Mansoureh Shojaei

Mansoureh Shojaee (Persian: منصوره شجاعی‎; born 21 August 1958 in Tehran, Iran), is a leading Iranian women’s rights activist and writer.

Mansoureh Shojaee was born in Tehran in 1958. For over 20 years, she has been one of the leaders of the Iranian women’s rights movement, and her involvement in politics spans over 30 years. She was a librarian at the National Library in Tehran for 22 years and worked as a journalist, freelance writer, and literary French translator. From 1994 to 2004, as part of the Children’s Book Council of Iran (IBBYP – International Board on Books for Young People), she worked with blind children and enabled them to access literature by teaching them the use of audiobooks. For her efforts, she received the 2010 Testimonial Statute Honors Award from the IBBYP. She also worked with other organizations including UNICEF to develop traveling libraries geared towards Iranian women and children. A close confidant of Shirin Ebadi (the Iranian 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate living in exile in London), Mansoureh Shojaee was committed to fulfilling Ebadi’s dream of an Iranian women’s museum. The project was scheduled to start in the Banu library in Evaz in southwest Iran but was banned in the early stages. In 2000, Mansoureh Shojaee co-founded (with the journalist, feminist and political activist Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani and other like-minded women) the women’s cultural center Markaze Farhangi-ye zanab, where she opened the Women’s Library Sadige Dolatabadi in 2003. She is one of the initiators of the One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality and co-founder of the website The Feminist School. Because of her dedicated efforts, she was imprisoned several times, most recently on 27 December 2009. After a month, she was released on bail and was free to leave Iran. Having already suffered a four-year travel ban, she promptly went into exile. She was initially accepted at the Heinrich Böll Foundation and was part of the Writers in Exile Program from 2011 until 2013. In 2013, her book ‘Sharzade’s Sisters’ was published. She continues to work as a women’s rights activist, writer, and journalist while in exile. In 2007, Mansoureh Shojaee studied in The Hague at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, for a Master’s in Human Rights, Gender & Conflict Studies.

In 2020, she founded Iran Women’s Movement Documentation Center (IranWomen.Center) as a platform that brings all the projects together. IranWomen.Center is a platform where you can find the recent projects and support the upcoming projects of Mrs. M. Shojaee and her companions.