KURGHINYAN
Poet • Feminist Pioneer
Shushanik Kurghinyan
The fearless founding voice of Armenian feminist poetry — whose 1907 manifesto I Want to Live demanded a woman's full place in work, struggle, and life itself.
The fearless founding voice of Armenian feminist poetry — whose 1907 manifesto I Want to Live demanded a woman's full place in work, struggle, and life itself.
Shushanik Kurghinyan (1876–1927) was the fearless founding voice of Armenian feminist poetry. Born into a poor family in Alexandrapol (today's Gyumri), she wrote verse that demanded what almost no one else in her world dared to say out loud: full equality for women — in work, in struggle, and in life.
Her landmark 1907 poem I Want to Live remains the manifesto of Armenian feminism: a refusal to live as an ornament, and an insistence on standing beside men in every arena of human struggle. Writing in the revolutionary ferment of the early 1900s, she championed workers, the poor, and women with the same unflinching pen.
I want to live — but not a lavish life trapped in obscurity... I wish to work beside you.
— Shushanik Kurghinyan, I Want to Live (1907)Silenced by ill health in her later years, Kurghinyan died in Yerevan in 1927 — but her poems outlived every institution that ignored them. Today she is read as the great-grandmother of Armenian feminism, her lines carried on posters, in classrooms, and in translation around the world.
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