Gender as ideology and its practice in Armenia

Gender, as a socially defined category which links biological sex to a particular set of social obligations and cultural expectations, has important ideological and practical consequences for families and societies. This chapter will examine how the abrupt political and economic changes of the last few years have intersected with Armenian and Soviet constructions of gender to shape the lives of Armenian women.

For Armenians, the family represents the centre of affective life and, no less importantly, the means by which they resisted cultural assimilation and physical destruction as a people through centuries of onslaught by Arabs, Mongols, Turks and other ethnically or religiously alien peoples. Countless proverbs express the centrality of the family to ethnic ‘survival’, and the complementarity of men's and women's roles in this joint endeavour. Armenians often describe the family as a ‘fortress’ – man, the ‘outer wall’, wards off external danger, while woman, the ‘inner wall’, preserves domestic order and harmony. The organic relation of each part to the whole is also expressed in the analogy of a married couple to a body, in which man is the head, and woman is the neck. When invoking this comparison, people frequently point out that although the head supposedly makes the decisions and controls the body, in fact, women subtly control the head, for ‘as the neck turns, so turns the head’. Both proverbs stress the supportive and subordinate nature of women's relationship to men. Armenian women do not necessarily accept or conform to these stereotypes, but they must still contend with them, whether to defy, subvert or adapt them.