Ottoman Women

The emergence of women’s studies in the 1970s and 1980s significantly broadened the scope of sources and methods in the study of the socio-economic, cultural, and legal history of Ottoman women. Basing their research on multigenre documents from Ottoman courts of law, historians began to shed light on the active role of Ottoman women in the economic, religious, and social lives of their communities. From the mid-1980s, much of the scholarship on Ottoman women has espoused methods and theories that emerged in feminist, gender, cultural and postcolonial studies. Critical analyses of 18th- and 19th-century Orientalist texts and images provided ample evidence that the representations of Ottoman women as powerless, idle, and perpetually subjected to sexual exploitation played a key role in the European colonialist and imperialist discourses of alterity. In dismantling such misconceptions, scholars focused on a wide range of documents from Imperial and local archives to demonstrate the agency and power of Ottoman women, and their ability to undermine gendered laws of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Studies that focused on Ottoman women’s management of property convincingly argued that women made strategic investments to participate in the economic and political sectors of Ottoman societies. In the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars increasingly relied on feminist methodologies in their investigations of the female perspectives on patriarchy, seclusion, and female sexuality. In particular, analyses of women’s magazines, novels, autobiographies and polemics produced by late 19th- and early 20th-century Ottoman women have offered important insights into the female perspective on the “women question” that was on top of the agenda of all male reformers of the late Ottoman Empire. Contemporary scholarship on Ottoman women goes beyond adding women to Ottoman history and refuting the Orientalist clichés. Modern works that destabilize the dichotomies of public/private, male/female, and visible/invisible to address the complexities of Ottoman women’s experiences display a great deal of theoretical and methodological sophistication. In addition, modern-day scholarship on Ottoman women take important steps toward a comparative investigation of the condition of women across the boundaries of ethnic and/or religious affiliation. However, like earlier scholarly works on Ottoman women, modern-day studies are limited by availability of source material. Consequently, much of the history of Ottoman women of modest means, and women who inhabited rural areas of the Empire, remains undocumented and therefore unexamined. This article presents an overview of scholarly works that focus on various aspects of the history of Ottoman women. With the exception of three works, all works are written and/or available in English. Those who are interested in more general topics on Muslim women in the Ottoman Middle East should consult the Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies article “Women in Islam.” Important works on gender and sexuality in the Ottoman Middle East can be found in the Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies article “Gender and Sexuality.”