Feminism in Armenian

From 1862, when the first Armenian women's journal began publication in Constantinople, to 1968, when the longest-running Armenian women's journal of the post-genocide diaspora ceased publication in Beirut, Armenian feminists were active participants in the social and political life of their times. Yet their writings have remained largely untranslated, scattered across archives, and unread outside a small circle of specialists. Feminism in Armenian recovers the first century of Armenian feminism through an intergenerational and intertextual study of twelve public intellectuals — among them Srpuhi Dussap, Zabel Yesayan, Hayganush Mark, and Siran Seza. Melissa Bilal and Lerna Ekmekcioglu pair a critical biography of each woman with a generous selection of her writings, translated from the Armenian by G. M. Goshgarian: life writing, fiction, opinion pieces, speeches, editorials, and personal correspondence. As these women built an intersectional feminist politics claiming their rights as both women and Armenians, their paths took them from Ottoman Constantinople to Egypt, republican Turkey, Lebanon, Soviet Armenia, France, and the United States. Most bore the personal and intellectual impact of the 1915 Armenian Genocide.Neither conventional anthology nor monograph, Feminism in Armenian is designed for the classroom as much as the archive. In centering the activism of a racialized and diasporic group, it allows for a fresh reading of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Armenian history.This book is accompanied by two open-access digital projects: a documentary archive of the twelve women's published and unpublished writings, along with recorded oral history interviews (www.feminisminarmenian.org), and Twelve Faces of Armenian Feminism (1860s–1960s), an online exhibition curated by art historian Sevan Injejikian (www.feminisminarmenianexhibition.com).