Iranian Women you Should Know: Bersabeh Hovsepian

January 29, 2016

5 min read

The First Kindergarten and Daycare Center in Iran by Bersabeh Hovsepian

Global and Iranian history are both closely intertwined with the lives and destinies of prominent figures. Every one of them has laid a brick on history’s wall, sometimes paying the price with their lives, men and women alike. Women have been especially influential in the past 200 years, writing much of contemporary Iranian history.

In Iran, women have increased public awareness about gender discrimination, raised the profile of and improved women’s rights, fought for literacy among women, and promoted the social status of women by counteracting religious pressures, participating in scientific projects, being involved in politics, influencing music, cinema... And so the list goes on.

This series aims to celebrate these renowned and respected Iranian women. They are women who represent the millions of women that influence their families and societies on a daily basis. Not all of the people profiled in the series are endorsed by IranWire, but their influence and impact cannot be overlooked. The articles are biographical stories that consider the lives of influential women in Iran.

IranWire readers are invited to send in suggestions for how we might expand the series. Contact IranWire via email ([email protected]), on Facebook, or by tweeting us.

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An Iranian citizen journalist, who writes under a pseudonym to protect her identity, wrote the following article on the ground inside Iran.

For 90 years, the sign on the entrance to a cul-de-sac in Tehran’s Baharestan neighborhood read the words “Bersabeh Hovsepian.” Bersabeh Hovsepian was an Armenian-Iranian woman who founded Iran’s first ever daycare center and kindergarten, a woman who played a crucial role in educating Iranian children.

Hovsepian was born in 1906 in a village in the southwestern province of Chahar-Mahal and Bakhtiari. Her family moved to Tehran when she was just a year old. Like most Armenian girls, she went to the Hikazian School for Armenian children, which was set up by a philanthropist. Hovsepian graduated from the school — which closed down a few years ago — in 1924.

Between the time of Hovsepian’s birth and her graduation, Iran went through huge changes. First, there was the Constitutional Revolution and then, in 1921, Reza Shah Pahlavi overthrew the Qajar Dynasty. Although they continued to be denied many crucial rights, the situation for women improved in Iran, allowing them greater access to education and jobs.

After she graduated, Hovsepian began teaching at the school, and then she went to the Caspian port of Anzali to teach at the Armenian school that was based there for a year. Throughout her years as a teacher, she found that many of her female colleagues had difficulty caring for their children because there was no place for working mothers to leave their children. This meant women were forced to choose between work and children.

Knowing this, and the fact that in Europe there were “children’s’ gardens” for children pre-primary level, Hovsepian began to get ideas for something similar in Iran. Several years earlier, Jabbar Baghtcheban founded a kindergarten in the provincial capital of Tabriz but Hovsepian wanted a prep school that would also act as a daycare center for children younger than three. In 1930, she went back to Tehran and fought with the bureaucracy to get a permit for Iran’s first daycare center, which she succeeded in getting.

In 1931, she opened her kindergarten, which she called “Iran.” The place was made up of two classrooms, a dining room and an office and its first clients were the children of four mothers that Hovsepian knew. However, it was not long before other working mothers heard about the place. Over the following 30 years, her daycare center grew to become a large educational facility with a kindergarten, a primary school and a high school for nearly 400 students.

Then in 1949, she went to Switzerland to study child psychology and education, gaining a graduate diploma from the University of Geneva, and leaving the school in the hands of her colleagues.

Her school has been widely praised for its high standards and many of its former students have gone on to be very successful. But this is just one of Hovsepian’s achievements: her biggest feat was to save countless women from having to choose between their children and their careers. Her daycare and kindergarten gave children an environment in which to enjoy being children whilst also receiving a modern and science-based education.

During her adult life, Hovsepian was a pioneer in fighting for women’s rights and was active in a number of charity foundations. She co-founded the Iranian Women’s Organization in 1968. She also received a number of medals and accolades for her contributions to education in Iran.

Up until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, her school was an independent institution but it was taken over by the Ministry of Education, like many other private schools, after the revolution.

In 1981, she retired after having worked tirelessly for half a century as an educator. For a while she became a tour organizer but she eventually moved to the United States. For several years, she lived alone in Glendale, California in the US until she passed away in 1999 at the age of 94.

Also in the series:

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Jinous Nemat Mahmoudi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Simin Behbahani

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Forough Farrokhzad

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Parvin Etesami

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Farokhru Parsa

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Jamileh Sadeghi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Fatemeh Daneshvar

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Fatemeh Moghimi

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Googoosh

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Sima Bina

50 Iranian Women you Should Know: Tahereh Qurratu'l-Ayn