Jennifer Manoukian
The Armenian
press in the late Ottoman Empire was the site
of heated debates among writers and intellectuals, who would rip apart
each
other’s arguments and attack each other’s character with a ferociousness
that might surprise even the most jaded, twenty-first century reader.
The article above sparked
a lengthy debate on education in the pages of the Constantinople-based
newspaper Massis. While keeping its
focus on the unique challenges facing young female teachers, the article
also touches on thorny gender and class inequalities that inflamed some
Armenian
intellectuals and drove them to air their vitriol in a series of
responses to
the article.
But it all began with this article from 1903: Zabel Yessayan’s Mer Varjouhinerë [Our Female Teachers].
Although Yessayan would go on to become one of the most prominent writers in
Western Armenian literature, and the most celebrated among women writers, in
1903 she was still relatively unknown, having only recently returned to
Constantinople after an eight-year period in Paris.
This article is one of her first pieces of social criticism,
and one of the first written after her return. At its core, the article is an
appeal to her fellow Armenians to recognize the great contributions and
sacrifices young women were making for the community. Yessayan writes that she
was prompted to write this article after seeing how these teachers had become
the targets of “unjust and senseless disdain” within the Armenian community. Before
“showering them with insults and reproaches,” she urged readers to understand
the burdens of these young women, who were often supporting their entire families,
and be sympathetic to the constraints they faced within conservative school
administrations.
While this article illustrates a commitment to activism, a
contempt for injustice and a disregard for social convention, which Yessayan
would continue to demonstrate throughout her life, it also firmly positions her
within a tradition of earlier Armenian women writers and activists who
protested against similar gender-based inequalities.
The influence of Serpouhi
Dussap, the first Armenian novelist to address the social struggles of
women, can clearly be seen in Yessayan’s article. In the 1870s and 1880s, Dussap
called for a restructuring of Ottoman Armenian society in which women’s rights
to education, employment and social autonomy would all be ensured. Many Armenian literary elites of the time condemned
her novels and saw her work as an attempt to destroy the Armenian family.
Dussap created female protagonists fully engaged in the society
around them as a way to provide Armenian women with an example to follow. In
fact, Dussap uses her 1887 novel Araxia
gam Varjouhin [Araxia or the Teacher], which revolves around a young woman
who becomes a teacher to support her family, to model the way young women can
gain both financial independence and personal satisfaction from their work
outside the home. Dussap’s revolutionary ideas laid the foundation for other
women like Yessayan to continue the struggle for social change.
There were remarkable transformations in the sixteen-year period
that separated Dussap from Yessayan. Within this short time, young women like
Araxia were graduating in larger numbers each year, forcing Ottoman Armenian
society to reevaluate its conception of womanhood. Yessayan sees these teachers
as the embodiment of a new ideal of womanhood that values a strong work ethic
and commitment to the community (For a fictional representation of the powerful
role one of these teachers played in the life of an ambitious girl living in
Anatolia, see Krikor Zohrab’s short story The Poturlı).
Although by 1903 the basic challenges (i.e. access to
education and employment) had been alleviated for the urban,
middle-class women
who became teachers, other challenges had sprung up within their field.
The
prejudice against women working outside the home that Dussap had fought
against in the 1880s had lessened, but in its place emerged a widely
held
belief in the “insufficient educational and moral qualifications of the
female
teachers.”
It is this assumption that Yessayan attacks in her piece.
Rather than laying blame on the young women themselves, she holds the Armenian
community accountable for the conditions under which the teachers were forced
to work. In the article, she details the plight of these teachers—or “jewels of
devotion and self-sacrifice”—who suffer from exhaustion,
malnourishment, and unjustifiable attacks by the school board and parents all for
the sake of the young minds in their charge. While “they enter the field with
vigor and self-confidence to do good,” they end up “debilitated by
disappointment” and “dried up [like] barren tree branches.”
Yessayan proposes a three-prong solution that resonates as
much for us today as it did in the Ottoman Empire in 1903:
1) Reconceptualize education so that it’s less constricted
by set lessons, rules and the reproachful eye of the school board and more open
for teachers to express their individuality in the classroom.
2) See teachers as chief contributors to the moral and
intellectual growth of a new generation, and accord them the respect that this
invaluable role merits.
3) For parents: understand the teacher not as a rival but as
a partner in the education of the child and realize that both parent and
teacher are working towards the same goal.
"Toszuz Evrak" (www.docblog.ottomanhistorypodcast.com), July 24, 2013
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