Bread Six Cents Apiece: Elizabeth Stewart Writes from Tehran

In Issue 3 of Volume 10 of the Star of the West, in late 1918, the editors printed a letter from Elizabeth H. Stewart, an American Bahá'í teacher who had followed Dr. Susan Moody to Tehran in the early 1910s. The letter was dated November 1918 — the very month of the Armistice in Europe, although in Tehran, remote from the front lines but ravaged by the indirect effects of the war, the worst was not yet clearly past.

Stewart had two reports to make.

The first was about the basic conditions of the city. The Persian capital had been overwhelmed by the shortages of the final war years. The grain harvests had been disrupted; the caravans had thinned; the prices in the bazaar had risen to levels Persian working families could not pay.

Eggs have been six cents apiece, bread very poor and so high that I have made it for a long time.

Stewart's letter is exact about the small details. Six cents for an egg in a country where the daily wage of a labourer was itself a few cents. Bread so poor and so expensive that she had been baking her own for many weeks. The picture was one her American readers would have recognized only abstractly: in Chicago and Boston, the war had brought hardship, but nothing on this scale.

The second report was the surprising one.

The friends had been continuing the regular meetings of the Tehran Bahá'í community throughout the war. Stewart had been helping to organize teaching gatherings — small groups of seekers and friends meeting in private homes for conversation about the Faith. In the months of 1918 something unprecedented had begun to happen. The Persian Bahá'í men of the city, who in the older custom of their society had attended such meetings alone, had begun bringing their wives.

Stewart noted the development as the historic shift it was. The Persian women had not, in the social conventions of the country, been admitted to the public-religious life of their husbands. The Bahá'í teaching that men and women were equal in the sight of God had been received intellectually by the Persian friends for years; now, under the pressure of the war and the slow inward work of the teaching itself, the practice was beginning to follow the conviction. The husbands were inviting the wives. The wives were coming. The meetings looked, for the first time, like the kind of meetings the Master had described.

The Star of the West printed both halves of Stewart's letter — the bread at six cents, the wives at the meetings — without commentary. The juxtaposition spoke for itself. In a city stripped of even the basics of food, the deeper revolution the Bahá'í Faith had been carrying for half a century had quietly taken its next visible step. The American friends, reading the letter from a Chicago magazine in their warm parlours, had been given a glimpse of how the work goes forward in places no comfort accompanies it.

Source: Star of the West, Volume 10, Issue 3 (November 1918), letter from Elizabeth H. Stewart in Tehran. Public domain text from bahai-library.com.

Editors, S. O. T. W.. (1918). *Star of the West*. Bahai News Service. https://bahai-library.com/star_of_the_west_volume_1