UCLA

To understand how establishing Armenian girls’ schools advanced women’s agency in the late Ottoman Empire requires connecting modernization reforms, romantic nationalism, Ottoman women’s emancipation, and the impact of two Armenian spokeswomen, Sibyl and Dussap, on those causes. While embracing markedly divergent feminist ideologies and arguments for elevating women’s agency through education, these equally empowering, if dissimilar, figures inaugurated the long-lasting and influential women’s organizations: the Patriotic Armenian Woman’s Association and the School-Loving Ladies’ Society. Additionally, they both were the public activist of the time through their literary works and speeches.The study first explores four influencers in girls’ education: the Armenian Patriarchate, missionaries, the Ottoman State, and women’s organizations. It demonstrates that most of these supported girls’ learning as the primary means of preparing suitable wives, cultivators of the Armenian nation’s children, and representatives of modernization. Sibyl, both influential literary writer and linguist, and the founder of the PAWA, promoted this traditional viewpoint as the fulfillment of females’ nature and the reason for girls’ education. In contrast, the more liberal writer Dussap and the SLLS envisioned education as the path for an individual woman to nurture her unique ideas and desires, and not only to nurture a family and the Armenian community, as traditionalists assumed. So training girls in academics and in work skills allows them financial independence, intellectual growth, personal happiness, and a satisfying marriage. Yet both of these pioneering women’s associations launched elementary and middle girls’ schools as well as teacher training colleges, deployed public platforms increasingly accessible to women (literary publications, the daily press, exhibitions, auctions, meetings), and amplified the agency of Armenian women from all the classes in the urban and rural regions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thus, to include Armenian women in the women’s emancipation narrative of the Empire, this research links archival and other primary sources, including literature, association records, private correspondence, periodicals and newspapers in Western Armenian, Ottoman-Turkish, English, and Modern Turkish. This work thereby presents a complementary understanding of Armenian women’s organizations, girls’ schools, and the role of Christian minority women to the historiography of Ottoman women’s studies.