The Ottoman Empire was a gendered machine. Sexual difference remained interlocked with religious difference as the state regulated who reproduced with whom and who the offspring belonged to. For instance, legally speaking, there was no such thing as an Armenian; one was either an (Ottoman) Armenian woman or an (Ottoman) Armenian man. One of the most fundamental differences between them was that the man-Armenian was forbidden to marry a Muslim woman but the woman-Armenian could become any Muslim man’s bride. The patrilineal logic and ever-present concerns about maintaining the hierarchical superiority of Islam and manhood determined the rules regarding legal sexual partnership and identity of the progeny. Expectedly, the undoing of the Ottoman Empire, i.e. the Armenian Genocide, was a gendered event and biological reproduction lay at its very heart. As the genocide has received more public and scholarly attention in the last decade, gendered wartime experiences too have increasingly come under popular and academic limelight. Even though this field is still in its infancy, it does have the potential to substantially add to –and alter—our understanding of not just the Armenian case but also war and genocide in general. This essay provides a historical overview of the field and suggests new avenues of research.

It is symptomatic of the state of the field that to this day there is not one single book in any language that has both “women” and “the Armenian Genocide” in its title. Up until mid-2000s, “women” were mentioned in the literature only as “women and children” and usually inside the broader category of what was assumed to be “innocent people,” including another understudied group called “the elderly.” For historical and political reasons, most important of which being the Turkish official denial, genocide was equated with killing, and those who were not killed as such did not receive much attention.Footnote ¹ As the burden to prove that “1915” was “genocide” set the frames of the scholarly output in these earlier years, especially in English and French, abduction and rape, processes that do not necessarily end with the perishing of the human body, were seen as mere byproducts of war and uprooting, neither necessitating any further inquiry nor having any “smoking gun” value in establishing the fact-ness of the genocide. Moreover, the event that is considered to be the initial stage of the genocide and thus commemorated globally by Armenians, the April 24 1915 arrests of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, involved men with only two exceptions (Mari Beylerian and Zabel Yesayan), contributing to the idea that men are the main historical subjects of the event thus should be the central actors in its study. The articles and book chapters that concentrated specifically on women’s experiences or children’s lives during the genocide were few and too far between but they eventually began instigating curiosity in the younger generation’s thinking.Footnote ² These publications unearthed the multiplicity of primary sources that could be used to have a better understanding of what really happened to Armenians during the Great War. Eyewitness accounts and memoirs, oral history interviews with survivors, reports and documentation of various Armenian benevolent institutions, and Western diplomatic correspondence contained relevant information and insight about women and children.

Beginning in the mid-2000s the field gained momentum with the publication of several articles that further explored gender and age specific aspects of the genocide, such as sexual violence, abduction, and the reintegration of the formerly kidnapped women and children into the post-war Armenian community.Footnote ³ While these publications opened up new scholarly conversations mostly outside of Turkey, a new scholarship inside Turkey also came into existence, namely, the study of the non-Turkish, non-Muslim, especially Armenian women’s history under the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey.Footnote ⁴ Produced by Turkish Armenian feminist women, this latter scholarship was part and parcel of increased attention in Turkey to minorities’ past and present, a development that was boosted by political factors (such as Turkey’s accession to EU candidacy) as well as the active encouragement of minority actors and their institutions. Most importantly, established in 1993 the Aras Publishing House began translating Armenian literature and scholarship to Turkish, and in 1996 the weekly Agos, with more Turkish pages than Armenian, began publication.Footnote ⁵

In 2004, as the Turkish reading public began discovering Armenians (and their women, including early feminists in the Ottoman Empire) outside of a Turkish official narrative of betrayers, terrorists, and a whining diaspora, Fethiye Çetin published the memoir of her grandmother who was a young girl during the Armenian genocide, witnessed the perishing of her family, and was taken in by a Muslim family and converted to Islam.Footnote ⁶ Çetin’s story was not the first Turkish publication of a forcibly Islamized Armenian grandmother’s storyFootnote ⁷ but it did strike a chord not only because of the beautiful language of the author, the book’s narrative construction, and the captivatingly painful life of the grandmother, but also because of its timing and that Çetin was the lawyer of Agos’s editor Hrant Dink. A Turkish ultranationalist youth assassinated Dink in front of his office in January 2007 which led to an unprecedented event that initiated a new process. For the first time in history the killing of an Armenian public figure galvanized some sectors of the Turkish public into protest. It is estimated that about 100,000 people marched in Dink’s funeral in a Turkey of 75 million that hosts 60,000 Turkish Armenians. Dink’s demonization in the eyes of the Turkish nationalists revolved around the person of Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk’s adopted daughter, a combat pilot, and the symbol of modern Turkish woman, whom Agos claimed was an Armenian orphan adopted and Islamized by Atatürk. This historical claim and the demonization and tragedy it triggered further energized scholars, activists, and the broader public alike to dig deeply on Armenian women’s and children’s experiences during the genocide. Anthropologists began collecting life narratives of grandchildren of Islamized ArmeniansFootnote ⁸ and studying their conversion patterns,Footnote ⁹ journalists spread out to Anatolia to find and report descendant stories,Footnote ¹⁰ experts in literature analyzed the relevance of sex-specific violence in Armenians’ memoirs and novels,Footnote ¹¹ and filmmakers produced documentaries.Footnote ¹² While historians’ trajectories worked somewhat independent from this “memory boom,” they were not completely immune to the scholarly zeitgeist of the era either. They focused on surviving Armenians’ and League of Nations’ rescue efforts to locate and retrieve kidnapped and Islamized women and children,Footnote ¹³ Armenian nurses and relief workers,Footnote ¹⁴ the perspectives of refugee women some of whom recently rescued from Muslim homes and orphanages,Footnote ¹⁵ and the processes of conversion, forced assimilation, orphanhood, and prostitution.Footnote ¹⁶

The breadth of the primary sources expanded to include League of Nations’ archives, the memoirs of the American relief personnel, the Armenian and Turkish press of the immediate postwar era, and Ottoman and Turkish state archives. It is worth noting that many of the documents that indicate how transfer of women and children from Armenian to Muslim contexts was an integral part of the “Armenian deportations” were published by the Turkish Republic Prime Ministry General Directorate of the State Archives in volumes that are meant to negate “the genocide thesis.”Footnote ¹⁷ In line with the Turkish official narrative, the archivists who included these “transfer documents” in such published volumes must have reasoned that the existence of Ottoman government documents that ordered Armenian orphans to be collected and put into Muslim orphanages and widowed women to be married off to Muslim men must have constituted proof of a lack of Ottomans’ “intent” to annihilate all Armenians.Footnote ¹⁸ As more and more scholars recently have noted, however, this reading is influenced by the Holocaust framework which, from a gender perspective, an exceptional genocide in that rape was forbidden, abduction and assimilation were unthinkable, and children were among the first targets for elimination. The legal definition of genocide according United Nations convention in 1948, after all, openly refers to child transfer and the prevention of births within the victim group as constitutive elements of the crime.Footnote ¹⁹

Looking forward, we see that the field is ripe with multiple research opportunities. We still do not have a systematic analysis of how the legal system worked to allow the transfer of women and children during the war years and the (partial) reverse transfer during the Armistice Years (1919-22). For example, we know that the Mudros Armistice’s clause that obligated the Ottoman Empire to release “prisoners of war” came to also apply to women and children kept in Muslim households. The postwar Ottoman military tribunals offer abundant evidence as to how rape and abduction served as proof of intent to destroy a community. Other topics that are worthy of further exploration include Assyrian, Greek, and Pontic Greek women’s lives during the Great War; Armenian women relief personnel and journalists during and after the war; Turkish, Kurdish, Arab, and Circassian women’s roles in perpetrating or benefiting from the massacres or the abduction of women and children; Muslim women’s righteous behaviors; the role of Armenian women in the organization and execution of the Operation Nemesis, (the covert operation carried out by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation from 1920 on to assassinate the masterminds of the Armenian massacres); the role of masculinity and emasculation in how each side understood each other during and after the war; and sexual violence against men and boys. As the field grows we should see Armenian women’s experiences included inside the larger framework of women’s lives during World War I, which to this day remains essentially concerned with European women.