A female member of the First Armenian Parliament (1919-1920), physician.
In 1919, when in many countries of the world women were still fighting for the right to vote, there were 3 female members of the Armenian parliament. One of them was Katarine Zalyan-Manukyan a member of Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF).
Zalyan-Manukyan was a physician devoted to helping orphans and refugees and the fight against epidemics. She met her future husband and one of the founders of the First Armenian Republic, Aram Manukyan at one of the orphanages.
They got married in Yerevan in 1917. However, their married life did not last long as on January 29, 1919, Aram died of typhus fever when their daughter Seda was only four months old.
On June 4 of 1919, Katarine Zalyan-Manukyan was elected as a member of the second parliament of Armenia and was a member of the parliamentary Commission on Health. Following the fall of the First Republic, the young widow was subjected to political persecution by Soviet authorities. After she was fired from her job and evicted from her apartment, Katarine was forced to live with her sister in her one-room apartment. She then left to join her husband’s relatives in Krasnodar.
In 1927, when Armenia had a desperate need for doctors, she returned to Yerevan and devoted her life to medicine whiling having to endure extremely harsh living conditions. Katarine Zalyan-Manukyan passed away in 1965.
“My mother was an educated and honest person devoted to her profession. She would leave for work in the morning, come home at noon, feed me, then lock me inside again and leave to work a different job. That was the whole meaning of her life …”
From the memoirs of Seda Manukyan
