Early Life, 1941-1970
Mahnaz Afkhami was born Mahnaz Ebrahimi in 1941 in Kerman, Iran where she lived with her mother, Ferdows, her father, Majid, and her two younger siblings, Hamid and Farah. Mahnaz and her family lived together on a family compound where both of her paternal grandparents were landowners. During this time, Mahnaz, along with her brother Hamid, attended a local Zoroastrian school. Throughout her childhood, Mahnaz was surrounded by her extended family and fondly remembers group trips to an oasis where the family would enjoy wine, song, and dance.
When Mahnaz was eleven years old, her parents divorced. After the divorce, Ferdows, Mahnaz and her siblings lived with their maternal grandmother, Tooba Naficy, in Tehran, Iran. Tooba, who had raised Ferdows as a single mother, ran her own tailoring business in Kerman and employed several local young women. A year after moving to Tehran, Ferdows, who had left university to marry Majid, moved to the United States to finish her education.
In September of 1956, Mahnaz became the first of her siblings to leave Iran and join her mother in the United States. For a short time in San Francisco, California, she attended Mission Dolores, a local Catholic school. Soon after, Mahnaz, in order to expedite her "Americanization", moved in with an American family in Seattle where she attended Roosevelt High School, a local public school. After graduating at the age of sixteen, she moved back to San Francisco to live with her mother and enroll in San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University).
During her years in San Francisco, Mahnaz met Gholam Reza Afkhami, who she quickly fell in love with and married. In 1961, Mahnaz and Gholam moved to Monterey and both worked at the Defense Language Institute there. In March of 1964, Mahnaz and Gholam had their son, Babak Afkhami. During this time, both Mahnaz and Gholam also attended graduate school. In 1965, Gholam received a teaching assistantship and the couple moved to Boulder, Colorado where Mahnaz worked for the journal Abstracts of English Studies.
Returning to Iran in 1967, Mahnaz began working as a literature professor and Chair of the English Department at the National University of Iran. During this time, she worked with her female students to organize the University Women's Association which would eventually lead to her work with the Women's Organization of Iran.
