The first Armenian woman to publish a novel — whose 1883 debut Mayda scandalized Constantinople, argued for women's independence, and opened Armenian literature to every woman who followed.
Srpouhi Dussap (1840–1901) was the first Armenian woman novelist — and the first great feminist of Armenian letters. Born Srpouhi Vahanian in Constantinople to a wealthy Catholic Armenian family, she turned her home into one of the city's leading literary salons and her pen into a weapon for women's emancipation.
Her 1883 novel Mayda — the first novel published by an Armenian woman — was an open argument for women's right to love, work, and live independently, and it detonated a public controversy. Conservative critics attacked; a generation of younger women, including the future writers Sibil and Zabel Yesayan, found in her proof that an Armenian woman could hold a pen in public.
She followed with the novels Siranush and Araksia, or the Governess, each pressing the case for women's education and economic independence. After the death of her daughter Dorine in 1891, she withdrew from public life, but the door she had opened never closed again.
Mayda was more than a novel — it was the first time an Armenian woman argued in public, in print, that her life was her own.
— On the scandal and triumph of 1883Every Armenian woman who has published a book since 1883 follows Srpouhi Dussap. Yesayan called meeting her a turning point of her youth. In the history of Armenian feminism, Dussap is where the written record begins.
Discover the culture, history, and community behind figures like Srpouhi Dussap.
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