During the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, gender issues—in particular how to sustain total war in a society grappling with a radical threat to the traditional male-headed family and economic structure as a result of mass conscription—emerged as a key focus in Ottoman state policies, elite interests, and individual experiences. The resulting negotiations over gender and morality taking place in the context of total war provide a way to trace currents of social and institutional continuity and change, providing insights that move beyond the generalities frequently used to describe the war’s significance for Ottoman society. The four papers included in the panel explore the interactions between wartime, gender, and morality from state and society perspectives, using a wide range of sources such as petitions to the Ottoman state, police records, Sharia court records, US consular records, the press, and ego documents in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, English and French. The first paper analyzes the particular impact of wartime conditions on women, the relationship between subsistence and monetary aid and maintaining morality during the conflict, and the transnational strategies women pursued to survive. The second paper traces war moralities and tensions between Islamists and the occupation government over the question of licensing Muslim female prostitutes. The third paper examines community reactions and state responses to the issue of sexual violence against women and children by Russian soldiers, Ottoman deserters, and male civilians on the Ottoman homefront in Eastern Anatolia. The fourth paper analyzes how wartime anxieties over morality and gender were codified in the Ottoman Law of Family Rights of 1917, exploring how this legislation allowed the state to exert greater control over Ottoman gender relations during wartime. Together, these papers provide a broad and deep analysis of how anxieties over morality interacted with gendered social experiences and state policies in different areas of the Ottoman Empire, from rural eastern Anatolia to Mount Lebanon, and the key urban centers of Istanbul and Beirut. As Middle East historians continue to probe the importance of the First World War in shaping Late Ottoman and modern Middle East history from a variety of perspectives, this panel demonstrates some of the ways in which gender analysis can suggest answers to broader questions of state practice, social rupture, and the role of World War I in the making of the modern Middle East.
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Dr. Seçil Yilmaz
This paper will explore the debates regarding public order and morality within the context of the regulation of prostitution in Ottoman Istanbul during and after WWI. The regulation of prostitution was not a new phenomenon in the late Ottoman Empire. There had been attempts to regulate prostitution through municipal authorities in particular districts and provinces, such as Beyo?lu, Adana, ?zmir, and Beirut, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, the regulation did not include all sex workers. On the one hand, foreign sex workers found legal protection through capitulations ¬—the economic and legal concessions provided to European powers— until the unilateral annulment of capitulations in 1915. On the other hand, Ottoman authorities had been reluctant to subject Muslim sex workers within the regulation terms due to the fact that it would violate Islamic legal practices prohibiting prostitution. Therefore, Ottoman authorities primarily regulated and licensed non-Muslim sex workers who held Ottoman citizenship or foreign citizens without the legal protections.
This paper examines a particular breaking point in the history of regulation of prostitution after 1915, when the Ottoman authorities gained full legal authority over regulation of foreign sex workers with the annulment of the capitulations. In addition, the Ottoman medical authorities increasingly and publicly expressed the necessity of licensing Muslim sex workers during WWI and its aftermath. This paper will particularly analyze the debates between the conservative and Islamist press, led by the authors of Sebilürre?ad, and the Ottoman medical authorities, who were predominantly the members of the General Administration of Health, regarding the regulation and licensing of Muslim sex workers in Ottoman Istanbul during the war and under occupation. While regulation of prostitution had been primarily seen as a means to reduce the spread of venereal diseases, the wartime concerns regarding the social and moral order in the Ottoman society prompted public intellectuals and medical authorities to engage with a rather “political” debate through the bodies and moralities of sex workers, predominantly of Muslim women.
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Dr. Graham Pitts
World War I revealed a paradox of Lebanese migration to the Americas: a source of great prosperity for Lebanese before 1914, Lebanon’s dependence on money sent from abroad also represented a dangerous vulnerability, particularly for women who were apt to rely on cash remittances sent from male relatives in the United States, Argentina, Cuba, or elsewhere. Lebanon lost access to its main sources of income when the Ottoman Empire joined the war in November 1914. Money transfers from the mahjar had been the largest source of income for the Ottoman province of Mount Lebanon before 1914, followed by the export of silk to France. Residents of Beirut and Mount Lebanon faced famine conditions beginning in April 1915. As men succumbed to starvation or were conscripted into labor units, women shouldered an increased burden, raising children and running the financial affairs of the family unit. That reality reflected an Ottoman, and broader wartime trend on the one hand. However, women in Lebanon had a peculiar experience, as this paper will reveal, based on the detailed correspondence they sent to U.S. consulate at Beirut, as well as materials from Lebanese archives. The pronounced reliance of its economy on remittances had already created vulnerabilities for individual women before the war: they were more likely than men to be reliant on cash flows from relatives in the Americas (which were liable to cease as men fell on hard times or started new families). During the war, that vulnerability became general. In their time of need, many women requested support from the U.S. government, in light of the absence of support from the Ottoman imperial, provincial, or municipal governments. Those Lebanese who had the means to travel back and forth from the Americas and relied on remittances for their livelihood mostly survived into the latter two years of the war, suffering once the financial system stopped functioning. Had the war ended in 1916, they likely would have survived, no worse for the war. Their dependence on remittances became a liability only once the U.S. consulate could no longer facilitate the transfer of funds, and the Ottoman currency experienced massive inflation. The experiences of Lebanese women during the war varied, and can only be comprehended by attending to the complex intersections of gender and class that dictated their fate.
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Dr. Kate Dannies
The Ottoman state’s emphasis on implementing reforms to facilitate total war during World War I is well established. However, the extent to which reform policies involved interventions into issues of gender and family life has not been examined. This paper analyzes how wartime anxieties over morality and gender were expressed in the content and timing of the Ottoman Law of Family Rights of 1917, exploring how this legislation allowed the state to exert greater control over Ottoman gender and family matters during wartime than had been possible in the Late Ottoman period, when organized opposition from the Islamic religious leadership was a significant obstacle to reform in this area of the law. A gender analysis of wartime reform constitutes a vital contribution to both the historiography of Ottoman modernization and the Ottoman First World War. The history of Ottoman centralization during the war (and therefore the pre- and post- war histories of reform) is incomplete without understanding the extent to which gender was a central target of this process both as a venue to articulate Ottoman cultural identity in the face of western influence through intellectual and literary production, and as an area for reforms (or lack thereof) by the Ottoman state, particularly in the area of personal status law. Prior to the war, personal status law had constituted a red line that the state could not cross even as it pursued codification of Sharia law and introduced European codes pertaining to other legal issues. I argue that the Ottoman Law of Family Rights of 1917—the first codified personal status law based on Sharia—offers a window into how the First World War shaped longstanding debates over gender, morality, Ottoman cultural authenticity, and the role of the state, culminating in the passage of this legislation at the height of the war. Using the text of the law and commentaries on it, Ottoman archival sources, Sharia court records, and a variety of press and ego documents in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, I show how the passage of this legislation was accompanied by a complex negotiation between individuals, institutions, and the state over the most sensitive questions of gender and morality, and how the law acted as a vehicle for carrying the tensions over modernization and their expressions in gendered terms in Ottoman society into the war years and beyond.
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Dr. Stefan Hock
A telegraph dated December 5, 1916 from the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior to Sivas Province announced that an investigation regarding a report from the Third Army that someone had raped and taken the virginity of a migrant girl working as a servant and afterwards raped another woman, who committed suicide after the attack. If events happened as reported, proceedings against the perpetrator would be carried out “with haste.” The Ottoman Archive documents many such cases of victimized women and children during the First World War, often in rural areas of the empire. The wives and daughters of conscripted soldiers were, in particular, frequently the victims of sexual assaults by enemy soldiers, deserted Ottomans, brigands, or fellow men in their communities. My paper explores how both the wartime Ottoman government attempted to manage the problem of sexual violence as well as how local actors communicated with the Ottoman state to seek its assistance in protecting themselves.
I examine documents from a number of apparatuses of the wartime Ottoman government, including the Ministry of Public Order (Asayis Kalemi); the Ministry of War (Harbiye); the Cypher Office (Sifre); and imperial edicts (Iradeler) and argue that the Committee of Union and Progress viewed wartime as a suitable, even ideal, setting to actualize its vision of a modern, centralized “nation in arms.” The Ottoman government’s actions during the First World War thus reflect its assumptions about sexuality, gender, morality, and the role of the state as a “surrogate” husband and father. The wartime government passed a number of measures that granted military courts increased power over prosecution of crimes committed against a deployed soldier’s household, including rape, zina, abduction, and false imprisonment. In this way, the expansion of the expansion and transformation of the state and the military’s functions caused the development of a new, broader relationship between the state and Ottoman women. I suggest that it was, in part, the experience of the First World War that paved the way for later Turkish Republican policies that similarly privileged the Turkish state in women’s lives.
