Chapter 4 “Something Other Than Ordinary Education” International Schools in Pahlavi Iran

Community School

Community School existed in Tehran from 1935 to 1980.¹⁶ It was originally a school for missionary children that opened to all English-speaking students in the Iranian capital. Unlike the other schools of the Presbyterian Mission, Community “escaped the general closing order that affected all the Mission schools for Iranians.”¹⁷ It grew in size and notoriety during the postwar years and enrolled students of dozens of nationalities, including Iranians. Without Alborz College, which was nationalized in 1940, the Presbyterians thought Community School was “the next best thing.”¹⁸ The mission of the school, which prepared students for colleges outside of Iran, was informed by the priorities of American evangelicals and the historical particularities of midcentury Tehran. There were at least three phases of Community School’s history, and this section is on the first, during the 1930s and 1940s, when the school was located on the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound and inextricable from the Christian community.

It took many people to establish Community School, but Commodore Fisher’s colleagues knew that he “had given the school its essential form.”¹⁹ Born in 1894, this “tall, gentle Tennessean” had no familial ties to the missionary network.²⁰ He and his wife, Franke Fisher, began their missionary careers in the city of Hamadan in the early 1920s.²¹ Community School, as a concept, originated in Hamadan in 1930. “The opening of the school for the missionary children,” Franke Fisher wrote that July, “was one of the outstanding events of the year.” Eleven students attended the “little Hamadan school” and took classes in a “pleasant schoolhouse” during that first year. Amid these beginnings, “We hope that this station school will develop into a mission school eventually.”²² This happened when the Hamadan station school became the Presbyterian Mission’s “School for Missionary Children” in 1932.²³ Franke Fisher was among the first chairs of the school’s governing committee.²⁴ With institutional reference points in the Indian schools of Woodstock and Kodaikanal, Hamadan became host to “a central school for the children of missionaries,” the first of its kind in Iran, based on the Calvert homeschooling model. The original “prospectus,” which circulated in 1932, called for classes “corresponding to public school work in the USA.”²⁵ In July 1932, the US legation in Tehran reported to Washington, DC, about the school and other “scraps of news.” They noted that, with the school’s opening, “one of the most serious problems facing missionary parents in this country is apparently solved to the general satisfaction of all concerned.”²⁶

Not exactly. Some missionaries wanted the school in Tehran. The missionary William Wysham “argued for the capital city because we could draw on all the foreign community.” Others “presented an idealistic picture of a country school without big city distractions.” Hamadan, a small city west of the capital, was the initial host of that Jeffersonian vision. But some parents kept their children in Tehran for school. To Wysham’s telling, “realism” prevailed among the members of the Presbyterian Mission in 1935, when the Hamadan and Tehran schools consolidated on Central Compound in Tehran. That was where it remained “anchored,” and rechristened “Community School.” To the recollection of Sarah McDowell, the matriarch of the Del Be Del network who was present at the school’s creation, the word “community” was chosen because it conveyed “the concept of serving other than missionary children.”²⁷ In contrast to the school in Hamadan, the school in Tehran could enroll international students and collect tuition to finance operations and subsidize the education of missionary children. For those reasons, “a decisive majority” of the Presbyterian Mission voted to move the school to Tehran in 1935.²⁸

The school’s move from Hamadan to Tehran gave it an international flair. Community School enrolled fifty-two students during its first year in the city, divided evenly between Americans and non-Americans.²⁹ By 1940, after “the fifth year of intensive work in building up the Community School,” there were 112 students from eighteen countries. Prior to the first Pahlavi shah’s nationalization of foreign schools, Community School enrolled students of many nationalities, but it was designed for American missionary children. That changed during the 1939–40 academic year. “Probably the most significant event of the year for the school has been its adoption by the Mission as a Community School, rather than a school for mission children exclusively or principally.” The school principal, Maud Rowlee, explained why this was significant in the context of Pahlavi nationalism. “This means that the school may plan to go forward in the future regardless of the presence or absence of missionary children as … service to the youth of many nations gathered here by the demands of business and diplomacy.” In 1940, with other schools closing, Rowlee recommended that Community School “be developed to the limit of its large possibilities.”³⁰

Although Community School stayed open after educational nationalization, it was a rogue institution. Iranian officials explained that institutions like it were allowed to remain open “from motives of leniency and purely temporarily,” but, from the perspective of the Iranian government, they “had no standing or legal status.”³¹ This arrangement was acceptable to the Presbyterian Mission. With memories of Reza Shah’s nationalism and uncertainties about Mohammad Reza Shah’s policies, the missionaries wanted to avoid “the strait jacket of the Ministry of Education.”³² In the 1940s, the remaining missionary educators were “in exact agreement on one point that is … the all-important one.” They “would never favor the expenditure of one dollar on any educational effort that would once more put us in competition with Government schools and with our students required to take Government examinations.”³³ This arrangement helped the school stay open, but it also meant that it was neither accredited nor recognized by the Iranian government.

In 1940, the Fishers relocated from Hamadan to Tehran, where they ran the experimental school for the next decade. Commodore took over from Maud Rowlee as principal, and Franke taught classes and helped with administrative affairs. As other foreign schools closed, the Fishers continued working and enjoyed “absolute freedom.” The couple informed friends in fall 1940 that “our own future was very uncertain until we were asked to take charge of this sole remaining Mission school.”³⁴ While the principal, or headmaster, exercised administrative authority, they worked with a five-person school committee whose members were appointed annually by the Presbyterian Mission. At least three committee members had to be missionaries, and the others were either parents of students or prominent members of the American colony. On specific matters, such as the curriculum, the headmaster interfaced with the faculty governance structure and subgroups such as the “religious education committee.” Prior to the late 1960s, Community School was controlled by Presbyterian evangelicals.³⁵ Outside observers, including those with the US government, knew that, “The Community School is in a very real sense a private parochial school sponsored and maintained by the Presbyterian Church.”³⁶

Despite its religiosity, the school’s mission became less Presbyterian and more American during the Second World War. “Hundreds of soldiers have visited the school this year,” Commodore Fisher wrote in 1944. “The soldiers have broadened the horizons of our students and I believe we have helped to broaden the vision of the soldiers.”³⁷ The war broadened Commodore’s horizons, too, as he became content with conveying an American message to his students. As he saw it, Community School was “a definitely American school for the foreign community in Iran” with “a distinct mission to perform.” That mission was “to give some imprint of American idealism and to teach something of the Christian message to those who will go out to the ends of the earth.”³⁸ Community School was an evangelical school, but that was not why most parents sent their children there, or how Iranians understood it. Community School was a popular and rigorous English-language college-preparatory school that was marked on Iranian maps as the “American School.”³⁹

Whether the mission was Presbyterian or American, Community School was too foreign to remain on Central Compound next to the Evangelical Church of Tehran. It was evident to all, including Fisher, that Community School’s “American program and foreign atmosphere” was “not organized with the needs of Persia and … the Persians in mind.” More problematic for Iranian Christians was that “a foreign school for foreign children does not fit in with the idea of an indigenous church.” As the foreign colony in Tehran increased in size, so too did the daily stream of school traffic around Central Compound. “All of our students, foreigners, pass thru [sic] the Persian church yard a number of times a day and their automobiles line up along the street in front of the church,” especially when parents retrieved their children. Throughout the 1940s, Fisher routinely pressed his colleagues to move Community School to its own property.⁴⁰ Iranian Christians also insisted that the school move locations. When two Iranian church leaders petitioned their coreligionists in Tehran and New York, the Americans “voted to concur in the opinion … that the presence of the Community School in conjunction with the church and the school maintained by the church was an embarrassment.”⁴¹ In 1949, the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) sent the order from New York: “In view of the fact that the Board is unlikely to be able to furnish the necessary staff and funds for the reopening of the Teheran Hospital in the foreseeable future … the Teheran Hospital plant should be put to other use.”⁴² Community School therefore moved approximately two miles east, from the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound to the old Hospital Compound, where it opened for classes in fall 1952.

The move marked the end of the first phase of Community School’s history. Future generations of students, most of whom were not Christian, would be in a less overtly evangelical environment. Rather than attend a school adjacent to the Evangelical Church, students in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had their own campus. Community School’s move occurred one year after the retirement of Commodore and Franke Fisher, which marked a generational change in leadership. Their successors had less parochial conceptions of international education, and their views contributed to a shift in mission that complemented the school’s physical move to Kuche Marizkhaneh, or Hospital Alley, just off Jaleh Avenue. Rather than remain within the restrictive parameters of Presbyterianism and Americanism, Community School’s mission became more internationalist and, after 1967, increasingly Iranian.

Uniting Nations in Iran

During the second phase of Community School’s history in the 1950s and 1960s, the school’s internationalist ethos was understood in relation to the United Nations (UN). In 1941, Commodore Fisher found that it was “quite a League of Nations that we have every day.” By 1948, he wrote about “uniting nations in Iran.”⁴³ Missionary educationalists in Tehran were similar to their coreligionists on America’s mainline in championing the United Nations as an alliance to win the Second World War and, afterward, as an organization and metaphor for maintaining a “just and durable peace.” Midcentury Protestant internationalism assumed that, to borrow from the historian William Inboden, “isolationism had gone the way of the frontier circuit preacher.”⁴⁴ That internationalist ethos was the core of the Community School mission under the leadership of Richard Irvine, Fisher’s successor as headmaster from 1951 to 1967. Thereafter, the school entered its third and final phase, during which time it became an Iranian school.

Richard Irvine made the United Nations and the mission of Community School one and the same. Irvine was born in North Carolina but spent most of his youth in New Jersey, where he attended high school and college. He served in the US Army during the Second World War and then went to the Philippines to teach at the US Armed Forces Institute. After the war, Irvine earned a graduate degree in education from Rutgers University and replaced Fisher as headmaster of Community School.⁴⁵ When “Dick” and Mary Ann first arrived in Tehran in 1951, they were struck by the school’s distinctiveness. During his first year on the job, Irvine noted that “Community School occupies a unique position in Iran, perhaps in the world. It was organized by missionaries … for their children. It has become a project in international education.”⁴⁶ That was because the UN model made it possible for Christians and non-Christians to buy-in to the school’s internationalist ethos. Some at the school referenced the Old Testament book of Isaiah, speaking about the need for humans to “beat their swords into plowshares” and believing in the maxim that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”⁴⁷ Whatever the belief system, everyone at the school recited an international pledge to three flags: those of Imperial Iran, the United States, and the United Nations. In English, it went like this: “I pledge allegiance to my own country, and to the United Nations, of which it is a part. One world brotherhood of peaceful nations, with freedom and justice for all.”⁴⁸

The faculty supported and represented the ideals of the pledge. In 1958, the faculty came from multiple European and Asian countries and from across the United States.⁴⁹ Joan Rankin, who taught elementary school, was from America’s Pacific Northwest, and her roommates in a teachers’ house in downtown Tehran included “a New Yorker, one from North Carolina, a Filipino, [and] a gal from southern New Jersey.… So just name the accent you want to listen to and we’ve got it.”⁵⁰ In addition to American missionaries and teachers, the “backbone” of the faculty were women from Europe and Asia. The language department was particularly strong in this respect. Women from the French-speaking countries of Europe taught French, and high-powered Iranians taught Persian. Perhaps not knowing the entire story, students described Nayereh Ebtehaj-Samii as being “petite yet influential.” Her colleague, Parvin Amin, shared Richard Irvine’s alma mater in the United States, graduated from the Tehran School of Social Work, and was reputed to be a fount of “encyclopedic information about Iran.” In later years, Amin was remembered as having “been at the school as long as we can remember.” The same was true of Eva Meghdadpour, the German-born Iranian who worked with “calm efficiency” behind the front desk. Hykon Sahakian, an Armenian Iranian graduate of prewar Iran Bethel, was a teacher and administrator who was always ready with “tea and sympathy” and “altruistic firmness” when her students dropped by the office. “Thanks to her,” the students testified, “we know and respect the word ‘teacher.’ ” Over the decades, she also served in various administrative capacities, including as Irvine’s deputy and vice principal.⁵¹ These European and Iranian women were joined by teachers from Asian countries such as the Philippines, who were recruited as a “means of counteracting the made-in-America label” that was attached to Community School.⁵² At Community School, the faculty expanded the Del Be Del network beyond its Presbyterian American core.

Irvine and the faculty put students through a curriculum that was purposefully global. In January 1952, as other Americans worried about the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, Irvine reported that “the school is now engaged in a program looking toward the complete revision of curriculum so that pupils graduating will … have acquired a world cultural background.”⁵³ During the Irvine years, students studied the Old and New Testament, but they mostly took classes in the humanities, social studies, languages, mathematics, and sciences. The hope was that students would be prepared for college but also “learn more about religion—not only our own but others.” In the humanities and social sciences, “students turn their head from Asia to America,” and courses such as history were “made more enjoyable because the countries represented in the text, are also represented by students” in the classroom. In a globalizing world, the administration, faculty, and students knew that this “broader scope of knowledge” could “make present situations more understandable.” Still, late in the mission era, students in the upper levels attended chapel daily, sang psalms and hymns, and learned of the different ways to “put the vessel of life at His disposal.” There were also regular “morning assemblies,” often moderated by Tehran’s American preachers but featuring speakers on a range of subjects.⁵⁴ The school fused Christian precepts with a modern curriculum and a global perspective, and this educational mission extended into the extracurriculum during the 1950s and 1960s.

Anyone familiar with the Community School of the Irvine era typically recalls its “big annual fete” each year on “United Nations Day.”⁵⁵ October 24 was marked annually by students, faculty, parents, and diplomats in the city. They watched a “parade of flags,” judged an “international talent review,” and took part in a “prayer for peace.” All through the year, one could find the “flags of the nations” that “grace the auditorium.” UN Day was held no matter the global crisis, even in October 1962 “amidst mounting world tension due to the approach of Soviet missile-bound ships to the blockaded shores of Cuba.” In this way, new meaning was injected into the word “Community.” It was not only a place to receive an education. As a yearbook described the school: “It is a community of young people from many of the world’s nations. It is a community where all the major cultures of the world are brought together—where East meets West.”⁵⁶ The aim of UN Day, and Community School’s mission, was, as Irvine put it, to educate students who “will be better able than their predecessors to solve the problems of international relations … because they possess a wholesome nationalism coupled with a mature sense of membership in the community of nations.”⁵⁷

The Irvine era at Community School ended in 1967. It was then that Richard and Mary Ann Irvine parted ways from the Presbyterian Mission, left Community School, and began their own educational venture known as Iranzamin. In summer 1967, the Irvines told their friends that they would “work with another school,” announcing that “our motivation and concern continue to be essentially what they were when we were first sent to Tehran.”⁵⁸ In summer 1967, Irvine obtained a license from Iran’s Ministry of Education to open a coeducational English-language school for Iranian and international students in Tehran.⁵⁹ Also known as the Tehran International School, Iranzamin was one of the few schools in the world that offered an International Baccalaureate in 1968. A decade later, Iranzamin had nearly 1,500 students from fifty countries and an international faculty of 112 members.⁶⁰ Community School followed suit. Soon after the Presbyterian Mission closed in 1965, school leaders ended their quarter-century estrangement from the Iranian government and reconciled with the Ministry of Education. Reporting on Iranzamin and Community School, US diplomats in Tehran were pleased that, as of 1967, “both private schools now accept Ministry of Education supervision.” For that reason, “their graduates are eligible at last to compete for entrance into Iranian universities.”⁶¹

Thus began Community School’s post-1967 Iranian period. In the 1967–68 academic year, Community School was, for the first time, required to meet the curricular and administrative mandates of the Iranian Ministry of Education. The stewards of the school knew that, if they wished to remain open, they had little choice in the matter.⁶² In the past, the Iranian government did not recognize the school’s degrees, though they were valuable abroad. Now, the Pahlavi government bestowed legitimacy on them. In summer 1968, after his first year as the new headmaster of Community School, Douglas Hill wrote: “The most important development of the year was the granting of government recognition to the school making its diploma equivalent to that … offered by the Ministry of Education.” This not only applied to current and future students, but, as Hill explained, “This action is retroactive, covering all former graduates of the school.” People understood its authenticity because “the announcement of the recognition was made at Commencement,” where Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda delivered the address.⁶³ Hoveyda spoke regularly at commencement exercises, and the Del Be Del network interpreted his address in 1968 as a signal of “the pleasure of the Imperial Government with regard to the School as an inter-cultural expression in education.”⁶⁴

On campus, Iranian oversight changed the administrative structure and curriculum. Hill was a Presbyterian missionary and the American headmaster from 1967 to 1975, but Surur Amiri, an employee of the Ministry of Education, was the lead Iranian administrator. Hill was, for many reasons, “pleased with the appointment.”⁶⁵ Others were, too, as they knew Amiri as “an Iran Bethel alumna, a good friend, and a capable person who knows how to handle herself in Ministry circles.” Amiri’s appointment, in particular, but the Iranian government’s support for the school, more generally, was “everything we could ever have hoped for.”⁶⁶ Her title was “Persian Director,” whose primary charge was to oversee the Persian-language curriculum and exit exam, which were requirements for students with at least one Iranian parent.⁶⁷ Persianization was coupled with the continued secularization and internationalization of the curriculum, as chapel and other evangelical activity disappeared or became less conspicuous.⁶⁸

At the higher levels, Iranian oversight required the diversification and reorganization of the school’s governance structure. In 1967, three missionary-controlled decision-making bodies determined Community School’s future. They were the school’s Policy Committee, the administrative remnants of the Presbyterian Mission in Tehran, and the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR), which was the mission board in New York. To their collective mind, “this is not the time for Community School to become an independent institution.” Therefore, “It is to remain a project of the Commission at this time.” The compromises of 1967 were twofold: to register with the Iranian Ministry of Education as a “foreign” school, and to create a board of trustees to represent constituencies outside the Presbyterian network.⁶⁹ The implications of registering with the Iranian government were readily apparent in 1967, but it took five years before the independent board eclipsed American Presbyterian stalwarts in determining the mission of Community School.

The breaking point came in 1972, when the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (UPCUSA) dissolved COEMAR, which had, from New York, administered the church’s foreign missions since its inception in 1958. The Del Be Del network learned that, “As of June 17, 1972 the Community School began operation under a new independent, autonomous Board of Trustees.” The mission network put forward three members, and the six others came from “the Founders”—meaning state and corporate sponsors—and the “Parent-Faculty-Student Association.”⁷⁰ In the late 1960s, trustees included prominent Iranians such as Farough Farmanfarmaian.⁷¹ He was a major industrialist and philanthropist whose children attended Community School.⁷² In the early 1970s, Ghaffar Farmanfarmaian replaced him on the board and was its chairperson for much of the decade.⁷³ Similar to what Sattareh Farmanfarmaian did for the Clinic of Hope, Farough and Ghaffar Farmanfarmaian did for Community School by adapting it to an Iranian context. But it was not just the Farmanfarmaian family. There were other prominent Iranian trustees on the Community School board, including a former teacher, Nayereh Ebtehaj-Samii.⁷⁴

After 1972, at the height of the third phase of Community School’s history, traces of its evangelical past nearly disappeared as Iranian enrollments swelled. Hill retired in 1975, and his replacement, John Magagna, was a Navy veteran and educational professional with no ties to the Del Be Del network who understood Community as a “non-denominational school.”⁷⁵ When Magagna moved into Hill’s office, the school had 1,500 students, triple the size from the late 1960s.⁷⁶ During the twilight years of the monarchy, Empress Farah Pahlavi visited the school, which was still located on the compound of the old Presbyterian Mission Hospital, where the shahbanou was born nearly forty years prior. In her speech on May 28, 1977, Farah Pahlavi used the language of Commodore Fisher and Richard Irvine in describing the school as “a mini United Nations.”⁷⁷ Although the school scaled back its UN Day festivities in 1972–73, the empress, speaking in 1977, echoed the internationalist ethos of an earlier era.⁷⁸ Rhetoric aside, Community School was, in its third and final incarnation, an Iranian school. Just prior to the overthrow of the Pahlavis, there were even plans for Community School to relocate so that the municipality of Tehran could turn the campus into a public park and a historic landmark.⁷⁹

Educating Global Citizens

The UN epistemology of Community School worked because of the student body. As an international school, Community School was “traditional” in that it educated expatriate English-speakers in Tehran, but it was “non-traditional” because it opened to “host country nationals.” More important, it was an “ideological” school. This was not because of its evangelical or American affiliation, but, to borrow from scholars of international education, because of its commitment to “bringing together young people from different parts of the world to be educated together with a view to promoting global peace and understanding.”⁸⁰ During Community School’s three eras of history, young people from around the world, born roughly between 1930 and 1970, were socialized in an environment that instilled in them an understanding of what it meant to be an active member of the global community, or a global citizen. The students, then, were manifestations of the UN epistemology at the core of the school’s mission.⁸¹

During the 1940s, when Commodore Fisher ran the school on the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound, enrollments more than doubled, reaching nearly three hundred by decade’s end and never returning to prewar numbers. American students were in the minority every year.⁸² As the missionaries understood the situation, “The rapid development of Iran has brought in engineers and specialists from other countries, and its isolation and freedom from European quarrels have made it a haven for refugees.”⁸³ During the 1941–42 academic year, the largest national groupings were the fifty-nine students from Iraq and twenty-four from Czechoslovakia.⁸⁴ While the Iraqi and Czechoslovakian families arrived in Iran for different reasons, the Del Be Del community had embraced both refugee communities by the end of the 1940s.

Ties between Iraq and Iran go back centuries, but the Iraqi Jewish population at Community School was a product of the mid-twentieth century.⁸⁵ There was mass Jewish out-migration from Iraq between 1941 and 1951. For two days in early June 1941, a farhud, or anti-Jewish pogrom, followed the British military defeat of a pro-German Iraqi government in Baghdad. The violence compelled many Jews to leave Iraq and start new lives in other countries. Between 1948 and 1951, after the creation of Israel and the passage of discriminatory citizenship laws in Iraq, more Jews departed for good. By 1951, there were fifteen thousand in Iran.⁸⁶ Once in Iran, “Iraqi Jews” were, to borrow from Arlene Dallalfar, a Community School alumna-turned-professor, “a minority within a minority,” and “they negotiated their identities as Jews, cherishing the Arab heritage of their parents, while simultaneously forging an Iranian identity.”⁸⁷ There were other educational options for Iraqi Jews in Tehran, but Community School was a popular choice.⁸⁸

It was also a popular choice for families from Czechoslovakia. Thomas Edward Muller attended Community School, and he explained that Tehran’s Czech expatriates were part of “the technical and engineering elite.” Most of them moved to Iran to work on the country’s transportation infrastructure during the Second World War. After the war, they turned their attention to factories and power plants. Their relationship with Czechoslovakia soured in 1948 when communists seized power. “A monstrous betrayal by the allies now placed Czechoslovakia under the Soviet spell,” Muller wrote, which meant that a large population of anticommunist Czechs renounced their citizenship and were stateless in Tehran.⁸⁹ After 1948, American Presbyterians met refugees who, because their “political coloration is not in harmony with that now prevalent in Prague,” were in “the painful process of breaking their ties with the present regime.” They were also “making plans for their next moves and for ultimate settlement in some other country.”⁹⁰ For the time being, they were, like Iraqi Jews, refugeed in Iran.

Whether from Iraq or Czechoslovakia, Community School’s internationalist ethos resonated with its students. David and Harry Shamoon attended in the 1950s and 1960s, and their families were in Iran because of events in Iraq. Years later, both spoke about the impact of the school on their lives. “It was revolutionary,” David told an interviewer, “we were taught to be tolerant and respecting of all different cultures and backgrounds.” Despite the tendency of young people to form cliques, “the idea of diversity … was really hammered home to us” and, as a result, students learned the art of “getting along and just approaching each other on a human level.” Harry, or Haim, had a similar memory, stating that the idea “of embracing different cultures stuck with me” because Community School “was a place where people from all over the world could feel part of a school community.”⁹¹ Anna Starek Kostal, class of 1966, shared the sentiments of her classmates in recalling the school’s impact on her intellectual development, but also the significance of the Del Be Del network to her Czech family’s resettlement process.⁹²

In the 1950s and 1960s, when Richard Irvine was headmaster, the school struggled but succeeded in maintaining its international student body. That aim was threatened in the early 1950s because, with the start of the US aid program, the American colony in Tehran expanded in size. At Community School, the American population skyrocketed from 52 to 179 between 1950 and 1953.⁹³ Writing in 1954, Irvine surmised that American students began to “crowd our school plant” approximately “three years ago, when Point Four first came to Iran and when military missions here began to grow.”⁹⁴ To relieve the pressure, in 1954 the US embassy sponsored a school for Americans, the Tehran-American School. In contrast to Community School, which admitted international students and, after 1967, was licensed by the Iranian government’s Ministry of Education, the Tehran-American School only admitted US citizens, and it was accredited by educators in the state of Indiana.⁹⁵ Its creation enabled Community School to retain a cosmopolitan character, without becoming overrun by Americans.

During the Irvine era, students attended from all corners of the world, with two or three dozen nationalities represented in any given year. Enrollments stayed in the four hundreds through the late 1950s, and in 1960–61 there were just more than five hundred students: 35 percent Iranian, 33 percent American, and 17 percent Iraqi, in addition to others. At one point, Irvine counted eight religions, but about half were Christian in 1961, with 30 percent Jewish and 18 percent Muslim.⁹⁶ In 1966–67 there were 642 students, more than half of whom were Iranian, with only 29 students from fourteen Presbyterian missionary families.⁹⁷

Community School’s American students were in Tehran for various reasons. Michael Zirinsky, a historian and member of the class of 1960, explained this point. “Many of us,” Zirinsky stated, “were the children of American cold warriors.” They included the sons and daughters of diplomats, military advisers, aid workers, and businesspeople. In the early years, Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., the future general, attended the school. In the later years, the children of the US aid mission’s lead attorney, John Westberg, graduated from Community School. Whatever their reason for being in Tehran, these young Americans were dropped into an international learning environment. One of Zirinsky’s “strongest memories is of the massed flags of all our countries and the pledge we frequently recited.” Beyond the symbolism of the flags and pledge, many former students later in life married someone of a different background. Zirinsky concluded that “mixture may be our norm.”⁹⁸

Increasingly, more Community School students were Iranian. Prior to 1967, Iranians needed permission from the Ministry of Education to attend, but some received that permission and seeped into the student body.⁹⁹ Nesta Ramazani had a British mother and an Iranian father, and, in her day, Community School was the only English-language school in the city. Ramazani wrote that “I loved Community School from the very first day I stepped into its walls.” She graduated in 1949, when the school was on Central Compound. But even then, the school “had an international student body, with Americans in a clear minority.” Most of her “classmates were of mixed or foreign parentage,” and many were multilingual, which she remembered made for “a stimulating environment.” Despite the Christian affiliation, some elite Iranian families and their children appreciated that Community School was a coeducational place where young men and women “had the freedom of wearing clothing of our choice.”¹⁰⁰ But it also had an American reputation and an English-language curriculum that appealed to parents who wanted their children to study abroad. The Community School faculty knew that English was the “drawing card” for reaching Iran’s cosmopolitan elite, and that the student body was a “King’s mixture.”¹⁰¹ Quite literally: some of the Pahlavis attended the school.¹⁰²

After 1967, Iranians made the school their own. Kamyar Guivechi, for example, was born in Iran, lived for a time in the United States, and returned to Iran to graduate from Community School in the early 1970s. In Tehran, the decision to attend Community School “was kind-of a no-brainer.” Beyond the fact that the language of instruction was English, he told an interviewer that Community “was the school of choice” for his family “because of its multinational, multicultural setting.” For people who were socialized in this environment at a young age, “it touched their life in a unique way.”¹⁰³ The Iranian-American writer Tara Bahrampour shared similar memories about Community School at the elementary level in the mid-1970s. Although “most of my friends at school have at least one parent who is from somewhere else,” it was apparent that “so many of us are Iranian or some mix of Iranian.” Wherever they were from or whatever was going on in the world, Bahrampour’s cohort, “already odd and special in our walled-in school,” understood their differences but seemed to “have too much in common to worry about it.” Among this select group, students shared class notes, schoolyard gossip, and aspects of their family cultures ranging from language to food.¹⁰⁴

This was the essence of the “third culture kids” phenomenon.¹⁰⁵ If Community School’s mission became manifest, it was in the students. At the most fundamental level, as the historian Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet described her former school, it was a “site where girls and boys, Americans and Iranians, Jews and Muslims, once sat in class together and shared snacks during recess.”¹⁰⁶ It was those routine yet profound acts of living and learning together—in a particular place in East Tehran—that socialized Community School students to empathize with the people around them, grow to appreciate the world they shared, and either enter the Del Be Del network or become part of its extended transnational family.

Jane Doolittle and Iran Bethel

Jane Elizabeth Doolittle was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1899, and grew up in Yonkers, New York. She did her undergraduate work at Wells College and earned a graduate degree from the Teachers College at Columbia University. In college, she was a leader of the Student Volunteer Movement, whose mission was “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” Doolittle was a professional educator, but she never wavered from that religious mission. As she later professed, “I am a servant of God. I go where He leads.” Doolittle was in Iran from the 1920s through the 1970s, and her career coincided with the entire Pahlavi period. She ended up in Iran because, in response to a request from the Presbyterian Mission’s lead evangelist, William Miller, her Wells College classmates raised the requisite funds to send one of their own to Persia, and they chose Doolittle. On October 29, 1921, she wrote home with the news: “I’m in Tehran, at last.”¹⁰⁷

Doolittle’s assignment was at Iran Bethel, an elementary and secondary school for young Iranian women. Doolittle knew that Iran Bethel’s history began nearly a half-century before her arrival on the scene, when the Presbyterian Mission opened the first American girls’ school in Tehran in 1874.¹⁰⁸ Doolittle arrived in 1921, and in 1927 she became principal of Iran Bethel, a position she never relinquished until retirement in 1966.¹⁰⁹ The school was known as Nurbakhsh, or the “light-giving” school, from 1935 to 1940, during the brief existence of Sage College, which Doolittle and the women of the Presbyterian Mission ran for Iranian women.¹¹⁰ Those institutions—Iran Bethel, version 1.0—were nationalized by Reza Shah in 1940. Doolittle knew that, whatever the name, it was “always in the eyes of the Iranians known as ‘The American School for Girls.’ ”¹¹¹ This is how she described Iran Bethel’s mission: “Superficially it is a finishing school for girls.… Fundamentally it is an institution where we seek to find and use all opportunities which will make Iranian women … better fitted to meet their problems in life, to share in others’ needs, and to build a better world.”¹¹² In other words, “our aim has been to teach them to live, and to live abundantly.”¹¹³ While Community School survived educational nationalization in 1940, Iran Bethel 1.0 closed. But, in the 1940s, Doolittle regrouped under the school’s original name, and Iran Bethel, version 2.0, remained open through the 1960s.

Iran Bethel 2.0 had modest beginnings. After the school closed in 1940, Doolittle was in Iran without a workplace or a particular work assignment. She was younger than missionaries such as Samuel Martin Jordan, and more committed to the evangelical life than many of the Alborz College men, and thus felt compelled to stay. “What the coming year—or month, or week—will bring forth none of us know,” Doolittle wrote in August 1941. Like her colleagues, she soon found that “there is work to do, and plenty of it.”¹¹⁴ With Reza Shah’s abdication and the US occupation of Iran during the Second World War, the Presbyterians were optimistic about the future of their educational mission, and Doolittle interpreted her surroundings in these terms: “What wide, wide fields there are here untouched. So many hearts longing for just the human touch, the love and fellowship which this world so desperately needs.”¹¹⁵

Those fields were actually streets, in an area of downtown Tehran known as “the Lalezar.” While some had a Parisian reference point, others compared Lalezar Street to New York’s Broadway or called it “the Fifth Avenue of Tehran.” The street and the surrounding district fused Iranian and European architecture, boasted historic homes, and attracted visitors to its cinemas, theaters, restaurants, and hotels. It was, in the mid-twentieth century, “the hipster destination of its time.” American missionaries saw it as the “Mecca of the dandies,” and scholars described it as “a promenade for the perfumed youth of the city.” The buildings curved at street corners, and they had storefronts with electric lights for passers-by to do window-shopping for modern goods and traditional Persian handicrafts. Doolittle was always up for “an exciting adventure” on the street, or tea somewhere like Café Pars.¹¹⁶ From the Lalezar, Doolittle—a second cousin of the American social reformer Jane Addams, and a student of the progressive educator John Dewey—fused the social gospel with the educational mission in Tehran.¹¹⁷

What Addams called a “settlement house” in Chicago, Doolittle understood in Tehran as a “Christian caravanserai.” During the 1940s, some of her rented homes, which were for personal and professional use, were structured like a caravanserai, with courtyards leading up steps to rooms on either side. Animals roamed the outdoor spaces, and inside one saw that “children are sleeping under the corsie in winter, or spread on rugs in front court in summer.”¹¹⁸ Impoverished women, especially ones who were ill, harmed, deserted, or in need of childcare, came to Doolittle seeking assistance. When Doolittle heard “the knock at the door … I know it must be that of some poor wretch,” often with babies in their arms and “with expectancy written all over their faces.” Wherever she lived, “my door is still marked.”¹¹⁹

Doolittle was a professional educator, but she was also an evangelical who adjusted her mission during the Second World War to include humanitarian work. During the war years, Doolittle used aid dollars for “orgies of shopping” in the stores along Lalezar Street to purchase sweaters and other goods to distribute to clients “from one end of the city to the other.”¹²⁰ Doolittle was never alone, and most of her helpers were alumnae of the prewar Presbyterian education system, many of whom were Muslim women that made a living doing “government ‘welfare work.’ ” Though comfortable in their own careers, former students volunteered their time because they admired their mentor’s vision for melding education and social work. They told her: “Your methods are so different, and your reasons for doing it so different.”¹²¹ In 1943, Doolittle’s team doled out winter supplies to approximately one thousand individuals in more than two hundred families.¹²² During the war, it was an ad hoc relief operation, and Doolittle used her cellar to store “Red Cross supplies” and other humanitarian goods that “meant new life and hope to so many.”¹²³ Doolittle wrote at the time that “the growth in my activities was aided both by world conditions and by the addition of … two new rooms” to her home.¹²⁴

In addition to developing new lines of Christian witness during the Second World War, Doolittle quietly continued teaching young Iranian women, but at her home instead of at a schoolhouse. Mornings began with Doolittle greeting the students before she proceeded to “inspect faces, hands, noses” and ask them to “remedy the deficiencies.” They then made small talk “before lining up and talking about God a bit.” After completing the morning ritual with hymns, Doolittle ventured out into the city and turned over the little ones to her colleagues, most always Iran Bethel alumnae, “to teach them reading, writing, [and] arithmetic” for intellectual growth, along with physical education for the body and domestic skills for family life.¹²⁵ After running a caravanserai in the Lalezar district for five years, in 1945 Doolittle requested “a permanent center belonging to the Mission where such work can be developed without interruption, and where people will know where to find us.”¹²⁶ It would be another half-decade before Iran Bethel moved into a permanent structure, detached from Doolittle’s home.

The delay resulted from the Iranian government’s unclear policies toward foreign schools in the 1940s. Perhaps because of the school’s reputation, the Iranian Ministry of Education allowed Iran Bethel to stay open despite the fact that, unlike Community School, the students were Iranian. Recalling the unusual arrangements, Doolittle mused that, by 1946, “I’d been running this illegal school for some years.” In 1948, the Presbyterian Mission felt comfortable enough with its place in Pahlavi Iran to draw money from the Sage College settlement and purchase a property at 27 Diba Street.¹²⁷ By 1950, Doolittle spoke of the school and clinic collectively as the “Bethel Project,” but the status of the school remained ambiguous. Doolittle had to secure an operations permit each year, and, twenty years after Reza Shah’s nationalization decree, she was still “hoping to get something more permanent than a personal permit requiring annual renewal.” Most years, according to Doolittle, “Inspectors from the Ministry of Education come to see what we are doing, heartily approve, and tell us to continue unhampered.”¹²⁸

There was continuity and change between the pre- and post-1940 manifestations of Iran Bethel. As was the case in the past, most of the students at Iran Bethel 2.0 were daughters “of the privileged classes” who “for one reason or another do not wish to continue in the regular program of the Ministry of Education.” They were, according to Doolittle, “educated, cultured young women” and “with ideals and great ability, who long to be of use in the world.”¹²⁹ At Iran Bethel, they read the Bible and studied “the word in season” through the humanities, sciences, and vocational classes. There were also extracurricular programs, including humanitarian work with the underprivileged of Tehran. The total program aimed to produce the “Ideal Iran Bethel Girl”—an annual award given to a student who excelled in “all phases of Iran Bethel life.”¹³⁰ Doolittle inherited this pedagogical model from her predecessor and former colleague, Annie Boyce. She and Alam-e Nesvan, the women’s publication that Boyce coedited from 1921 to 1936, “placed emphasis on the connection between morality and cleanliness” within a civilizational discourse about “progress.” Their hope was that, even if students did not convert to Christianity, they would learn how to manage a household.¹³¹ After 1940, “home economics” were still “the magic words” at Iran Bethel, and the women of the Del Be Del network marveled at the school’s “home ec. lab,” which was equipped with a gas stove, refrigerator, and other modern appliances.¹³² A gendered conception of women’s education, imbued with American-style “domesticity,” was a point of continuity between the pre- and post-1940 manifestations of Iran Bethel.¹³³

The major change was that, after 1940, Doolittle ran a school and clinic: “Iran Bethel’s ‘other hand.’ ”¹³⁴ While service learning and humanitarianism had always been part of the Iran Bethel program, a clinic was now attached to the school. The major innovation, then, was the juxtaposition of elite education with in-house social and medical work. As one of Doolittle’s Iranian proteges described the dual mission: “Classes in the mornings are attended by the wealthy class of people so we take up a collection in the mornings and spend it in the afternoons with the clinic work. We bring the two classes together many times so that both can understand the need of the other.”¹³⁵ At the clinic, doctors were on hand, but the older students and alumnae did bookkeeping, dispensed milk, and served in other ways. A missionary teacher at Iran Bethel understood service learning as “an introduction to social work, where the women of Iran are increasingly realizing their responsibility,” which, when combined with coursework, transformed students into “concerned citizens of a new world.”¹³⁶

Iran Bethel 2.0 was the Presbyterian Mission’s most important educational institution for Iranian women, and its clinic in the Lalezar district rivaled the Clinic of Hope in South Tehran. Because of the American and Iranian women of the Del Be Del network, the Doolittle project, which regrouped as a Christian caravanserai during the Second World War, continued under the Iran Bethel name during the early Cold War. Iran Bethel’s mission was rooted in American evangelical culture and Doolittle’s personal vision, but the meaning and feeling of the Del Be Del network’s experience with Iranian feminism was a product of its place in downtown Tehran.

Professional Feminism

The feminism of Jane Doolittle’s circle of Iranian friends and colleagues was rooted in traditional and modern discourses and practices. On the one hand, the “professionalization of femininity,” to which Iran Bethel contributed, did not necessarily remove women from the private sphere, beyond time spent at finishing schools that taught skills for use in the home. On the other hand, the “professionalization of feminism” had, by the mid-twentieth century, created a cadre of working women with careers in Iran.¹³⁷ This professional feminism transcended the hierarchical relationships and domestic ideals of the Iran Bethel School, and Doolittle held her former students and Iranian partners in high esteem.¹³⁸ Foremost among them were Gertrude Nurollah, Akhtar Azadegan, and Fatemeh Behaeddin, all of whom were Christians and educators, along with Soqra Azarmi, a medical doctor. Early in life, the Presbyterian Mission’s institutions were gateways for these Iranian women and their families into the Del Be Del network. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, Doolittle’s mission was dependent on them and other professional Iranian women in the churches, schools, and clinics of Tehran.

Gertrude Nurollah did not work at Iran Bethel, but she was Doolittle’s closest confidant. Her name meant “light of God,” and she was an “Armenian-Jewess” whose father converted to evangelical Christianity. He was converted by a British group called the Church’s Ministry Among Jewish People, and he was baptized by an American missionary. Gertrude’s father studied in Britain and, “when he returned to Tehran, he wanted to marry a Christian girl.” He married Esther, an Armenian graduate of Iran Bethel. Their daughter, Gertrude, studied at Saint Katherine’s College, a teacher training college in England. Afterward, she assumed administrative responsibility of a school for girls that her father established. When it closed, she opened the Nur [Light] School and ran it for decades. It was a finishing school, much like Iran Bethel, which taught young Iranian women the English language and household trades such as sewing and cooking.¹³⁹ Gertrude Nurollah and Jane Doolittle lived together, and they were companions in life, partners in mission, and peers in the professional world.¹⁴⁰

Akhtar Azadegan, born in Tehran and educated in the Presbyterian school system, was a leader of the Evangelical Church of Iran. She attended Iran Bethel and, though born into a Jewish family, converted to Christianity when she was a student at the school.¹⁴¹ Midcentury Americans noticed that “she speaks English fluently, French sparingly, and Persian all the time at home.” She was open about the reason for her entry into the Del Be Del network. “If it had not been for American missions and missionaries,” she said, “I would never have heard the Gospel.” In the 1950s, she was “an ordained elder” of the Evangelical Church of Iran and was also active with its women’s association and education committee. In 1958, she represented Iran at the quadrennial meeting of Presbyterian women’s organizations at Purdue University in Indiana. It was a high-profile trip, with Azadegan and the other international Presbyterians meeting First Lady Eisenhower and having a congressional luncheon. In the US capital, “The group visited the church in Washington where President Eisenhower is a member.” Azadegan “sat in his pew” at the National Presbyterian Church and “breathed a prayer for a better understanding between countries and for the spread of Christianity throughout the world.”¹⁴²

Azadegan was also indispensable to Iran Bethel. The school was run by women, which made it different than most Presbyterian Mission institutions. Doolittle recalled that, early on, “The women missionaries finally revolted at having a man as the head of their school committee.”¹⁴³ In the mid-1960s, there were sixteen instructors, all of whom were women. Doolittle boasted of having “a fine loyal staff, half American and half Iranian, all working together for the progress of the girls.” Like Community School, Iran Bethel relied on career and short-term missionaries from the United States. Missionary women taught classes, as did everyone from the “wives of businessmen” to daughters of US embassy employees. The school also had “staunch national teachers who carry heavy loads,” with Azadegan working by Doolittle’s side for decades. Whatever their background, Doolittle found that all of the women at the school “have given their time and talents to us most graciously.”¹⁴⁴ Azadegan believed in the Del Be Del network’s religious and educational missions, and she worked in the administration at Iran Bethel’s successor, Damavand College, until the fall of the Pahlavis.¹⁴⁵

Fatemeh Behaeddin was another teacher and churchwoman of the Del Be Del network. Her family was Muslim, yet, at a young age, Behaeddin and one of her sisters were “given an education in Christian Mission schools, and won to Christian discipleship.”¹⁴⁶ After advancing through the Presbyterian school system, she chose education as a profession and received early-career mentoring from Doolittle as her personal secretary in Tehran.¹⁴⁷ Her professional life began in the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1938, she was the Evangelical Church of Iran’s delegate at an ecumenical conference in India. After the Second World War, she earned a graduate degree from her mentor’s alma mater, the Teachers College at Columbia University. More than anything, Behaeddin was known as the principal of the Mehr [Love] School.¹⁴⁸ Around 1938, she became principal of the school.¹⁴⁹ Because of her role in the Evangelical Church and the Mehr School, Behaeddin had an international reputation as “a noted interpreter of the Christian Woman’s place in the Near East.”¹⁵⁰

From the Mehr School, Behaeddin helped to manage the Evangelical Church’s schools. Separate from the Presbyterian Mission’s Community School and Iran Bethel, the Evangelical Church controlled four preuniversity schools, which were under the direction of the church’s education committee and the supervision of the Iranian Ministry of Education. Two of the four schools were in western Iran: Saadi in Kermanshah and Alvand in Hamadan. Of the 1,647 students in the church schools in the mid-1950s, Alvand enrolled nearly half of them. In Tehran were the Gohar and Mehr Schools, with Behaeddin running the latter and larger of the two. At the time, Mehr had more than four hundred students and was located on the Presbyterian Mission’s Central Compound. Despite the Christian affiliation, three of the four schools had faculty, staff, and students from different religious backgrounds. As Doolittle explained it, “Gohar continues to be our one completely Christian School, and is free to conduct a Christian program such as the other three cannot do.” Outside of Gohar, only a third of the students were Christians. Doolittle was involved with these church schools, and she worked with Iranian colleagues to cultivate a cohort of professional female Christian educators. For example, during the summers, Doolittle hosted a “teachers’ institute” at her cottage north of Tehran in the mountainous environs of Fasham.¹⁵¹ Therefore, Doolittle ran the Presbyterian Mission’s Iran Bethel and worked with Behaeddin and the schools of the Evangelical Church. Doolittle wrote in the late 1950s: “The Mehr Schools … demanded my time and interest, believing as I do that it is through our schools that we have the greatest influence and opportunity to win the youth of the country to Christ.”¹⁵²

As Azadegan and Behaeddin bolstered Doolittle’s educational mission, Soqra Azarmi was the lynchpin to Doolittle’s clinic. Azarmi earned a bachelor’s degree from the Presbyterian Mission’s Sage College in the late 1930s, and she moved fluidly between the Iranian and American poles of the Del Be Del network. She spoke Persian and English, and Americans found her to be “a retiring, soft-spoken …, intelligent young lady.” At Sage, she specialized in the sciences to prepare for a career in medicine. She volunteered at the Presbyterian Mission’s hospitals and clinics, and earned a doctorate from the University of Tehran’s Royal Medical School. Azarmi was part of the first generation of Iranian women to attend medical school, and, in the late 1940s, a former missionary teacher and a group of American women pulled together resources to support Azarmi’s postgraduate work in the United States. She spent time at New York University and was a resident at Chicago’s Women and Children’s Hospital, whose founder—Dr. Mary Harris Thompson—Azarmi admired. Like her “predecessor,” Azarmi was a “modern woman in medicine.” American newspapers described her as being “intensely interested in medicine as a pure science” and excited “to absorb some of the specialized aspects of that science at its origins—the laboratories, lecture halls, and hospitals of a highly advanced country.” Seeing New York City gave her “a sense of wonder,” but “she made no secret” that her “ideal” was to practice medicine in Iran.¹⁵³

Azarmi had her own career path, but, in Tehran, she volunteered her time and services to the Iran Bethel Clinic. Medical work required trained and licensed doctors, and Azarmi’s dedication to her mentor made it possible for Iran Bethel to have “a clinic of our own.” In 1949, Doolittle expressed “how deeply thankful I am now … since Soqra Azarmi, M.D.—a former student of mine who worked for years to fit herself for just this work—has started to operate this department for us.”¹⁵⁴ Their personal relationship ran deep, and Doolittle celebrated holidays with the Azarmi family.¹⁵⁵ Professionally, Dr. Azarmi served for many years as the resident at the Iran Bethel Clinic. More broadly, her career advanced in an Iranian milieu during the postwar decades. Azarmi was a lifesaving innovator in Iranian medicine in the 1960s, and by 1964 she was a professor at the University of Tehran.¹⁵⁶ She went again to the United States in the middle part of the decade to research at Johns Hopkins.¹⁵⁷ She then launched the Iranian Cancer Institute. Its director was a man who had, many years earlier, worked with Philip McDowell at the Presbyterian Mission Hospital in Tehran. When the institute opened, Azarmi asked Doolittle to raise awareness and sit on its board.¹⁵⁸

Whether their work was in a church, school, or clinic, the Iranian women of the Del Be Del network were professional feminists—each an example of the “capable woman” described by the historian Camron Michael Amin—whose mission was to serve the women of Tehran.¹⁵⁹ Nurollah, Azadegan, Behaeddin, and Azarmi were, in their own ways, Doolittle’s friends and colleagues. While some had been former students at Iran Bethel, Doolittle was, in the 1950s and 1960s, as dependent on them as they had been on her earlier in life. Doolittle did not hesitate to show gratitude: “And again I say, Thank God for Faith, and for women of Faith!!”¹⁶⁰

The Sociality of Suffrage

In addition to the professions, the Del Be Del network’s brand of feminism was reflected in Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s White Revolution in 1963. As the historian Liora Hendelman-Baavur wrote: “The White Revolution facilitated universal suffrage, accelerated women’s education and entry into the salaried workforce, and generated new images of modern women.”¹⁶¹ Of course, the Presbyterian Mission did not contribute to the formulation of the White Revolution, but Americans supported the inclusion of women’s suffrage among its first six planks in 1963. Moreover, the sociality of the Del Be Del network mediated the meaning and feeling of the suffrage moment, especially for Jane Doolittle’s circle of American and Iranian friends.

Their experience with women’s suffrage in the 1960s was similar to unveiling in the 1930s.¹⁶² Therefore, the scholar Nima Naghibi’s analysis of “moments of legislated unveiling and veiling” offers a way to understand women’s suffrage in Iran during a moment of authoritarian reform at the start of the White Revolution. In the mid-1930s, “Pahlavi and Western feminists applauded state-imposed unveiling as a symbol of social progress,” and in the early 1960s the Del Be Del network embraced the shah’s mission because it afforded them a platform for practicing “the politics of sisterhood … in second-wave and Pahlavi feminist discourses.”¹⁶³ Notwithstanding its political limitations, or perhaps because of them, American evangelicals were on the ground in Tehran to experience the suffrage moment firsthand in late Pahlavi Iran.

Jane Doolittle’s mission may have been an example of “imperial feminism,” but she contributed to the Iranian women’s suffrage movement through the cultivation and organization of the Iran Bethel alumnae.¹⁶⁴ The school’s graduates could join the Iran Bethel Alumnae Association, which was among the oldest women’s organizations in the country, having been established in 1915.¹⁶⁵ Decades later, in the 1950s, there was a proliferation of Iranian women’s organizations, and in 1959 Ashraf Pahlavi, the shah’s sister, gathered seventeen of them under the umbrella of the High Council of Women’s Organizations, which in 1966 became the Women’s Organization of Iran.¹⁶⁶ The Iran Bethel Alumnae Association was not among the initial members. The association was similar to the school in that it was not formally recognized by the Iranian government. Still, Doolittle studied the scene as women’s organizations “were encouraged to unite under one head,” and she realized that “a large percentage of the leaders of the various groups is drawn from among our graduates.”¹⁶⁷

One of those graduates was Nayereh Ebtehaj-Samii. She was known at Community School as a Persian teacher, but, in the late 1950s, individuals far removed from the Del Be Del network learned about “the part she played in the fight for women’s rights in Iran.” She regularly reminded people about how “as a young woman she had been forced to wear a veil.” Instead of a black chador that left only the face showing, she could now attend public events “smartly dressed in black hat and dress and neat straw-colored pumps.” The ability of women to “show their faces” was, for Ebtehaj-Samii, “symbolic of the progress women have made” in Iran and the Middle East during the twentieth century. In 1958, Ebtehaj-Samii visited the United States on a tour organized by a nongovernmental organization called the Committee of Correspondence, which supported women’s suffrage globally. While not an advocate of “aggressive” activism, she worked diligently to create a situation whereby, in the late 1950s, “the future for Iran’s women … seems bright.” According to Ebtehaj-Samii: “There is a great deal of awakening.… Pretty soon we hope to get the right to vote.”¹⁶⁸

Iranian women from across the social spectrum mobilized as women’s suffrage was introduced with the White Revolution in 1963.¹⁶⁹ Later that year, Doolittle was proud to report that two former Iran Bethel students were among the first six female parliamentarians in Iranian history.¹⁷⁰ They were Mehrangiz Dowlatshahi and Nayereh Ebtehaj-Samii, both of whom were elected by the voters, men and women alike, of their hometowns to represent Kermanshah and Rasht, respectively, in the twenty-first Majles.¹⁷¹

Because Ebtehaj-Samii had taught at Community School, the American faculty spent time with her in the workplace and in the town. In March 1962, the Community School teacher Joan Rankin stopped by the house of Ebtehaj-Samii, whom she then knew as “the Persian teacher in our school,” to deliver a Nowruz gift.¹⁷² After 1963, encounters in the city were more exciting to write home about. “Right now I’m at the beauty parlor with Aunt Hazel,” began one of Rankin’s letters. “When we came in a friend of mine, Mrs. Samii, a member of parliament, former teacher at Community School[,] was here.” Rankin was so thrilled to reconnect with her former colleague that she penned the letter right now, in the beauty parlor. It was exhilarating to Rankin that, despite Ebtehaj-Samii’s move from Community School to the Majles, “she would like to come over and call on us.”¹⁷³ Rankin’s aunt, Hazel Fuller, was a teacher at Iran Bethel, and she also wrote home about the encounter. “This morning I had my hair done … and met a teacher who teaches at Joan’s school.” It was Ebtehaj-Samii, “a graduate of Iran Bethel and a member of parliament.” As their letters indicate, American women of different generations found similar meaning in Iran’s suffrage moment. They knew that “many of the graduates of Iran Bethel have important positions,” and, through the Del Be Del network, they got to know them and experience a social scene that was “a mixture of Persian and American culture.”¹⁷⁴ Beyond private encounters in homes and businesses, the Del Be Del network experienced the sociality of suffrage at two women’s conferences in Tehran in the mid-1960s.

The first was the Committee of Correspondence conference in 1963. That April, the organization that sponsored Ebtehaj-Samii’s US tour five years earlier, and that championed “the contributions women can make to their community and nation,” held one of its “most notable” international “workshops” in Tehran.¹⁷⁵ Many of the Iranian women at the workshop were known to American diplomats and missionaries in Tehran. Some of them had, in the preceding decade, received US government scholarships to study abroad. Reporting on the Committee of Correspondence conference, US diplomats found that “most of our women grant returnees … took an active role in this conference which was termed as ‘highly successful.’ ” One returnee was Effat Samiian, who was known to diplomats as a secretary of the High Council of Women’s Organizations.¹⁷⁶ In the early 1960s, Doolittle knew her as a professional educator and president of the Iran Bethel Alumnae Association.¹⁷⁷ The Iran Bethel alumnae were perennially active, but “especially in this year of women’s emancipation in Iran,” Doolittle reported in 1963. At the Committee of Correspondence workshop, she wrote that “it was gratifying to find that over half of the Iranian delegates were Iran Bethel graduates who continue to play their leading role in working for the progress of women.”¹⁷⁸ Doolittle kept the readers of the Del Be Del newsletter informed about the conference, which was held at Tehran’s brand new Royal Hilton Hotel, lasted a week, involved women from as many as fifty countries, and seemed to mark “a day of revolution and reform in the Christian work in Iran.”¹⁷⁹

The second event, in March 1965, was the UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) conference on the status of women. Joan Rankin wrote home on multiple occasions about how she and other women from Community School and Iran Bethel attended sessions of the “big” UN meeting, which was also held at the Royal Hilton Hotel in northern Tehran.¹⁸⁰ Rankin’s aunt, Hazel Fuller, also wrote about how the group “went to a luncheon with the teachers and Miss Doolittle” for the occasion of “the big world meeting of women of [the] United Nations,” which involved four hundred attendees from more than twenty countries. As always, “the alumni from Iran Bethel were very active,” and the women of the Del Be Del network appreciated that “the two parliament members came to our table.” In addition to sharing in the progress of Iranian women, the UNESCO event created different registers of meaning and feeling for the women in the banquet halls. Hazel Fuller, for one, loved being around women from all over the world who were “dinner guests at our table.” Whomever her company, Hazel wrote, “I sure had a good time just being an American.”¹⁸¹ These women’s conferences in 1963 and 1965—and the intimacy among the perceived bigness of it all—coincided with the final years of Doolittle’s missionary career and conditioned the sociality of suffrage for Americans in Tehran.

The Presbyterian Mission closed in 1965, Doolittle retired in 1966, and, thereafter, the Iran Bethel Alumnae Association, along with the clinic and school, were reinvented. In December 1964, the alumnae association, which had two hundred active members and whose president was Surur Amiri, “promise our full support” to carry on Doolittle’s “unparalleled and valuable” work in Iran.¹⁸² The group’s influence in Iran was on the rise, with Doolittle reporting in 1965 that the alumnae association “has finally become an officially recognized organization, engaged in activities for the advancement of women in society.”¹⁸³ Despite formal retirement in 1966, Doolittle lived in Tehran until 1978, and during those twelve years she sustained personal and professional relationships with her former students. On a personal level, former students celebrated their mentor and were Doolittle’s biggest champions during her last decade in the country.¹⁸⁴ On a professional level, they ensured that the Iran Bethel Clinic survived in the form of the Doolittle Clinic. With the Presbyterian Mission closed, Iran Bethel’s extended “family” created a “Doolittle Fund” to purchase a new property for the clinic and support its operating costs. It opened in 1966, and the alumnae volunteered with medical doctors in a modernized Christian caravanserai in the Lalezar district.¹⁸⁵ The Doolittle Clinic remained open through the 1970s.¹⁸⁶ Finally, the Iran Bethel School transformed into Damavand College.

The Iran Bethel School produced 550 graduates by the time Doolittle awarded diplomas to her final class in 1966.¹⁸⁷ In 1966, as Doolittle signed off, she hoped that the “Iran Bethel School may have a new and inspiring future under the direction of Miss [Frances Mecca] Gray.”¹⁸⁸ Doolittle continued to run her clinic, but it was up to Gray, the former president of the Beirut College for Women, to determine whether “the school should be either upgraded or closed.”¹⁸⁹ Gray discovered that “this school has had a notable record of achievement and has gained a position of prestige in the country.” She concluded that “the light in the field of women’s education,” while already bright, could burn “with a brighter flame.” Rather than close Iran Bethel, she would transform the finishing school into a world-class university.¹⁹⁰ Gray expressed her logic in 1967:

Since Iran Bethel was the first and … finest school for young women in this land, it would be easy to rest on past laurels and recount the flow … of the year as one more bead on a lovely rosary of memory. In our era, however, time does not flow … it catapults in torrents, and one must look sharply ahead or suffer shipwreck.¹⁹¹

In fall 1968, Iran Bethel reopened as Damavand College, a four-year liberal arts college with a license from the Ministry of Education to offer bachelor’s degrees to Iranian women. The curriculum was based on a liberal arts program, the president reported to a board of trustees, and donors supported the college in Iran and from abroad.¹⁹² In 1971, a half-decade before her visit to Community School, Empress Farah Pahlavi broke ground near Niavaran Palace on a new Damavand campus “dedicated to the humane studies and the liberating arts.”¹⁹³ Damavand graduated its first class in 1972, and the new campus opened in 1975. At the end of Gray’s presidency, there were 670 students, thirty-seven full-time faculty, and twelve administrators. Before departing, she reflected on the college’s place in the landscape of 1970s Tehran: “Last evening I rode out along Jordan Boulevard … to the site of Damavand College. In a sweeping arc like the form of an historic Iranian caravans[e]rai the walls and towers of the new College are rising.”¹⁹⁴

Jane Doolittle’s legacy was on par with the boulevard’s namesake, Samuel Martin Jordan of Alborz College. When asked about her “greatest achievement,” Doolittle said this: It was “the fact that I re-opened classes for the girls in 1940, after the schools were closed.… If I hadn’t kept the girls’ school open, there wouldn’t have developed any Damavand College.”¹⁹⁵ The American and Iranian women of the Del Be Del network would have agreed with this assessment, as did some of the Pahlavis. In the mid-1970s, Doolittle was excited to receive “a beautifully written letter of appreciation from Ashraf [Pahlavi] for what I had done along educational lines.”¹⁹⁶ More broadly, as Iran Bethel gave way to Damavand, it was clear to all that “the Royal Family is generously backing the College.”¹⁹⁷

Rather than close foreign schools, as his father attempted to do, the last shah kept them open. The Presbyterian Mission’s schools were private institutions, but after 1965 Community School and Iran Bethel moved under the jurisdiction of international boards of trustees and the Iranian government’s Ministry of Education. Instead of a hard takeover, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s approach to foreign schools was soft nationalization. The transformation of Community School and Iran Bethel, and the creation of Iranzamin and Damavand, were byproducts of a revolution in educational expectations that swept through Iranian society. Those expectations grew in the late 1960s and 1970s.¹⁹⁸

Especially after the closure of the Presbyterian Mission in 1965, Community School and Iran Bethel functioned as “parastates” in Tehran. Scholars have employed this framework to explain how, in the United States, the federal government relied on “intermediary institutions” and “third-party providers”—such as schools and nongovernmental organizations—to promote local reforms while avoiding the political stigma that is often attached to federal programming in a country with a citizenry hypersensitive about centralized authority. This was why, according to the historian Christopher Loss, reformers in Washington “relied on institutions at least once removed from the federal government’s immediate family of bureaucratic agencies,” especially during the eras of the New Deal and Great Society.¹⁹⁹ In Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah used Community School and Iran Bethel as parastates to experiment with coeducation and women’s education, without formally renouncing his father’s position on nationalization. Keeping the schools open also made his American allies happy. There is reason to believe that the shah saw a reflection of his mamuriyat in Community School and Iran Bethel.

At the same time, the schools were, like other institutional manifestations of the old and new missions in Tehran, incubators of international and interreligious relationships, and gateways into the socio-affective world of the Del Be Del community. The same was true of the associations that Americans and Iranians established during the twentieth century.