Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979 (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Talinn Grigor (TG): The idea for the book was conceived in May 2019 during the Second Feminist Armenian Studies workshop, which took place at UC Irvine, as we began to think about a question posed by a participant following my talk on Armenian women architects in modern Iran. She asked whether these women had “managed to move the needle” to benefit women’s causes. That sparked our initial conversation about doing research and writing a book together on the history of Iran’s Armenian women. Although Houri is the authority on Irano-Armenian women’s history, at the conference she was presenting on the revolutionary Rubina, so we both noticed that I was the only one, among fifteen speakers, who presented on Irano-Armenian women. That, along with the question posed by the audience member, was the dual spark that started the project.
Houri Berberian (HB): I had wanted to write my second book on that very topic, but several hindrances, from not being granted a visa to enter Iran to not having the network and connections to the Irano-Armenian diasporic communities, kept me from going beyond producing an article at the time. Moreover, it became very clear that this history could not be told solely by relying on textual sources. We had to rethink our time-honored methods for writing histories and mining sources.
Through our networks and complementary strengths in textual and visual source interpretation, we augmented formal sources with informal ones—over one hundred oral interviews and family collections of photos and papers languishing in treasured but rarely opened boxes. We consulted five significant collections of former founders and presidents and sundry others. 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, either themselves or their predecessors, had once been at the forefront of social, cultural, and intellectual activism. This was, in many ways, similar to the women’s organizations we study —a painstakingly collaborative project.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
HB & TG: It is a comprehensive history of Armenian women’s organizations in Iran—a history that has not been considered by anyone before. This means that it raises a range of questions about minority-majority relations, community-state engagements, and women-society power politics. The research and writing of this history itself raised a set of challenges: how to reconstruct a history in which even the most prolific activists and agents claim, “I haven’t done anything,” against a plethora of historical evidence that proves the opposite. How to write a history while constantly navigating silences in the archives, in society, and in metanarrative. We discovered what we call the matrilineal network of activism, spanning from grandmothers to mothers, to daughters, and nieces, which sustained 120 years of intense volunteer work by women for the betterment of their own lives and those of their communities. We also discovered a global network of Armenian women transcending imperial and national borders to conduct the lion’s share of community charity work to educate girls, to provide welfare, to save genocide survivors, to support school boards, to fight illiteracy, and, by the 1960s, to be staunch women’s rights activists and to engage the Iranian state as sovereign and independent entities. The postcolonial, diaspora, and indigenous feminist theories were essential in mining our sources—both textual and visual/material—and reconstructing the most critical aspects of this history.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HB: In many ways, this book connects to and builds on my previous work in its focus on Armenian women in Iran and transimperial connections. It departs, however, in two critical ways. First, it engages with new approaches, methods, and sources, as mentioned above. Second, the book expands on my period of study from the turn of the twentieth century to include the 1930s to 1970s, which, although I teach, I had not previously researched.
TG: Although I had written about Empress Farah through a feminist lens and on individual Irano-Armenian architects and artists, the rich history of Iran’s Armenian communities was fascinating to study. My previous work had always focused on the state and primarily on powerful men, so shifting to a new perspective that oscillates between the macro (empire/nation) and the micro (community, individual women) historical scales required a new methodological approach, which has changed how I approach my sources.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
HB & TG: We want everyone to read this book to understand that minoritarian positionalities can, have had, and will always have the agency to change lives for the better. By connecting the case of Irano-Armenian women to broader discussions and considerations about minoritized peoples and modernization, as well as nationalism and feminism—or what feminism without a label meant for these women, especially within a nationalist context —we believe we will reach a broader audience. We hope readers will appreciate that this first history of Armenian women in modern Iran bears witness to what is evident to us: that a clearer picture of the periphery, of the minoritized or marginalized, informs our understanding of the center.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
HB: I have begun research on the “repatriation” of Armenians in the 1940s from Iran to Soviet Armenia. Between 1946 and 1949, approximately 100,000 diasporan Armenians (a quarter of whom were from Iran) responded to Stalin’s call to return “home.” Most of them were invited to “repatriate” to lands neither they nor their forebears had ever inhabited. Of the 100,000, more than a quarter were Irano-Armenians, mostly peasants, and primarily from the provinces of Azerbaijan and Isfahan. In 1947, when the Iranian government halted the repatriation, about sixty thousand Irano-Armenians became stranded in Tehran. The story I want to tell is about local Armenian efforts and propaganda to encourage repatriation from Iran and about those who were left behind in 1947.
TG: I have returned to a book project that I had already started when Houri and I decided to write this book. Titled Of Hyphenated Architects, it asks why, given the staunchly nationalist reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, many of Iran’s indigenous architects were religious minorities, particularly Armenians. How did such hyphenated architects—the most daring among them were women, including the first official female Iranian architect—confront and negotiate imperial(ist) and national(ist) frontiers to conjure up, through their utopian designs, a new secular vision for humanity from the 1880s to the 1960s? I feel very fortunate to be returning to it with the foundational insights I gained during this intensely collaborative work with Houri.
J: What happens when a historian and an art historian write a book together?
HB & TG: A lot! We both agree that writing this book was one of the most meaningful scholarly works we have done. The commitment to undertake this project meant that, at the beginning, we really had to learn what it means to be interdisciplinary. Academia likes to throw this word around, but writing a book together, which at times meant writing a single sentence together, one learns what it means to be interdisciplinary. Historians are trained to read documents, and art historians are trained to read images and spaces. We have different methodological and source priorities, which means we had to learn how the other “sees” the source (or does not see it at all) and interprets it, and then integrate it into a compelling story. The book has been immensely successful because we both were committed to seeing how the other “sees,” even when counterintuitive to each of our training, and trusting that that interpretation is historically accurate and generative.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter Seven: The Golden Age of Feminism, pages 230 and 234 to 237)
[230]
Through Alik‘, women—whether AWU [Armenian Woman Union] members or supporters or neither—increasingly vocalized their feminism through the paper, often through translations of American and French feminists, reporting on or synthesizing feminist works and their own thought pieces. The paper’s “In Women’s World” column and later “Armenian Woman” page at times functioned, in the absence of a woman’s journal, much like an Armenian feminist organ, as they engaged with contemporary European and American feminist thought, the state-sponsored WOI [Women’s Organization of Iran] and White Revolution, and global and Iranian women’s feminist activities, sometimes reprinting articles from Zan-e Ruz, Ettalā‛āt-e Bānuān, and Kayhān. Articles debated and advocated work outside the home and equal rights, featured feminists’ writings or women “greats,” and confronted sexism, all often voiced within Armenian national concerns and anxieties.
….
[234-37]
AWU members’ active intellectual output was preceded by the organization’s cultural patronage of literature, “intending to benefit Irano-Armenian women writers.” Leontine Masumian (1923–2012) and Knarik Avagian (1920–1973) played a prominent role as writers who bridged the divide between women’s volunteer work and professional careers. They served as prominent life members of AWU while pursuing careers beyond the community. Masumian was none other than the daughter of AWBS [Armenian Women’s Benevolent Society] activist and amateur historian Nvard Masumian, bearing out not only the matrilineal pedigree we trace throughout this study but also the generational paradigm shift from AWBS to AWU. After attending Haykazian and Nurbakhsh schools, Masumian studied with Lotfali Suratgar at Tehran University’s Faculty of Language and Literature, graduating with a master’s degree and doing so, according to a 1945 Luys article on the university, as “the first Armenian woman of that faculty” with “command of English, French, and German.” Beginning at age twenty-two, she translated literary works, including those of William Saroyan, in Luys, Lusaber, Alik‘, and Alik‘ Amsagir throughout the decades, thus “bringing her contribution to Armenian literature.” She joined the Education Ministry as a specialist in English pedagogy. A 1954 Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Michigan was followed in 1964 by a residential fellowship at Moray House College of Education in Edinburgh, sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. A founding member of the Irano-Armenian Writers Union and a sixty-year member of the AWU, she served as secretary on its Executive Board from 1960 to 1969 and from 1980 to 1989. In 1959, AWU financed Masumian’s Armenian translation of the English novel They Never Return by Armenia Saginian Karapetian, herself a member of AWU and Irano-Armenian Writers Union.
In 1963, “with the hope of assisting Armenian translation literature,” as noted by the board, AWU financed the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist play Huis clos (1944). Avagian’s Armenian translation of this daring play, Drnp‘ak, features two female protagonists, Inès and Estelle, trapped in “hell” with the third protagonist, the misogynist Garcin. The timing of the play’s publication was likely linked to the three-day tour by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Soviet Armenia in October of the same year, indicating AWU’s timely and avant-garde response to global events and networks. While ARF’s [Armenian Revolutionary Federation] organ, Alik‘, spun Sartre’s comments to underscore “in Armenia, the new has always sprung from the old” to take a jab at the Soviets, AWU leveraged the long-standing tradition of Irano-Armenian theater to implant the philosophy of existential feminism and existentialism pioneered by de Beauvoir and Sartre into the community and Armenian-language literature in a manageable portion of the play. By the 1970s, de Beauvoir’s other works, such as Le deuxième sexe (1949) and La vieillesse (1970)—the former theorizing the oppression of women and the latter that of the elderly—were known among Irano-Armenian and Iranian feminists. La vieillesse even appeared in a translated article by Tumachian Nersisiants.
Repeatedly described as an “intellectual, writer, and translator,” Avagian graduated from Jeanne d’Arc in 1938 and at age thirty-two entered the employment of the National Bank and Central Bank, reaching the post of keeper of the Royal Jewels. This post, coupled with her command of multiple languages, brought her face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth II, Charles de Gaulle, and Leonid Brezhnev, as she presented Iran’s royal treasury. At the Central Bank’s Issue Department, Avagian “contributed much to the research” on Iran’s Crown Jewels in 1966. She joined a Royal Ontario Museum and University of Toronto research team in the same year that resulted in the publication of The Crown Jewels of Iran: Guide-Book (1966), followed by V. B. Menn and A. D. Tushingham’s Crown Jewels of Iran (1968). In her spare time, she translated Sartre’s Les mouches, Dostoevsky’s Bobok, Alejandro Casona’s La dama del alba, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince.
Throughout the decades, Avagian was an active member of Iranian, Irano-Armenian, and international organizations, including the International Women’s Club (an organization comprising ambassadors’ wives and elite Iranian women aimed at promoting an understanding of Iran) and the Irano-Armenian Writers Union. She even cofounded—as the only Armenian and woman—the Tehran Philharmonic Union in the early 1950s and represented AWU at the ICW [International Council of Women] meeting in Tehran (1966). A lifelong member of AWU, Avagian not only served as four-time president, once vice-president, and four-time overseer between 1949 and 1968 but also its representative to WOI from 1966 until her passing at the prime of her life at age fifty-three. AWU’s public statements express the membership’s tremendous grief in terms that convey the loss of a child. A day after her death, AWU’s Executive Board announced the sponsorship of a pupil at Nairi School to honor her “unforgettable memory.” At her funeral and in the press, on behalf of AWU, Petrosian Stepanian underscored, “Knarik was truly the pride of AWU, and why not, the pride of every Armenian woman.” Perhaps she had in mind Avagian, Abrahamian, and Masumian—single women who dedicated their lives to the service of women, children, arts, and literature—when she honored all women, singling out, likely for the first time at an Irano-Armenian Mother’s Day celebration, those who had not “physically brought children into the world” but had been caring mothers, nevertheless, and who for years had “with sacrifice loved, coddled, taught and shaped select individuals for nation, public and humanity.” Before ending with a moment of silence, she asked that these “worthy mothers” be remembered and “feel that this is also their holiday.”
The intellectual abilities of [Armik] Tumachian Nersisiants, [Seda] Darmanian Hovnanian, Masumian, and others were in full view as they translated excerpts from some of the most influential feminist works, such as Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) and It Changed My Life (1976) or wrote about such topics as UN’s Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, adopted in 1967 to promote gender equality. Tumachian Nersisiants also familiarized readers with American endocrinologist Estelle Ramey’s refutation that women were weaker than men, concluding that men were the “weaker sex” according to biology and women were stronger given their “stamina, longevity and performance under stress.” Darmanian Hovnanian, for her part, brought to light The New Feminism, a primer on feminism for teenage girls, by Lucy Komisar, who was at the time vice-president of the largest American feminist organization, NOW (National Organization for Women). Others offered selections on such figures as French journalist and politician Lucien Romier about his view on women’s progress; French-Peruvian socialist and feminist Flora Tristán; British-American astronomer and astrophysicist Margaret Burbridge, who fought against discrimination against women in astronomy; French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, who pioneered ecofeminism; and American feminist and leading figure of second-wave feminism Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970). Millett and journalist Sophie Keir visited Iran in 1979, years after the publication of this article, after Ayatollah Khomeini had decreed a number of restrictions on women. Their participation in protests in the streets of Tehran led to their brief detention and swift deportation, as Millett narrates in her 1982 Going to Iran.
The two-decade-long “golden age” of Irano-Armenian feminism, especially but not exclusively that of AWU, evolved within a very distinct milieu that benefited from an early history of women’s organizations as well as Pahlavi state policies on women, which aimed to complete Reza Shah’s secular and modernist nation-state-building project. Armenian women’s organizations cast their lot with the Pahlavi regime as they engaged with it to achieve their own goals. AWU became especially adept in this engagement, pursuing public activism centered on intellectual, cultural, and literary productivity with a feminist character, while continuing to expand possibilities and opportunities for Irano-Armenian women and the community. It did so within a persistent, albeit slightly less acerbic, patriarchal framework and continued national anxieties, never abandoning its self-enlightenment and educational purpose and resolve to raise women’s consciousness and improve women’s lives in Iran. AWU’s collective and persistent campaign in the printing press and the mass media reached a new high when it organized a widely broadcast public exhibition that brought women onto the stage of history as creative and critical generators of discourse and historiography.