BY NANEH GRIGOR
Special to Asbarez
For decades, the evidence sat in women’s homes. It was tucked into photo albums, saved in boxes, folded into tablecloths, stitched into handicrafts and carried across borders after families left Iran. Some women preserved bylaws, anniversary booklets, letters, diaries and photographs for more than 50 years.
To many archives, those materials may not have looked important. But to Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor, they told a history that had almost disappeared.
Their book, “The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979,” tells the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. But at its center are not only institutions or political movements. This book is about women who documented their own lives when official archives often failed to do so, knowing that one day it would be needed.
“The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979” book cover
The book is not only about what Armenian women did. It is also about how difficult it can be to prove that they were there.
“Formal archives have considered women’s history and their documentation irrelevant, unimportant, not worth preserving,” Grigor said.
That absence forced the authors to look elsewhere. According to Grigor, they used informal archives, including oral histories, private collections, photo albums, diaries, letters, posters, handicrafts and other objects women kept.
Those materials changed how they understood the women they were studying.
At first, Grigor said, the authors hesitated to call the women feminists because many did not use that word for themselves. But after reading the visual and material evidence, they saw how intentional the women were in fighting for women’s rights.
“They were very intentional in their fight for women’s rights and used visuals in intentional ways,” said Grigor.
Talinn Grigor (left) and Houri Berberian
Berberian said that the silence around the word “feminist” was one of the most revealing gaps in the research. The term did not appear in the organizations’ documents, but other sources showed women were working toward economic equity and public visibility.
“The absence of organizational documents tells us much about the context in which these women lived and operated,” Berberian said. “Namely, staunchly patriarchal communities and societies.”
The women in the book organized schools, charities, cultural events, exhibitions and publications. Their work supported children, refugees, students, artists, the elderly and women entering public life.
Berberian said these organizations often became the social welfare network that did not yet exist.
“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 were touched by these women’s organizations,” Berberian added.
That work, she explained, helped make women “the harbingers of modernity.”
For Armenian girls in Iran, the influence of these organizations often began early. Grigor said Armenian schools had theater troupes and mixed choirs, giving girls experience being visible, bold and active in public spaces. Many women who later became artists, architects and intellectuals came from those schools and from families where mothers were active in women’s organizations.
But tracing those women was not simple.
According to Berberian, the authors faced several challenges, including the postrevolutionary exodus of Armenians from Iran, limits on _expression_, scattered archives and the loss of records. Another obstacle was the patriarchal practice of women dropping their maiden surnames after marriage, which made it harder to follow lines of women’s activism across generations.
Some women were also hesitant to speak about their own work or the work of their mothers and grandmothers.
Grigor said that many had been raised to think what they created, thought or said was not important. When the authors asked questions and treated their materials as historically valuable, some women began bringing out more boxes, photographs and objects.
“They started to feel empowered,” Grigor noted.
For Grigor, the research also became personal through her own grandmother, Seda Darmanian Hovnanian, who had been a co-founder and inaugural president of the Armenian Woman Union. She shared that she did not know the extent of her grandmother’s work until she found her photo albums, academic diplomas, papers and three-volume diary.
“The process of writing the book was at times very sad and difficult emotionally,” Grigor said. “Unlike my other books, this was not an aloof ‘scientific’ process.”
Still, for her, the coauthored nature of the book helped the work remain grounded in evidence.
Berberian and Grigor brought different training to the project. Berberian, a historian, worked closely with textual sources, including handwritten letters. Grigor, an art and architectural historian, examined images, objects and visual culture.
Together, they wrote against the idea that only official archives can tell history.
—