I'm Ali Behdad, the director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies and on behalf of my

colleagues at the center, I would like to welcome you all to today's lecture.

Before I introduce our speaker Dr. Melissa Bilal, I would like to take this

opportunity to thank our colleague professor Ann Karagozian and the Promise Armenian Institute for

their co-sponsorship of this event.

We are absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to collaborate with both the institute and the

Center for Armenian Studies and very much appreciate their support.

We're delighted to host today Dr. Melissa Bilal who is a distinguished research

fellow at the Center for Near Eastern Studies here and a lecturer in the department of

ethnomusicology.

Dr. Bilal who received her PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago,

is an assistant professor in the college of humanities and social sciences

at the Armenian University of Armenia.

She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, MIT, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi

University in Istanbul where she also um had a postdoctoral res--

was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Orient Institute of Istanbul.

Her research addresses a wide range of issues including memory politics in Turkey in relation to the Armenian

past, Armenian memorialization of loss and survival,

Ottoman-Armenian music ethnography, and post-Ottoman Armenian feminist thought

and activism. Her publication includes um a wonderful essay entitled "Lullabies

And the Memory of Pain: Armenian Women's Remembrance of the Past in Turkey."

And she also has co-edited the volume "A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the

Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey (1862 to 1933)."

She has also produced um, "Voice Imprints: Recordings of Russian Armenian POWs in German Camps, 1916-

1918" which is a CD project that aims to bring the Armenian experience in relation to the musicology's

colonial history into public audibility. Dr. Bilal's talk today is entitled "A Foe of Injustice and

Prejudice: Srpuhi Dussap and the Foundations of 19th Century Ottoman Armenian Feminist Thought."

So please now join me and to welcome Dr Melissa Bilal.

Um, thank you very much Ali for this kind and friendly introduction and for giving me the

opportunity to share my work with you. I'm grateful to you and to the whole CNEAS community

as well as to my colleagues at the Promise Armenian Institute both for sponsoring this event and for

supporting my scholarship by hosting me at UCLA. I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank dear Aslı Bâli

and my old and dear friends […] and Zeynep Korkman who not only came up with the idea of bringing me here

but also did not spare any effort to make our dream of working under the same academic roof come true.

My paper today focuses on the life and works of Srpuhi Dussap, one of the 12 women in the book,

"Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology" that I am co-authoring with

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu of MIT History. This is a tentative cover of our book.

It's, we put together it for fun.

Um, it's under contract with Stanford University Press and forthcoming hopefully in 2020.

So this talk is based on a chapter I recently completed writing for our book and I thank Lerna for her feedback

on this first draft. And English translations from the original Armenian text

that I will quote throughout this talk today are done by Jeffrey Koshkaryan for our book.

"Prejudice is injustice. Injustice is a lie. To lie is to spit truth in the face,"

wrote Srpuhi Dussap in Mayda, her first novel published in 1883.

A male columnist in Constantinople passionately advised Armenian women to stay away from this book. According to

him, it was a kind of publication one should strictly avoid reading. The very first novel by a woman in modern Armenian

literature, Mayda, was a fast sold out title and the most debated literary work of

its day. The novel triumphed against its opponents and changed many young Armenian women's and men's

lives. Its writer Srpuhi Vahanian Dussap, a celebrated revolutionary for many and scandalous decadent for others, often

referred to as the Armenian George Sand, became the most prominent social novelist of her time

and the most celebrated feminist idol for generations of Armenian women of letters.

Srpuhi Vahanian was born in Ortakoy district of Constantinople in 1841. Having lost her father

at the age of one, she was raised by her mother Nazle Vahan

or Nazle Vahanian, who was the well-educated daughter of the upper class amira [...] family. And here you see

Nazle Vahan's only photograph that we have and uh her tombstone in tombstone in Istanbul and also a little uh clipping

that I found um of a sermon that um […] the the archbishop um back then gave during her funeral. So most of uh the

details of Nazle Vahan's uh biography come from this very long and important sermon that he delivered.

Uh young Srpuhi had the class privilege of building a sophisticated background in science, philosophy,

literature, and history as well as theater, fine arts and music appreciation.

She was well versed in Armenian, Turkish, French, Italian, Greek, and English and played the piano. But she did not

have the opportunity to go abroad to master her studies like her older brother Hovhannes did.

It was he, Hovhannes Vahan or Vahanian, a Paris trained chemist later Ottoman politician and minister

who home tutored Srpuhi after she completed a few elementary grades at a local French school.

In her early 20s, Srpuhi began working with the renowned poet Megerditch Beshigtashlian as her Armenian

language and literature mentor. Megerditch Beshigtashlian encouraged

Srpuhi to publish her first poems in Venice's Pazmaveb [...] journal.

And here you see Karun, her first, very first uh poem. She started her literary career as a poet and she

wrote poems in classical Armenian. Beshigtashlian and Dussap, back then Vahan, Vahan's strong intellectual and

emotional bond manifested itself in continuous literary creativity.

One of the most historic outcomes of their collaboration was through his song settings of his

poems from the well-known Zeitun series inspired by the 1862 Armenian peasant resistance.

Although we don't have any documentation of Srpuhi's musical compositions, it is accounted that music was a central

part of her life, also after her marriage to her piano

teacher, French levantine musician Paul Dussap, and that she supervised their daughter Doreen's

career as a budding concert pianist.

Above all, Srpuhi's intellectual formation owes to her mother's literary salon

and educational activism. A staunch supporter of female education, Nazle Vahan

was one of the major patrons of Costantinopolan girls orphanages and schools, a legacy

her daughter committed herself to keeping alive.

Srpuhi also served as [...] that's the society of charitable women's vice secretary under

her mother's presidency.

This organization provided various essential welfare services to all community

members in need but its specific focus was sponsoring female learning.

It was founded in 1864 as the continuation of the former [...] that is guardian women, the trustee

association of Ortakoy by Nazle herself in 1859.

I want to show uh two photographs from Istanbul. Uh this is the Ortakoy Armenian Church or Turkey of

Armenian Church and uh as far, I mean, I tried to locate where the school should have been and

they showed me that like that uh that door in the yard was opening to the school.

And from the street, it's somewhere you know on on on your left, uh, sorry on

your right, uh right behind the bell tower, I guess um.

That I mean the school, I took this photographs for you to see that uh the memory,

the the physical memory of uh the school is still there but the the

building is not there um. But it's still kind of like legacy of these. I grew up

in the city and um kind of um took these photographs to be able to

locate where the school should have been.

Uh when in May 1879 a group of [...] alumna under Nazle's guidance initiated [...] patron Armenian

young women's training as teachers to serve in provincial schools, Srpuhi would soon assume the chair of

its general assembly. During her presidency between and 1887, the association was able to put

together a substantial budget from hundreds of members fees, donations from banks, and wealthy

community members and two fundraiser events including

the very first Armenian art exhibition in the Ottoman capital.

As a part of her efforts to secure funds, Dussap also published a tiny monograph "Language (1880)",

the cover of which is on my slide. And on the left you see the the fir– the first year annual report of the

the Association of uh [...] Armenian Women's Society.

And uh this booklet, Modern Armenian Language, that was

published in 1880, did not only bring revenue to the

society's school in Ortakoy but also stood as an important manifestation of this young author's support for the

use of the Armenian vernacular as the modern literary language.

Remember, she was writing her poems in classical Armenian, then she uh became a supporter of the

use of Armenian vernacular as the modern literary language.

And this this book um the booklet is uh dedicated to that cause. In this

period, Dussap published two essays that manifested her perspective on education

informed by her first-hand experience as an education activist.

In [...], that is Armenian Societies published in 1882, she came out with a communal solution to

the pressing problem of how to manage the finances of Armenian education institutions and organizations.

Her [...] Women's Education, published two years earlier that is in 1880, on the other hand is more theoretical. In

this article, she talked back to the prevailing

narratives discrediting women's enlightenment by associating it with decaying moral standards.

Masterfully utilizing the dominant discourses on familial happiness,

god's will, natural and societal harmony, as well as national unity and progress, Dussap

attacked bashers of women's education.

She stated that only when women have full access to an education based on solid principles that would help them

become free thinkers could one, can one judge the moral results of women's enlightenment. I'd like to read

some quotes from this article.

Quote. "To a large extent, women's defects stem from the education they were–

they are given and are also to some extent from the fruit of oppressive human laws.

Those laws exercising their tyranny over her destroy society's

equilibrium. Nature has grounded social harmony in the two sexes equal, moral, and intellectual development.

These two moral powers, when they combine, complement each other. When they remain separate, they cancel

each other out. End quote. Another quote from this article goes, quote. "When women with a firmly

grounded education stand as pillars of the social edifice,

rather than merely adorning it, when their minds are reinforced by solid learning, when they

shake off the prejudices that are the legacy of past generations, when they cast off the

black stains that besmirch their conscience, then the best primary school is the maternal abode

and the mother is the most effective teacher." End quote.

And the last quote I want to read from this article goes, quote. "The path of learning must be open

before women and no limits should be imposed on their intellectual inclinations.

It is a false precept which leads to the conclusion that a woman with a mind strengthened by higher learning is

incapable of being a good spouse and a good mother.

Does knowledge stand lower in the scale than ignorance? Did God, who has wisely disposed

everything in the universe, err with respect to women when he conferred reason and intellectual powers on them?"

End quote. Dussap two other articles, namely A Few Words on One Woman's Idleness, and The Principle of Women's Work both

published in 1881 further the education demand for women pairing it with a call to stand up against societal

pressures against women's work. Dussap calls women to break free by overcoming the biases against their

working and by taking up a sense of agency.

Quote. "Be active women. Let prejudice be shattered before your feet. Elevate yourselves. Do not be ashamed to

work, for that is humanity's vocation." End quote. Dussap believes that if women as rational beings

can make use of their intellectual and

moral capacities, they can truly feel their essence and natural calling and thus be happy. For her, this

entails being active, that is breaking idleness, earning a living with one's own efforts,

engaging in civic activities, being self-sufficient, independent of any outside influence on their free will,

briefly having a part in social and communal life.

When women think, act, and speak freely, according to Dussap, they can improve

their social conditions and prove that their inferior status is due to patriarchal constraints.

While Dussap's main focus is the women of her

own class whom she criticizes for demeaning any kind of labor, be it physical or affective, and for

being passive consumers, she advises women of all economic backgrounds to stand on their

own two feet. Moreover, she assigns women a vital task in sustaining their family's livelihood and happiness.

She brings the invisible work women do in the domestic sphere into visibility. She ascribed women the

responsibility of becoming role models for the future generations.

She also ascribes them the power of shaping the destiny of the nation and the entire humanity.

For me this text is a powerful, social analysis from a fresh perspective informed by economic inequalities or if

you like, class antagonism, among urban Armenian women that also

emphasizes the sameness of the structural obstacles that prevent women across classes from bettering their lives.

While revisiting the idea of a principal moral education that enables women to unchain herself rather than a

distorted unscientific education that has served to temper with women's nature and make her unaware of her chains,

Dussap's adds that ignorance and idleness morally weaken women,

make women slaves of men's gaze, and pressure- pleasures, deprive them of an awareness

of their rights, letting men make and practice law as they please.

Dussap employs a romanticized, uncorrupted, primitive natural life argument, but she powerfully states that

by ruling over women, men harm the harmony and well-being of entire humanity.

She counters any discourse against women's ill behavior by showing that it is

women's survival mechanism in a society that throws off their balance by constantly victimizing

them. It is clear that Dussap has been following the feminist criticisms of Napoleonic civil war law.

She tells Armenians that the civilization they imitate deprived women of their basic rights

while not sparing them from the harshest punishment for their smallest wrongs. In March 1882, with the invitation of imperial

physician [...], the chair of the greek syllabus philological association in Pera,

Dussap delivered a speech in French. It was soon translated into Armenian and published in the local press. In this

talk, she provided a detailed account on the recent developments in Armenian intellectual life by evaluating [...] and European

educated intellectuals' contributions to the national awakening.

She explained the revival movements among Constantinoples, Smyrna and [...] Armenians, the

organized efforts for mass education and literacy across the Armenians of the

Ottoman empire as well as the flourishing of Armenian performance and fine arts.

She employed the common narrative arch of golden age decline under foreign domination and revival. She displayed her knowledge

of Greek and European writers and philosophers and Armenians relations with them. One of

the most important parts of this talk was where she brought up women's participation in Armenian

national reconstruction as an evidence of progressiveness.

Attended by 500 people, this talk was praised as a success in Armenian European language papers in

Constantinople. It was also criticized for not using the word "Hayastan" -- Armenia-- and

overpraising Greek and Greek influence on Armenians. In her defense, male writers considered it as a very

brave lecture, especially under the heavy censorship of the Hamidian period and her precarious position with her

immediate family members being Ottoman officers, namely meaning her brother and husband.

For us feminist historians today, this speech is a unique documentation of a

late 19th century feminist's evaluation of arming and awakening movement

while taking active part in it. Dussap was aware that the ideas she

expressed publicly were perceived to be too radical, and even scandalous. She was probably

also conscious that her feminist critique was tamed by some of her male comrades

to promote a rather domesticated understanding of Armenian women's demands.

She moved forward to express her resistance through fiction and to sculpt the emancipated Armenian

woman she envisioned. Between 1883 and 1887, she wrote three novels to expose the

ills caused by male supremacy. Mayda, 1883. Siranush, 1884. Araxia [...], 1887. Araxia, or the Governess.

These are feminist romance novels that use women's self-consciousness as a

stylistic and rhetorical device and articulate women's thoughts and emotions suppressed in public.

While advocating for women's right to choose their romantic partners and to enjoy mutual love and passion in

their relations, these works make a fury case against the double standards of chastity

and the unjust treatment of women.

In her novels Dussap shakes the sexist definitions of honor from the ground, from the ground by

redefining morality as dignity, ethical judgment, and responsibility.

While doing so, she attacks the systemic inequalities between the sexes.

She criticizes religion customs and law, which for her are mechanisms of

dominance in the hands of men who keep all kinds of freedom and access to resources

either as their exclusive privileges.

Refuting the argument that women are weak in their nature,Dussap points to man-made conditions that have been preventing women from

developing their mental and moral capacities.

Her novels are not only declarations of objection against women's enslavement, they are

also deeply analyzed and convincing declarations of the possibility of otherwise.

In her texts, including her diary, she brings examples from the past and the present to prove women's sharp

mind and strong will. Through the characters of her novels,

she also breeds life into the free Armenian woman who is true to herself and owns her life. Dussap repeated the

idea of rejecting conformity to the conventions that ripped women off their freedom.

According to her, the emancipated woman is aware of her rights and fulfills her duties towards her

family and the Armenian nation. She is a fully functioning, independent and respected in

the respected individual who occupies a meaningful place

in society. Dussap also created examples of men who are sensitive souls,

loyal partners, and appreciative of women's work inside and outside home.

Her idealized modern Armenian women and men juxtaposed are juxtaposed in her novels

with their unwanted and shamed opposites. Their characters

develop on the background of social and economic transformations

in the Ottoman Armenian life.

Although the elitist over, despite the elitist overtones in her narratives, uh and these are not totally

resolved, Dussap's novels are unsparing critiques

of social hierarchies.

Focusing on the discourses and practices around romance and

marriage or on the anxieties over shifting norms of femininity and

masculinity, these novels offer an analysis of changing socio

economic relations and values from the lens

of gender and sexuality.

Dussap's writings embody the feminist critique of enlightenment thought.

She embraces the principle of celebrating reason while at the same time elevating the

value of sensitivity to a principle virtue in making sound judgments

and in enhancing social relations. Thus as much as we find eurocentrism and the colonialist discourse of western

white feminism in Dussap's body of writings, a strong feminist critique of European,

especially French education, political, and legal systems, are essential to her authorial stance.

It is important to note that one of the strongest

themes that connects Dussap's famous language with her contemporaries and the western

four mothers before her let's say is her use of analogy of women as slaves.

As for French counterparts of the time which she was probably closely following, she

celebrated motherhood as women's true calling. While also reproducing the popular Armenian

national modernization discourse on mothers shaping the future of a nation,

of a people, just like many other feminists, Dussap used

this narrative to demand a proper education for women in accordance with

this vital role. Dussap also redefine motherhood as a political power of women to influence men.

As much as this promoted the ideal of camaraderie between sexes, in the long path to emancipation in the

Dussapian world, women's strongest support were other women, with mothers sisters or friends. In her

novels, she depicted love and care, companionship, intellectual and artistic exchange, and

solidarity between women.

Moreover in her posthumously published diary, we read that she openly called women to unite.

She criticized women for causing harm to their sex,

a sign of not having the true womanly consciousness. Similarly, her literary

depiction of mother-daughter relations as life-saving was an extension of this outlook,

something she enjoyed with her mother Nazle in her real life.

It must be these predominant themes in her works, that is slavery, motherhood, and sentimentality as

political power, that led one of her contemporaries compare her to

Harriet Beecher Stowe. The same author considered her the only novelist of the early period modern Western Armenian,

literature likening her to George Sand. In fact, he was not alone in this association. Dussap was the Armenian

George Sand, not only because she may have been influenced by her, but because she shared the same destiny.

When Mayda her first novel came out sometime in May/June 1883, its news quickly spread in Constantinople,

Smyrna, and Tbilisi newspapers.

It triggered discussions from its name to the original language of the manuscript. Was it Armenian or French?

Whether it was a translation from George Sand or one of Sand's unpublished works. While some qualified

it as progressive and revolutionary, others got offended by its mention of

equality of legal rights, women's rights to free love, and their demands to be active in the public.

A fierce pen debate started between two prominent male writers: [...] and

While the former was a great supporter of the novel and its author, the letter argued that the ideas

expressed in it were not instinct with the Armenian reality of the time and could even be detrimental to the

Armenian family values. Arguing that women had no part in any of humanity's achievements except for causing destruction,

even to the extreme position of arguing that it was men who were oppressed.

When another prominent male writer of the time [...] invited to Dussap to react back to these

accusations in the journal he was editing that time, she stated that she hadnothing to add to what she had already expressed.

In principle, she never cared if what she firmly believed to be true and thus spoke out was praised or

condemned. Soon after this correspondence that Dussap's new novel was in press.

Newspapers and journal editors competed with each other in publishing the preface of this new

novel where Dussap addressed the backlash. Dussap's answer to her attackers was writing two new novels and

letting the characters in Siranush and Araksia [...] respond them.

After completing her trilogy, Dussap, stopped publishing for a while due to severe headaches that prevented

her from any focus requiring activity. But there are letters to her close friend photographer imperial

photographer, Kevork Abdullah, one of them on the slide, evidence that

in 1887 and 1888 she was still active, organizing events, running her literary salon and working

for [...], and another society named Asiatic Society.

In 1890, Dussap left for Paris. Her daughter Doreen was working with famous composers of the time

and trying to become a concert pianist and her son Edgar was attending high school in Paris. Dussap

herself was making a vibrant circle of intellectuals and artists. This is when she met feminist author

Juliette Adam and got fascinated by seeing a woman as the editor-in-chief of

a journal the renowned La Nouvelle Revue.

In 1891 Dussap was deeply shaken with the loss of her daughter to tuberculosis at the age of 18.

Following years were quieter times for her. She accepted house guests, spent time with her nieces [...] and paid regular visits to her

daughter's grave.

She died of cancer in Pera on January 16. And if you ever go to Istanbul, you can

pay a visit to her grave in the Latin Catholic cemetery of

Feriköy where she's buried next to her daughter.

Thank you. Thank you very much for that wonderful talk.

Um, very much enjoyed it. I want to remind everyone to please.

Thank you for this great talk and and we look forward to to having you at the CNES

for the rest of the year. Thank you. Thank you. And as I said, please check our website. We have a lot of events,

both archived and coming up. So we would love to

have you as our audience. Thank You.