From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Armenians/Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill
Before 1914, most Armenians in Canada were male sojourners, who came as part of a family or village group. Most wanted to aid their families back home and tried to retain their Old World mores and values. Feeling vulnerable in a relatively free and open society, the men protected and watched over each other.
After the war, Armenian Canadians endeavoured to reconstitute family life by locating and bringing surviving family members to Canada. Settlers who had lost their wives in the Genocide tried to find a refugee survivor as spouse. Through matchmakers, letters, photos, and the Armenian network, marriages were arranged between men in Canada and often-much-younger women – “picture brides” – from orphanages and refugee centres abroad.
Widespread fear of national extinction led Armenians to condemn exogamy and treasure children. For example, at Grace Anglican Church in Brantford, Ontario, where many Armenian rites of passage were performed, all but two of the sixty-eight weddings between 1917 and 1931 involving Armenians were endogamous. Most couples had a child within a year or two of marriage and a total of at least three children. Typically the birth rate fell during the Depression, through the practice of birth control, including self-administered abortion, but more usually by abstention.
Armenian women were expected to be obedient, respectful, and formal. In the early years, they depended almost totally on their husbands, who were older and more familiar with Canadian society. Men generally dealt with the “outside world”; at home they were authoritarian and patriarchal. During the 1920s at least, they earned enough at the factory to enable their wives to stay home to look after their families. But as the women grew older and more confident, they assumed greater responsibility, and by the 1950s and 1960s the ageing men were deferring to their younger wives. Traditional ways involved respect for elders, deferential treatment of men, sober clothing for women, no public display of affection or emotion, no loud laughter or speech, and no pampering of children. Invariably the behaviour of wife and children reflected on the honour of the household head. The disgrace attached to marriage break-up, loss of or separation from family during the Genocide, the struggle to make ends meet in Canada, and the preoccupation with carving out a new life usually ruled out marital separation, desertion, and divorce. Alcoholism, crime, and juvenile delinquency were rare.
In a community with a strong sense of propriety and shame, deviant behaviour brought ostracism. As children grew up in Canada, tensions inevitably arose, particularly with fathers, and mothers often acted as intermediaries at home. Disputes between the generations, the sometimes-stifling milieu, the fractiousness of political organizations, and career opportunities drove many young people away from the community.
Though the second generation would inevitably marry outsiders, the first few such unions caused anguish. An informal survey of second-generation children in Hamilton in 1945 indicated that, of 104 on the list, twelve never married, forty-one wed Armenians, and fifty-one married non-Armenians – a proportion considered outrageous by some Armenians.
As a result of the Genocide and immigration restrictions, there were few extended Armenian families in Canada between the wars, and so the bonds of surviving family were particularly precious. The need for intimacy often led adults to develop fictive kin, including godparents, who served as witnesses or attendants at the wedding and as godparents to children ensuing from the marriage and became virtual members of the family. For children with few blood relatives, everyone in the neighbourhood was “aunt” or “uncle,” every Armenian house was a second home, and every Armenian peer was a “cousin.” Children created their own games, group outings, and bonds of friendship.
Traditionally, Armenians indulged sons more than daughters. As future breadwinners, boys received education and training; girls were sheltered and scrupulously disciplined. Daughters were required to help in household chores and until the 1950s expected to marry before the age of twenty or twenty-one. A few, however, took post-secondary education and entered teaching or medicine. At a time when Armenians were assimilating into Canadian society, sending sons and daughters to university, and acquiescing in intermarriage, the post-1945 flow of immigrants brought in renewed resistance to exogamy and re-emphasis on Old World values. Often newcomers frowned on oldtimers for their “un-Armenian” outlook.
Recent immigration has created many large, extended Armenian-Canadian families. Younger couples are gradually assimilating, and more women are pursuing post-secondary education and careers outside the home. As in earlier days, distance from the immigrating generation increases the incidence of intermarriage, a practice still discouraged. Inevitably, the juxtaposition of values has redefined family roles, including generational and gender relationships. In general, family solidarity serves as a basis for Armenians to integrate smoothly into Canadian society and maintain vigorous community organizations.
