Introduction for The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979

INTRODUCTION

Min(d)ing the Gap

One of the earliest textual references to Armenia (Armina) as a geopolitical entity is Iranian. The earliest visual depiction of distinctly Armenian identity is also Iranian. Darius I’s cuneiform inscription at Behistun took a visual turn on the Apadana Staircase. The reliefs depict subject people of the ancient world, including an Armenian delegation bearing gifts to the Achaemenid king. From antiquity on, the intertwined histories of Armenians and Iranians merge and diverge throughout the centuries to produce an asymmetric but synergetic relationship between kings, princes, vassals, generals, merchants, revolutionaries, activists, artisans, and architects who dot the historiography of both geographies and cultures. This historiography is constituted mainly of the history of men, against which the production of the history of Irano-Armenian women poses all sorts of challenges laced with a myriad of missing parts. Yet, the oldest, and therefore the longest-functioning, Iranian women’s organization is Armenian.

This book is the first study that examines the history of Armenian women in modern Iran, from Naser al-Din Shah’s emerging seasoned reign in the 1860s to the 1979 fall of the Pahlavi dynasty. It traces the shifting relationship between Iran’s central nodes of power (absolute monarchy and state), the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions (Church and political parties), and its Armenian female subjects (minoritized and marginalized due to ethnicity and gender) in the larger matrix of Qajar and Pahlavi Iran. This introduction expands on the historiographical and methodological challenges of reconstructing a century-long history accentuated by absent or neglected evidence and persistent silences. Covering the period between 1860 and 1899, Part I traces the discursive mechanism through which Irano-Armenian women entered the domain of public representation by first stepping into photo studios as sitters of an ethnographic type and then as advocates of girls’ secular education. In 1871, they established Iran’s first women’s organization. By tracing the volatile and revolutionary years between 1892 and 1925, Part II reveals the workings of the volunteer ethos that fueled the bourgeoning of Armenian women’s organizations in Isfahan, Azerbaijan, and Gilan Provinces with radical goals and bylaws. The Armenian and broader Iranian “self-enlightenment” and constitutionalist commitments of these small units led to the most intense period of solidarity between Muslim-Iranian and Irano-Armenian women.

Moving to the foundational era of modernization from 1925 to 1958, Part III traces the contestation of the emerging New Armenian Woman by Iran’s Armenian-language printing press and other patriarchal institutions, including the Armenian Apostolic Church, paralleled by the birth of a new women’s organization that embodied an unprecedented vision of Armenian feminist intellectualism. Part IV lays bare the golden age of Irano-Armenian women’s activism between 1960 and 1977 within the wider context of the Iranian feminist movement overseen by the state. By then, Armenian women’s organizations directly engaged with the Iranian state and the monarchy as sovereign and public advocates of education, high culture, and women’s rights. Each part is launched with an image of one or multiple Irano-Armenian women that encapsulates the historical contents and artistic medium of the two chapters that follow. Our detailed, almost fetishistic, mode of describing the women in these four images appropriates art-historical methods to reclaim women, empower them, and make them speak through the very things (i.e., attire, makeup, jewelry, accessories, ornamentation, domestic objects, and furniture) that have been employed to objectify, sexualize, and minoritize them throughout history. A succinct conclusion denotes the abrupt termination of the feminist momentum of these organizations with the unraveling of the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Europe’s expansionist imperial ambitions in modern Iran percolated new facets into the old relationship between the Qajar and Pahlavi states and their largest Christian subjects, the Irano-Armenian communities. The ruling elite of both dynasties, with some exceptions, deployed long-standing sociocultural practices of Persianate “conviviality” that continued to “recogniz[e] the important place of minorities in the country’s history and national fabric.”³ The 1906 Constitution played a crucial role in demarcating the position of religious groups, recognizing only Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians (largely Armenians and Assyrians), and granting citizenship to all, thus gradually leading to an increased “integration of non-Muslims in Iranian society.”⁴ As Houchang Chehabi astutely points out, however, the constitutional privileging of Twelver Shiʿism—the state religion and that of the overwhelming majority of Iran’s population—rendered “certain positions . . . off limits to non-Muslims,” thus constructing a “glass ceiling” that limited the extent to which non-Muslims could rise in the government and military. For example, while absolute monarchs such as Fath Ali Shah, Naser al-Din Shah, and Mozaffar al-Din Shah appointed ethno-religious Armenian ambassadors or generals to represent Iran in international or military arenas, that was no longer possible after the promulgation of the Constitution. The majoritarian state and society and its Armenian communities devised alternative mechanisms to carry forward their symbiotic engagements. The study thus proposes a remapping of the conventional boundaries of Iranian modernity to the extent that national Iranian canonical history can be enriched with multiple minoritarian interventions by embracing the margins. This study’s historical, art-historical, and methodological—including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, feminism, and critical theory—interventions challenge Iranian and Armenian nationalist, androcentric, and state-centrist histories, a stepping-stone for others to expand.

The second significance of Irano-Armenian women’s organizational history explored here rests in its impact on the local and global ethno-religious communities in which they operated. Internally, although Irano-Armenians were few in number (70,000 to 250,000 during the period under study) and members of its women’s organizations were even fewer (ranging from 20 to 250 for any given organization at any given time), the impact of their volunteer work touched the lives of most members of the Irano-Armenian communities if they chose to live within the institutional and identity structures of that community. Within this communal dynamics, every child who attended school, every underprivileged individual who received aid or achieved literacy, every person who donated to charity, every elderly person who needed food and shelter, every refugee and internal migrant who was given care, every exile who found sanctuary, every emerging artist who secured an exhibition, every woman who aspired to public life (at least until the 1960s), and every student who received a scholarship to study abroad were touched by these women’s organizations. They were the social welfare network that did not otherwise exist and the modernist opportunities that had not yet been presented to women. Ultimately, these organizations were the harbinger of modernity that doubly minoritized women created for themselves—joining women across the globe and shaping a new vision of humanity’s future.

More broadly, although often portrayed as a singular entity, Irano-Armenians, as other Armenian diasporic communities in Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, or Russia, were far from homogeneous. During the critical transformations that marked Qajar and Pahlavi reigns from 1786 to 1979, the various nodes of the communities experienced modernity’s impact through their unique and shifting diasporic histories—from the wide-ranging spectrum of the descendants of the economically unrivaled seventeenth-century New Julfan wealthy merchants through the destitute survivors of the late Ottoman massacres, which culminated in the deportations, rapes, and killings of the Armenian Genocide (1915–23), to the political exiles after the rise of the Soviet Union in 1921. The cultural gamut, too, was diverse, ranging from globe-trotting Europe-raised and trained urbanites to unschooled peasants who had never left their Safavid-era villages. Symbiosis characterized modernization as the state-imposed and centralized policies of reform directly altering minority lives, while minority-led individual and collective undertakings helped shape these centralized efforts. As we show through their hitherto untold histories, Irano-Armenian women’s organizations were critical not only in contributing to majoritarian priorities but also in coalescing and ironing out conflicting communal causes and loyalties. They also often formed sociocultural networks and solidarities with other Armenian individuals and organizations globally. Women’s volunteer work remained at the seams of a wide diasporic system, from the photographic and print industries to a scholarship program and an erudite Armenian costume exhibition that was copied and recopied over several decades worldwide.

The Iranian case is unique in this Armenian diasporic context because it departs from minoritized women’s histories in the successor nation-states of the Ottoman and Russian Empires in which Armenians formed a large but nondominant subjecthood. In other diasporan centers, no analogous developments in Armenian women’s organizational activism were present, although individual feminists and feminist papers, such as Hayganush Mark’s Hay Gin in Istanbul, did exist. This is particularly true during the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to the more obvious reasons related to the precarious position of Armenians in Turkey as second-class citizens and communist state control in Soviet Armenia, Iran’s Armenian women benefited from Pahlavi state policies, laws, and resources; state recognition; and engagement with the state itself and the Women’s Organization of Iran. Even in the cultural hub of the post-genocidal Armenian diaspora, Lebanon, women’s organizations that met all the following criteria did not exist—independent and unaffiliated with a political party, focused on women’s issues beyond charity, initiated by women with women-only boards, and recognized by the state. In Iran, they did. Only the Armenian Relief Cross (Ōgnut‘ean Khach‘, 1929) came close. Although initiated by both men and women with a mixed board for its first ten years and focused on charity, the education of boys, and the preservation of “the Armenian people physically, to support its national, cultural advancement and prepare good citizens for this republic,” the organization, however, like its Irano-Armenian counterparts, also pursued self-enlightenment through classes, lectures, and publications.⁵ While Lebanon’s Armenian women did have their own journal, unlike the case in Iran, Beirut’s Young Armenian Woman (Yeridasart Hayuhi, 1932–34, 1947–68) did not survive into the 1970s. Siran Seza’s journal sought to make women visible and “to unite all Armenian women and oblige them to participate with pleasure in the ennobling work of the mind, soul and nation.”⁶ In its first year of publication, it explained the paper’s raison d’être as “not a caprice but a demand.” After returning from a thirteen-year hiatus, it revealed an enhanced reasoning: the conviction that “more than a demand we find ourselves in front of a duty.”⁷ That duty was taken up by women’s organizations in Armenian diasporan communities, especially in Iran.

The century-long evolution of Irano-Armenian women acting as photographic sitters to agents of history and historiography, often enabled by their solidarity through volunteer organizations, climaxed in what we call a golden age in the 1960s and 1970s. The history traced in Part IV indicates that Armenian women had more expansive personal liberties and attained greater professional achievements in Iran from World War II to 1979 than in any other previous time or territory in the region. In Iran’s two former imperial rivals with Armenian populations—Kemalist Turkey and the Soviet Union—Armenian women’s liberties and prospects were stained by post-genocide racism and Stalinist botched gender and ethnic affirmative action.⁸ The “Armenian Woman” Union (AWU, 1939) refused patriarchy’s subjugated status quo and, thus, birthed the uniquely Iranian brand of Armenian indigenous feminism. The sociological and economic conditions of late Pahlavi Iran, that is, the cross-pollination of an intellectually and culturally mature and economically secure and independent women’s organization parallel to and within an Iranian women’s movement, produced one of the rarest Armenian women’s organizations.

Third, the writing of the organizational history of Irano-Armenian women forces us to rethink our time-honored methods about how we write histories and how we mine and valorize our sources and archives. The book provides a curative to existing narratives on Iran’s history of modernization and Iranian feminist historiography’s blind spot. Not unlike the New Woman in Eurasia, herself a discursive category whose history is secured through texts and images, the reconstruction of Irano-Armenian women’s history is anchored on textual and visual mediations. Our cross-pollinated engagement with text and image is necessitated by the machinery of modernization, conditioned by pictorial order and central to its discursive and pragmatic workability. The politics of (in/ex)clusion of minoritized subjects was a foundational question that had to be reworked in the matrix of nationalism for the transition from the Qajar Shiʿi Empire to the Pahlavi secular nation-state. Therefore, because the visual representation of women has been key to the strategies of modernization—whether by the other, that is, state, foreigners, and community male leadership, or representations of the self by women themselves—the history of modernization in Iran cannot be fully explained without a minoritarian approach to modernization that was embedded in visual, as well as textual, discourses. As this study demonstrates, the “Armenian woman” as a discursive phenomenon was a key player. Thus, through entwined historical and art-historical disciplinary methods, the study offers an alternative perspective on the histories of Iran’s modernity.

Our research into women’s organizations has met similar but even more serious challenges in constructing a history whose presence remains laced with absences. The postrevolutionary exodus of around 90 percent of Armenians from Iran, coupled with limitations on (self-)expression, has aggravated these hindrances. Whether in the archives, scholarship, historical memory, or with historical actors—the women themselves—the silences remain persistent, as we encountered women who, despite evidence to the contrary, proclaim, “I haven’t done anything.” Often echoing the discursive gaps, some former activists decline to participate in knowledge production in part due to exilic and institutional ruptures and a gendered upbringing that regards talking about one’s sociopolitical engagements as boastful and, therefore, unseemly for women. And yet, prerevolutionary leaders of these very organizations actively sought to create knowledge, honing the bond between knowledge and power. The hesitation of women to talk about their activism is compounded by the patriarchal custom of dropping their maiden surnames—also markers of patrilineage—and taking on the husband’s name, thus impeding a researcher’s ability to trace the matrilineage of activism through formal archives, themselves repositories of “erasure,” which has been compounded by “physical losses.”¹² We have chosen to consistently employ both women’s maiden names and surnames to remedy century-long fractured matrilineages and preserve reconstructed connections. Where our protagonists began their activist careers before marriage—a few notable ones associated with AWU—we have placed their marital surnames in parentheses to avoid anachronism. Having said that, we recognize that it might be burdensome for some readers and that maiden names still carry the patrilineal tradition. However, we deem our choice imperative, having come to that conclusion through the enormous challenges we ourselves faced in establishing matrilineal ties. Where double surnames are missing as is any other information such as birth and death years, education, and other details, it means we were unable to find them despite our persistent efforts. The politics of naming is very much a methodological as much as an emancipatory tactic on our part.

Revolutionary rupture and the global dispersion of the Armenian community have had further deleterious effects on the accessibility and even survival of archives. Even when archives exist—as with those of Armenian women’s organizations—there has been a tendency to safeguard them from the peering eyes of researchers, who are often viewed with suspicion and distrust.¹³ The Islamic Republic’s narrative about its model Armenian community has impacted the Armenian custodians of archives. Despite the efforts to engage with both formal and informal methods—that is, the relative of so-and-so or a friend of a friend—the well-kept archives of the women’s organizations have been inaccessible to us as American scholars, but we have managed, through personal contacts inside and outside Iran, to acquire some important documents. In cases when archival documents have been preserved, we faced their fragmentary nature and limitations because of neglect, disposal, or loss as well as their unreliability and limits. We became intimately acquainted with the archive as a site of “power and privilege,” a “product of countless interventions . . . where the marginalized or problematic presence of a diverse range of women must be eked out from highly subjective records, unhidden, made visible.”¹⁴ In the face of these hurdles and through our persistent endeavors, resourcefulness, personal networks, and complementary strengths in textual and visual source interpretation, we augmented formal sources with informal ones—interviews and family collections of photos and papers languishing in treasured but rarely opened boxes—and our research flourished because of them. As we probed in interviews, a lush landscape of storytelling, photos, letters, and keepsakes emerged along with a sense of rediscovery by many women who were, either themselves or their predecessors, once at the helm of social, cultural, and intellectual activism.

During the Second Feminist Armenian Studies Conference held in May 2019 at the University of California, Irvine, we noted that not only was Grigor the sole scholar, among more than a dozen, who addressed Irano-Armenian women through a photographic history of women architects but that these women’s collective history straddled too many pockets of expertise, in history, art history, women’s studies, visual and material culture studies, minority and diaspora studies, Iranian and Armenian studies, Persian and Armenian languages, and Western and Eastern standards of Armenian, that a single author could not write it. During that same conference, a participant asked whether, despite the modernist aesthetics of white walls, short skirts, and cameras, “these women had managed to move the needle” in the right direction to benefit women’s causes. So we decided to find out. From then on, each of our own “betwixt and between” selves propelled us into a unique position that enabled the reconstruction of this history in this way. Early into the writing process, we recognized that, like the historical figures whose lives and works we uncover, we labor between diasporas, geographies, languages, cultures, and academic disciplines. This book is an outcome of a post-genocidal and postcolonial “stereoscopic vision”—rather than Enlightenment’s “whole sight”—that occasions a more inclusive, more nuanced, and more complex historical narrative, questioning the structures of conventional knowledge.¹⁵

We do here what the AWU board did in 1972 when it gave an interview in Alik‘ and insisted on a collective voice, for as they maintained, “We would rather see the result of our achievements” than claim sole proprietorship.¹⁶ Between the two of us, we share a stereoscopic vision split between Armenian, Greek, Iranian, Lebanese, and American heritages or lives and various languages where we constantly shifted between being insiders and outsiders as we moved from one epistemic landscape to another to produce this work. The family connections and familial networks of one got us into people’s homes and private collections, while the other marveled at how crucial intracommunal links worked to open doors and boxes. One of us had to grapple with the fact that she had to write about her own grandmother without the comfort of the fabled “scientific” distance for which we academics pride ourselves, while the other had to manage interviewees’ initial wariness of the rare Western Armenian interested in Irano-Armenian history. Starting as skeptics, we soon became convinced that our distinct in-betweennesses and disciplinary methods were indispensable to this project’s success. This, like the organizations it examines, is a painstakingly collaborative labor. Yet we do not claim that this book presents a comprehensive history, nor did we set out to accomplish that. As in any study, we have made choices in what story we narrate and how we narrate it. Our choices might not be adequate for some, especially those with ties to individuals and organizations we cover, as they search for particular details about a relative, friend, acquaintance, or even themselves. We hope that any possible discontent will serve as inspiration for further study.

The archival silences combined with unfamiliarity with the Armenian language for most researchers have led to scholarly silences. Although numerically small relative to the Ottoman Armenian and Russian Armenian imperial and post-imperial populations, Irano-Armenians’ engagement and impact in a number of spheres—from their significant role fighting for a constitution in Iran’s first revolution to serving as its top nation-building architects—have been considerable and meaningful. Yet the modern history of the community remains largely unstudied. Perhaps this is partly due to a form of misplaced humility captured by publisher and editor of Paris’ Haṛaj, Shavarsh Misakian, who observed that while others “can weave a fable around a watermill ruin, you Irano-Armenians are immeasurably parsimonious in forming [even] a terse description about works worthy of your memory.”¹⁷ The problem of the absence of “works worthy” of one’s memory is sometimes overcompensated by self-important unscholarly declarations. Yet, when it comes to the community’s women, who have received almost no scholarly attention as nationalist historical writing has rarely deemed women worthy of study, the gaps are even more acute. With few exceptions, little scholarship exists on the organizational lives of minority women in modern Iran.

Like Palestinian and Algerian women who did not have the “luxury” to “take for granted that they belong to a country, a nation, which does not have to prove its existence,” Armenian women, too, “necessarily had to make accommodations and negotiations” between nationalism and feminism.¹⁸ Thus, as Ellen Fleischmann argues for the Palestinian case, Irano-Armenian women’s organizations created and shaped an indigenous feminism, as they viewed women’s progress and equality within an Armenian national context, seeking “individual autonomy in order to enable women to participate in public life and make choices in their personal life but primarily in order to serve a collectivity, the nation, rather than the individual herself.”¹⁹ For Irano-Armenian women, indigenous feminism meant both an everyday lived feminism and, as defined by Ziba Mir-Hosseini for the Iranian case and adopted by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, “a general concern with women’s issues; an awareness that women suffer discrimination at work, in the home, and in society because of their gender; and action aimed at improving their lives and changing the situation.”²⁰ Armenian women’s activism arose and developed parallel to women’s movements throughout West Asia and North Africa as women sought to mitigate the effects of “inequitable gender relations in their societies” more so than to alter them. They joined male reformers in their advocacy of girls’ education, initiated their own charitable organizations recognizing the need for social welfare—“a kind of tacit political act and implicit criticism of the deficiencies of prevailing political and social institutions”—and pursued their own enlightenment. Much like their sisters in the region, they entered collective life through the “most honorable door” of nationalism.²¹

This study, on the one hand, seeks to insert itself into an already existing vibrant field of Iranian women’s and West Asian women’s studies and, on the other hand, to create a new niche by paying serious scholarly attention for the first time in the form of a monograph on the history of Armenian women in Iran. Until now, the topic has either been covered in the pages of Armenian-language non-scholarly biographical and encyclopedic-like accounts, where abbreviated biographies of women have been published often alongside the achievements of men, or some notable community-oriented anniversary collections by Armenian women’s organizations, which document their activities.²² That problematic model of brief biographies has been repeated in other collections.²³ Armenian women in Iran as a scholarly subject on its own has been mostly absent except for Berberian’s articles on early modern and modern Irano-Armenian women. While important work has emerged on Armenian women in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, the same cannot be said for Iran. While very rich and diverse, studies on women in Iran have bypassed Armenian women, and those on minorities have hardly addressed Armenian women.²⁴

This book prioritizes minoritarian politics formulated by women themselves through their public activism, be it charitable in nature in the latter part of the nineteenth century, educational in the early twentieth century, or intellectual and cultural from the mid-twentieth century on. It focuses on those organizations that self-identified as both Armenian and women’s associations originating in Iran to understand how they, in turn, positioned themselves vis-à-vis the patriarchal structures of their own communities, mainstream Iranian women’s organizations, Iranian state and monarchy, and the international women’s movement. Furthermore, by connecting the case of Irano-Armenian women to wider discussions and considerations about minoritized peoples and modernization and about nationalism and feminism—or what feminism without a label meant for these women, especially within a nationalist ambit—the study makes a conceptually rich intervention into the way we think about the history of women, organizations, nation(s), and minoritized peoples. This first history of Armenian women in modern Iran bears witness to what has increasingly become evident: without a clearer picture of the periphery, the center will remain fuzzy.

Notes

1. Bhabha 1994, 158.

2. Kia 2020, 4, 15; Matthee 2020, 83, 88–89.

3. Babaie 2008; Yaghoubian 2021, 513.

4. Houchang Chehabi, “The Legal Aspects of Religious Diversity in Iran,” SOAS, University of London, https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=raPWh9XcPr8, accessed 27 July 2023.

5. “Libananahay kanants‘ kazmakerput‘iwnner,” Yeridasart Hayuhi 11 (Nov. 1968); “Aknark mě Bēirut‘i Karmir Khach‘i vray,” Yeridasart Hayuhi 12 (Dec. 1968).

6. Editorial, Yeridasart Hayuhi 1 (Oct. 1932), 1 (1 June 1947).

7. Ibid.

8. See Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Suciyan 2021; Matossian 1995; Martin 2001; Manukyan 2017.

9. Tehran’s AWBS 1957, 3.

10. A. Amurian, “70-ameak T‘ehrani Hay Kanants‘ Baregortsakan Ěnkerut‘ean (1905–1975),” Alik‘ 287 (25 Dec. 1977).

11. “Yerēkvay tsatskots‘avor kině aysōr nakharar,” Alik‘ 14 (20 Jan. 1976); R. Nahapetian, “Hayern en yeghel Irani baregortsakan aṛajin miut‘ean himnadirě,” Alik‘ 31 (9 Feb. 1976); L. G. Minasian, “Iranahay aṛajin baregortsakan miut‘iwně,” Alik‘ 55 (10 Mar. 1976).

12. Spies-Gans 2022, 86, 88.

13. We know, for example, that AWU began organizing its archives in the early 1960s as evidenced by AWU’s general meeting notes that address “the organization of the archives on the occasion of 25th anniversary.” Meeting minutes, Petrosian Stepanian Collection.

14. Wolf 2018, 5.

15. Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” London Review of Books 4, no. 18 (7 Oct. 1982), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n18/salman-rushdie/imaginary-homela….

16. Zh. Gh. “Handipum . . . ,” Alik‘ 186 (20 Aug. 1972).

17. Cited in Arsen Mamian, “Nmushner T‘avrizi, T‘ehrani yev Nor Jughayi t‘aterakan keank‘i masin,” Alik‘ 246 (1 Nov. 1976).

18. Fleischmann 2003, 208. Fleischmann quotes Algerian feminist Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas, cited in Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 45.

19. Fleischmann 2003, 87.

20. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, cited in Kashani-Sabet 2011, 226n5. See also Asef Bayat’s (2013) treatment of the meaningful impact of ordinary actions.

21. Fleischmann 1999, 92, 104, 105, 108. See also Baron 1994.

22. Lazarian 2012 is the most widely referenced compilation of this variety.

23. Balayan 2011.

24. For example, Ekmekçioğlu 2016; Amin 2002; Kashani-Sabet 2011; Najmabadi 2005; Sedghi 2007; Sanasarian 2000.