Mansoureh Shojaee was a management student at the Higher School of Commerce in Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and was expelled from the university at the beginning of the 1983 Cultural Revolution, a plan by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to Islamize universities. After a few years, she continued her university education in French translation. She was a member of the board of directors of the Society of Women Fighting Environmental Pollution from the early 1990s for two years.

Shojaee was repeatedly interrogated for her work on women's rights and for publishing articles in various newspapers. Her passport was confiscated in 2006 by the Ministry of Intelligence during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency.

Mansoureh Shojaee started a project to “create a museum of the social history of Iranian women” in 2008, but after the events of the 2009 elections and the popular protests against the results of this election, she was arrested at her home on December 28, 2009. She was then transferred to Evin Prison, where Ministry of Intelligence interrogators forced her to halt her plans for building the museum. Shojaee was released from prison a month later on a 250 million tomans bail.

Shortly after her release on bail, she was persecuted and threatened by security forces again and was forced to leave her home and city. Finally, after a four-year ban from leaving the country, Nasrin Sotoudeh, a famous Iranian lawyer, succeeded in lifting the ban on her leaving the country. Shojaee traveled to Germany in the summer of 2010 to rest and visit her relatives, but a month later, her lawyer received a summons from the Evin Prison Prosecutor's Office.

The summons prompted her to delay her return. In January 2011 she received an invitation from PEN Centre Germany to live in Germany. Mansoureh Shojaee was tried in absentia in June 2015 by Branch 28 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court without the presence of a lawyer. She was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “propaganda against regime” and “collusion against the regime” and decided to never return to Iran.

Mansoureh Shojaee then went on to study human rights and gender studies at Erasmus University's Institute of Social Studies in 2014 as a graduate student, and is currently working as a researcher with the International Institute of Social Studies.

This author and translator has published research for many years in the quarterly Ketab (Book) publication and the magazine Zanan, jense dovom (Women, the Second Sex) and several other magazine, over many years, which has resulted in hundreds of articles and translations. In 2013, she published the book Shahrzad Sisters and several other short stories in German.