Description
Book SynopsisIn A Social History of the Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou bring together new research on women of different geographies and communities of the late Ottoman Empire. Making use of archives, literary works, diaries, newspapers, almanacs, art works or cartoons, the contributors focus particularly on the ways in which women gained power and exercised agency in late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey. The articles convincingly show that women’s agency cannot be unearthed without narrating how women were involved in shaping their own and others’ lives even in the most unexpected areas of their existence. The women’s activities described here do not simply reflect modernizing trends or westernizing attitudes—or their defensive denial. They provide an array of local responses where ‘the local’ can never be found (and should never be conceptualized) in its initial, unchanged, or authentic state.
Table of ContentsTABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication Acknowledgement List of Illustrations Introduction Duygu Köksal, Anastasia Falierou PART I: Women as Economic Actors: Class, Work and Social Issues Theater as Career for Ottoman Armenian Women, 1850 to 1910 Hasmik Khalapyan Searching for Women’s Agency in the Tobacco Workshops: Female Tobacco Workers of the Province of Selanik E. Tutku Vardağlı Working From Home: Division of Labor Among Female Workers of Feshane in Late Nineteenth Century Istanbul M. Erdem Kabadayı PART II: Education for Life: Schools, Associations and Curricula The Limits of Feminism in Muslim-Turkish Women Writers of the Armistice Period Elif İkbal Mahir Metinsoy Between Two Worlds: Education and Accultration of Ottoman Jewish Women Rachel Simon Girls’ Institutes and the Rearrangement of the Public and the Private Spheres in Turkey Elif Ekin Akşit PART III: Creating New Lives, Pushing the Boundaries: Ottoman Female Artists Painting the Late Ottoman Woman: Portrait(s) of Mihri Müşfik Hanım Burcu Pelvanoğlu The New Woman in Erotic Popular Literature of 1920s Istanbul Fatma Türe PART IV: Womanhood in Print Culture Enlightened Mothers and Scientific Housewifes: Discussing Women’s Social Roles in Eurydice (Evridiki) (1870-1873) Anastasia Falierou An Almanac for Ottoman Women: Notes on Ebüzziya Tevfik’s Takvîmü’n-nisâ (1317/1899) Özgür Türesay Women’s Representations in Ottoman Cartoons and the Satirical Press on the Eve of the Kemalist Reforms (1919-1924) François Georgon Part V: Dilemmas of Nationalism: Debating Modernity, Identity and Women’s Agency From a Critique of the Orient to a Critique of Modernity: A Greek-Ottoman-American Writer, Demetra Vaka (1877-1946) Duygu Köksal The ‘Tomboy’ and the Aristocrat: Nabawiyya Mûsâ and Malak Hifnî Nâsif, Pioneers of Egyptian Feminism Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen Hayriye Melek (Hunc), a Circassian Ottoman Writer between Feminism and Nationalism Alexandre Toumarkine Notes on Contributors Index
