Feminist Repatriation to Soviet Armenia in 1947? A History of Communist Armenian Women in France

Armenian women immigrants, many of them survivors of the Armenian Genocide, participated in the French Resistance against the Nazis during WWII. In 1942, they founded the Union des femmes arméniennes in Paris which remained an underground organization until liberation. After the war’s conclusion and in response to Soviet Armenia’s repatriation campaigns, the Union promoted the communist fatherland as a feminist heaven. Through its journal Hai Guine (Armenian Women), the Union leadership encouraged its membership to move to Soviet Armenia. For them, it was a place where women and men enjoyed equal economic and political rights and a place where the state assumed many of the burdens that had been the responsibility of women in the diaspora, namely, keeping and transmitting group identity to the next generations. In a way, then, the fatherland was a motherland. This paper delves into the hitherto unknown history of Armenian working-class women’s political subjectivities in postwar Europe. 

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History and the director of Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT. Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in 2016. Dr. Ekmekcioglu has published articles on various topics, including Armenian demands at the 1923 Lausanne Conference, an Armenian woman’s memoirs about her years at Constantinople’s Central Prison during WWI, and French Armenian communist women’s organizing in post-war Paris for repatriation to Soviet Armenia. Currently, Dr. Ekmekcioglu is co-authoring a book and digital humanities project titled Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Documentary Archive (IUP Ottomanica, 2025).

This event is part of CREEES’ Armenian Studies Program.

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