About Azərbaycan Qadını

Azərbaycan Qadını

Azərbaycan Qadını, meaning Azerbaijani Woman, is one of Azerbaijan's oldest magazines, founded in Baku in 1923 as Şərq Qadını, Woman of the East, and renamed Azərbaycan Qadını in 1938. For more than a century, in its successive forms, it has addressed Azerbaijani women on rights, education, work, family, literature, culture and public life. It began as the main print organ of the Azerbaijani women's department of the Communist Party, the Zhenotdel, designed to educate Muslim women about their rights and draw them into the economic, political and social life of the new socialist state. It is still published in Baku in a new format under editor Fatma Abdullazadeh, in Azerbaijani and Russian — a lifespan that makes it a unique witness to every era of modern Azerbaijani history, from the first republic's aftermath through the Soviet decades to restored independence.

Founding in November 1923 as Sharg Gadini

The magazine's first issue appeared in November 1923, as a publication of the Women's Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, under its first editor-in-chief, Ayna Sultanova. Shafiga Efendizadeh, a teacher and journalist described in that first issue as one of the first female editors and teachers recognised not only in Azerbaijan but throughout the Islamic Orient, served on its editorial board and headed its fiction literature department. The founding came just three years after the fall of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, in which Azerbaijani women had received the vote — earlier, as later Azerbaijani accounts emphasise, than women in the vast majority of countries. The new magazine's task, as historians describe it, was different in kind: to reach Muslim women who had lived largely within the family, to teach them their rights under the new order, and to promote the party's programme of incorporating them into education, work and public life.

Some sources describe Şərq Qadını as the first women's publication in Azerbaijan, while others note that the newspaper Ishig, published earlier, was overlooked for many years. This profile records both points as the sources give them: Şərq Qadını was unquestionably the first sustained women's magazine in Azerbaijan and the one whose influence endured, whatever priority is assigned to the earlier newspaper.

Renaming to Azerbaijan Gadini in 1938

The magazine carried the name Şərq Qadını, Woman of the East, until 1938, when it was renamed Azərbaycan Qadını, Woman of Azerbaijan. The change of name marks a change of frame: from a magazine addressed to women of the East in general, in the internationalist language of the early Soviet years, to a magazine of and for the women of one republic. Under its new name it continued through the Soviet decades as Azerbaijan's principal women's magazine. Azerbaijani state and educational accounts of the Soviet period credit the women's councils and the journal Azerbaijani Woman with an important role in the women's movement of those years, in a period when, in the same accounts, women's illiteracy was eliminated within a short time and women became teachers, doctors and engineers in large numbers. The magazine was part of the printed infrastructure of that transformation: a place where the newly literate could read, in their own language, about education, work, health, children and culture.

Mission: Literacy, Rights and Public Life

Scholarly studies of the magazine's early years describe a publication built around enlightenment. At its documented rhythm in one period — published eight times a year — it attracted women to literacy with articles and information on literature, culture, art, science, education and sport. Its columns addressed upbringing and the education of children; the Ottoman scholar Khalil Fikret, for example, wrote numerous articles on children's education in Şərq Qadını in 1923. The magazine's world was the world of the Ali Bayramov women's club in Baku, opened on 30 May 1920, where women learned trades in workshops, attended compulsory literacy courses, and found nurseries for their children and medical assistance alongside cultural and educational work — the social machinery, described in a later Nargis magazine history feature, within which the magazine's first readers were entering public life. To read the early Şərq Qadını is to read a manual for a new kind of life, addressed to women whom that life had previously excluded.

Influence Across the Turkic World

The magazine's influence reached far beyond Azerbaijan. Academic research on its regional impact records that, shortly after its publication began, its example spread to Turkestan and Tatarstan, a process in which the First Turkological Congress held in Baku in 1926 had an exceptional impact. Uzbek scholar Halid Said Hojayev emphasised Azerbaijan's influence in creating publications promoting women's rights and enlightenment in Uzbek society, and the Saodat women's magazine, published in Uzbekistan from 1925, was created directly on the model of Şərq Qadını, according to the studies cited; women's magazines such as Maarif va Oktuchi in the region likewise followed in its wake. The centenary assessments of the magazine conclude that the hundred-year-old journal, founded in 1923, fulfilled its mission and did great service not only in Azerbaijan but in the entire Turkic world — a judgement quoted here from the Azerbaijani academic literature that has studied it, and one that reflects a documented pattern of imitation across Soviet Central Asia and the Volga region.

Language, Editors and Continuity

The magazine is an Azerbaijani-language publication, with Russian also listed among its languages in reference data. Its editorship links Azerbaijan's twentieth century together. Ayna Sultanova, its first editor-in-chief in 1923, was one of the pioneering women of Azerbaijani public life. Its current editor, in the reference record consulted for this profile, is Fatma Abdullazadeh, under whom the magazine is published in Baku in a new format. Between those two editorships lies an unbroken institutional identity — the same title, in its renamed form, surviving the Second World War, the late Soviet decades, the collapse of the USSR and the restoration of Azerbaijani independence in 1991. Few magazines anywhere in the Caucasus can document a comparable span, and the title's centenary in 2023 was marked in Azerbaijani academic journals with studies of its history and influence, from which much of this profile's early history is drawn.

What the Magazine Covered

Across its eras, Azərbaycan Qadını has covered the subjects its seed record summarises: women's issues, family, culture and society. In its Soviet form those subjects were framed by the state's programme — women's participation in production, education and public organisations, the protection of rights and freedoms as the state defined them, and the celebration of women who became teachers, doctors and engineers. Literature held a formal place from the beginning, with a dedicated fiction department in the first editorial board, and culture, art, science and sport all featured in its literacy-era contents. In its post-independence form, published in a new format, the magazine continues as a women's title from Baku addressing family, culture and society for a contemporary Azerbaijani readership. Detailed issue-by-issue contents for recent decades are not part of the public record consulted here, and this profile does not reconstruct them; the documented continuity is of title, city, language and audience.

The Magazine in Azerbaijani Women's History

To understand Azərbaycan Qadını's importance, it helps to place it in the longer arc its own country tells about its women. Azerbaijani historical writing celebrates medieval poetesses such as Mahsati Ganjavi, the heroines of the Book of Dede Korkut and of Nizami's poems, and the women of the nineteenth-century oil-boom enlightenment who entered theatre, press and girls' schools as public life opened. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic granted women suffrage, and after its fall the women's clubs, literacy campaigns and this magazine carried the question of women's education and rights into the Soviet period by other means. Heydar Aliyev, addressing a republican assembly of women in a speech preserved by his heritage research centre, singled out the women's councils and the journal Azerbaijani Woman for their role in that movement. Whatever a reader's view of the Soviet system that published it, the magazine was one of the instruments by which generations of Azerbaijani women first encountered print addressed to them, in their own language, about their own lives.

A Century-Old Title in the Modern Directory

Among the magazines in this Azerbaijan directory, Azərbaycan Qadını is the elder by generations: Nargis was founded in 2012, Region Plus in 2006, IRS around the turn of the 2000s, Azerbaijan International and Visions in 1993 and 2006 respectively, and Baku in 2007 — while Azərbaycan Qadını dates to 1923 and predates them all combined in historical reach. It is not a glossy, a heritage review or an analytical journal, but something rarer in any country's media system: a women's magazine that has accompanied its readers through empire's end, revolution, Soviet modernisation, war, independence and the digital age without losing its name or its city. Its survival in a new format in Baku, a century after its first issue, is itself the central fact of its story.

Reading the Record Critically

The historical record for this magazine is rich for its founding era and thinner for its recent decades. The strongest sources are Azerbaijani academic studies of Şərq Qadını's founding, mission and regional influence, published around its centenary; reference summaries recording its 1923 founding, its name until 1938, its role as the Azerbaijani Zhenotdel's main print organ, its languages and its current Baku publication under Fatma Abdullazadeh; and biographical scholarship on its first editorial board. Sources differ on whether it should be called Azerbaijan's first women's publication, given the earlier Ishig newspaper, and the exact frequency of publication varied across its long life, with eight issues a year documented for one period. This profile has flagged those points rather than smoothing them over. The core facts — Baku, 1923, Şərq Qadını, renamed Azərbaycan Qadını in 1938, still published in Baku — are consistent across every source consulted, and they are enough to establish the magazine as one of the foundational titles of Azerbaijani journalism.