1883 – 1960
Mariam Garikuli conducted her activity as an actress in Tbilisi and Kutaisi. After leaving the theatre, she adopted the penname, Garikuli, when she undertook the literary activity.
In 1912, Mariam Garikuli published a short story “Cellar” in Sakartvelos Moambe. She cooperated with children’s editions. Her autobiographical work, “Passed Road” describes the life of the writer and also provides various literary portraits.
Women Unite!
Author: Mariam Garikuli
“I call on women, who are concerned about their rightless condition, to unite around the issue of women. I call on those who are concerned not only about the lack of women in the parliament but about their rightless state in their families because of their husbands, fathers, brothers. I call on those who lack equal voice in their families they have served with devotion; who do not have even their private corner to shed tears about their own miserable fate; I call on all of them to unite under the flag of women’s equality.
“Who says that we must act separately from men in the common public cause? The epoch of the Amazons has long ended and they are only recalled in fairytales. But apart form these common interests, until we are not viewed as equal to the law and justice our private interests will remain different from their private interests too.
“Let’s not be deceived by their oral promises and the fact that today we, women, have been involved in some insignificant activity for the state need. The time will come when they will no longer need our assistance and will again acknowledge the cooking in the kitchen as the women’s activity.
“Keep in mind that shifts and changes of history made a contemporary man so egotistic that he will hardly recognize a woman as an equal comrade. Women, do not forget that being well fed is not sufficient, there is a spiritual life too which we all – be it a female worker or a female bourgeois – equally lack. This is our common cause! Let the desire to regain human personality unite us regardless of the class we belong to and the direction we favor.”
The newspaper Voice of Georgian Woman,
issue #1, 5 April 1917