Harems, Households, and Gendered Space: Revisiting the Women’s Quarter in Late 19th Century Golestan Palace

The women’s quarter of Golestan Palace, where Nasser al-Din Shah’s many female relatives, wives, children, and differing classes of maids and servants resided, is a popular trope in European accounts of late 19th century Iran. Within such accounts, much of the representation of this space and the women that occupied it, has been seeped in orientalist language, which presented harems as idealized or barbaric domestic spaces, and as part of a timeless institution of Islamic culture. This paper critically engages with the dominant discourses about Nasser al-Din Shah’s harem in Western literature, through comparing and contrasting them with Persian narratives from within the harem. I will rely on primary sources including diaries, letters and journal entries from Taj Saltana, and Forough ed-Dowleh (both daughters of Nasser al-Din Shah), Abbas Mirza Zell al-Soltan (the Shah’s son), and E’temad al-Saltana (one of the Shah’s confidants who secretly recorded a daily journal of court affairs), and others, in order to provide a more complex analysis of this uniquely gendered space. The paper argues that in fact, for its time, the woman’s quarter of Nasser al-Din Shah’s court was one of the most economically and racially diverse spaces in Iran, housing various classes of Persian women as well as migrant women from Africa, Caucasia and Eastern Europe, their children, eunuchs and a host of both male relatives and non-relatives that had access or were sneaked into the court on a regular basis. This paper uses various narratives about this harem to examine some of the intimate and affective bonds that existed amongst its constituents, as well as explore the diverse kinds of powers they yielded within the royal court.