The Female Voice in Rawe and the Strive for Gender Equality Up on embracing the Christian faith the Assyrians incorporated the melodies of their temple hymns and chants into their Christian liturgical music. The zealous devotion of the early church fathers led to the suppression of everything that is not confined within the church and monastery walls (see the canon laws of Odisho Bar Brikha and Bar Salibi). This fact affected Assyrian laity music and heritage, almost leading to its total loss among most of the Assyrian communities, whose culture eventually came under the influence of the neighbouring peoples. However, the obstinate mountain dwelling Assyrians of Hakkari, isolated in their difficult mountain ranges, not only maintained much of this heritage and transmitted it orally from generation to the next but their isolated environment and semi-autonomous status helped them preserve an undiluted and organically evolved culture. The orally preserved heritage of the Hakkari Assyrians can be categorised into various genres. This paper will study this oral heritage, in itself construed as an act of defiance in light of Church policies towards laity music and culture. I will primarily focus on the female voice in “Rawe”, a genre loosely defined as Assyrian love poetry. This genre seems to have offered a rare vista of self expression for the Assyrian women in a highly patriarchal society. Therefore a detailed study of this genre can shed light on the status, role, and life of the Assyrian women in Hakkari. Indeed Rawe seems to be the only medium of expression for spirited Assyrian women that strived for gender equality in a closed and conservative Christian community. This paper will make use of these female voices to demonstrate the strive of the Assyrian women as manifested in Rawe couplets, which remains a genre that has not yet been reduced to sound scholarly research, something which this paper aims to achieve.