conventional life in such poems as "The Captive," "The Wedding Band," "Call to Arms," and "To My Sister."
As a divorcee poet in Tehran, Farrokhzad attracted much attention and considerable disapproval. She had several short lived relationships with men-"The Sin" describes one of them,--, found some respite in a nine-month trip to Europe, and in 1958 met Ebrahim Golestan (b. 1922), a controversial film-maker and writer with whom she established a relationship that lasted until her death in an automobile accident at thirty-two years of age in February 1967.

Unlike her female predecessors, Farrokhzad had a poetic voice that was and remains
(where as a voice not heard may be no voice at all.)

Sound, sound, sound,
Only sound remains. (Forugh Farrokhzad)