Womanhood and Female Sexuality in the Late Ottoman Empire
Panel 113, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 17 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel explores the diverse notions of womanhood and representations of the female body and sexuality in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brings together papers that engage a broad range of primary sources, such as women's journals, missionary records, Ottoman state documents, and literary texts for and about women to discuss how the rise of pro-natalist policies and nationalist ideas reshaped the notion of ideal womanhood and informed its discursive representation in the late Ottoman world. It seeks to complicate monolithic and communitarian understandings of women’s bodies, lives, and experiences.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, bodies of Ottoman woman became a site of sociopolitical intervention for the Ottoman state and its intelligentsia. Discussions of female sexuality gained a new momentum as motherhood and women's fertility came to define an ideal Ottoman woman. Current scholarship highlights the increase in pro-natalist policies in the decades leading up to World War I, and suggests that disciplining female sexuality became a distinct priority for Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals alike.
Yet, the Ottoman state was not the only actor who attempted to re-cultivate the norms and the set of behaviors that were expected from "proper" women. In addition to the state, papers on this panel engage with how ethno-religious communities (Jewish, Armenian, Arab, etc.) began promoting certain norms and defining "female sexuality" and "proper womanhood." These norms were deeply informed by each of these communities' ideological perspectives and socio-cultural vocabularies. Considering the multi-ethnic and multi-religious social composition of the empire, this diverse yet intensive collective reconsiderations of the many meanings attached to womanhood transformed women's bodies, lives, and experiences into sites of sociopolitical contestation.
Thus, this panel makes a two-fold argument. First, it argues that representations of Ottoman women by state and non-state actors greatly differed from one another. Second, we claim that the wide range of these representations makes it impossible to identify a single set of norms for ideal womanhood in late Ottoman society. Hence, we aim to showcase as many different representations of womanhood and female sexuality as possible in light of sociopolitical transformations that were taking place. Our panel contributes to the ongoing discussion about Ottoman women and their political and cultural representations by bringing in cases from different parts and ethno-confessional groups in the empire and by showing multilayered complexities of fashioning modern notions of Ottoman womanhood.
This paper explores the regulation of breastfeeding practices for new mothers in advice literature published in the Ottoman newspapers, booklets, and medical magazines between 1911 and 1918. In a period marked by military conflict, the female body and its reproductive role - even after pregnancy -repeatedly appeared in the advice literature of the era. In these texts, breastfeeding practices and the notion of motherhood were reframed as important moral and national duties. This phenomenon was the result of the cultural, moral, and political reconstruction of the "natural woman" through the state's ideological interventions during the early twentieth century. I argue that the medicalization of breastfeeding and the promotion of the "natural woman" in the form of a mother led to the reinforcement of essentialist dispositions on the Ottoman women that shaped new and restrictive subject positions for them in Ottoman society, aligned with the general ideological climate of the time. For my analysis of breastfeeding and the representation of Ottoman women as mothers, I refer to Avanzade Mehmed Süleyman's book titled "Is it a Boy or a Girl?", published in 1914, and to the article series titled "How Should Children be Fed?" by an Armenian doctor who used his nickname, Lokman Hekim, in an Ottoman-Armenian medical journal called Doctor, published in 1913-14. The contents of these two bodies of knowledge written in Ottoman Turkish and Armenian show that the male authors of these texts aimed at not only regulating the breastfeeding schedule and bodily care for young mothers, but also, they targeted new mothers' everyday lives, interactions with their family members, and their sexual responsibilities to their husbands. These interventions in Ottoman women's daily life and physical bodies led to the woman's becoming an object of public concern and the management of male experts. By providing a close reading of these texts, this paper analyzes how the medical reframing of breastfeeding and child-rearing as "scientific facts" turned women's bodies into sites of intervention by men and how it overlaps with the discourses surrounding motherhood and women's sexuality in the early twentieth century.
This paper explores how Ottoman-Muslim women’s lives were portrayed in Fatma Aliye Hanim’s Nisvan-i Islam (Women of Islam), published in 1892. The book depicts three different encounters with three European women travelers who come to visit at her house, wanting to catch a glimpse of the Ottoman-Turkish way of life. A combination of fiction, autobiography, and didactic essays, the book draws heavily on Islamic texts to argue that as a religion, Islam grants women more rights than other monotheistic religion. In this paper, I argue that the coupling the books’ generic liminality with a dialogic and serial narration enables Fatma Aliye to reclaim the value of Ottoman interpretations of Islam against a European audience while simultaneously critiquing her Ottoman-Muslim contemporaries’ use of those interpretations to undermine women’s progress.
Indeed, there are two instances in which Aliye directly contrasts the rules of Islam with current Ottoman customary practices, and identifies the latter as a hindrance for women’s progress. The first is the issue of polygamy. She argues that it is not by order of God that Muslim men were allowed to be polygamous. Since Islam recognizes divorce as a legitimate practice, men who chose to marry multiple times without divorcing (as they do in Ottoman provinces) were not acting according to religion, but according to custom. The second is the issue of men and women not “socializing” together. She argues that Islam allows them to socialize when the woman is dressed appropriately. This “appropriate” dress does not need to cover one’s face; a simple head covering would do. In making these claims, Aliye also emphasizes the importance of women’s religious literacy and ability to reread religious texts, including but not limited to the Qur'an, for the removal of the exclusions and oppressions imposed on women by customary practices. In examining these arguments within their literary and historical context, this paper suggests that women’s religious literacy and intimate and romantic relationships were closely intertwined in the creation of a new Ottoman-Muslim identity.
This project examines moments of encounter between American Protestant missionaries belonging to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the indigenous peoples of Ottoman Harpoot/Kharpert from roughly the years 1860-1900. The missionary enterprise’s success and survival depended on native agency, yet one encounters them as props and “special objects”. By examining letters and reports written by female missionaries through an affect-oriented approach, I trace how indigenous women and girls were “Otherized” when presented to an American audience in the form of magazines, memoirs, and letters. Working in conjunction with the ABCFM, and independently at first, the Woman’s Board of Missions (WBM) work through their missiology, missionary methodology and ideology, of “Women’s Work for Women,” that operated by saving the souls of indigenous women through evangelism and conversion and “uplifting” their social status through Western-style “civilization”. Coming from and contributing to a moment in United States history that was concerned with empire-building, the female missionaries and their domestic audience used racialized, gendered representations of indigenous women to uphold the legitimacy of their enterprise and the superiority of their beliefs. The diversity and heterogeneity of “Eastern Turkey” – a region where many ethno-religious groups coexisted – becomes collapsed and homogenized in these textual encounters.
This paper analyzes the administration and management of Ottoman Jewish women suffering from mental disorders throughout the overcrowding crisis in the mental asylums of Istanbul and these women's placelessness despite various efforts. The social and medical processes, in which women were first marked and then restrained as insane, confined and silenced not only the patients but also their femininity and sexuality as they were seen as morally degenerate threats for the social order. As their bodies were bargained by the officials and incorporated into the political, their placelessness stiffened. Nonetheless, as various power centers such as the central government, communal leadership, medical professionals bargained their lives, these women remained at the center of discussions as they were the living proof of the malfunctioning local communal structures and the central state. This paper looks at the various power centers' attempts to control the female body by placing female insanity within the specific historical framework of the late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Based on archival research in Ottoman state archives, Ladino journals, popular medical literature, and missionary reports, this study argues that insane Ottoman Jewish women were deemed undesirable and uninhabitable both by their local communities and the central state medical institutions. This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What was the understanding of female insanity of the period and how it found a place within local Jewish communities? How did insane Jewish women experience the mental asylum overcrowding crisis different than men? Finally, what kind of histories of Ottoman Jewish female insanity can be written using the archives despite the absence of personal testimonies?
Jewish insane women in the context of the late nineteenth century were further disadvantageous since central medical institutions prioritized Muslim patients. Unlike other non-Muslim communities, Ottoman Jews did not have a mental asylum in the capital. Although there were transitory solutions for male patients such as placing them in the central prison, this was not relevant to women. The experiences of these women were not simply the echoes of scientific knowledge, but part of the central cultural and political framework in which ideas about female body and insanity were constructed. Hence, this study takes female insanity as a co-produced social framework and moves beyond the image of the "madwoman" as the victim and shows the extent to which insane Ottoman Jewish women had to endure.
