Qudsiyyih Khanum Ashraf
persian religious educator
Qudsiyyih Khanum Ashraf (Persian: قدسیه خانم اشرف; 22 November 1889 – 16 April 1976), also known as Qodṣiya Maryam Ašraf or Ghodsia Ashraf Khanum, was an Iranian religious educator; she is considered one of the first Iranian women to be educated in the United States.
Early life
Qudsiyyih Ashraf was born in Majidabad, near Tehran, the daughter of Mirza Fazl'ullah Khan and Ṣafiya-Monavvar Khānom. Her father was a surveyor. She attended the American School for Girls in Tehran. In 1911, she traveled to the United States, in the care of an American Bahá'i, lawyer Louis G. Gregory, for the last leg of the journey (England to New York).
Ashraf attended the Lewis Institute in Chicago, the first woman from Iran to hold a scholarship from the American Bahá'i community, through the Persian-American Educational Society. She earned a bachelor's degree at Boston University in 1917, and also completed a first aid certificate from the American Red Cross in Boston that year. She earned a master's degree at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1918. She returned to Iran in 1919. She often gave lectures and interviews during her student years in the United States, always emphasizing her love of learning and her optimism about Persian women's futures: "It gives me joy to think of the freedom which is coming to the women of my country through the granting of a constitution," she informed a Pittsburgh reporter in 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Qudsiyyih Khanum Ashraf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.