This paper examines the way the social and political dynamics of the First World War shaped the institution of marriage and those individuals who sought to enter it, providing a closer look at how this fundamental social structure fared during the years of conflict. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman state actively promoted universal marriage and the nuclear family through legislation and policies designed to regulate marriage procedures and registrations and to lower the financial barriers to matrimony. As a proxy for social stability, in times of conflict facilitating marriage and remarriage took on a heightened importance in the eyes of the Ottoman authorities. During the Balkan Wars, special legislation paved the way for easier annulments for the wives of missing soldiers in order to allow them to remarry and reconstitute male breadwinner-led households. By the eve of World War I, the state’s interest in preserving the male breadwinner-led family through marriage had become deeply ingrained into Ottoman institutional practices and during the war, the preservation of the male breadwinner-led household constituted a central pillar of the war effort. Using a rare source, a series of marriage wanted notices published in Ottoman dailies towards the end of the war in early 1918, this paper examines interactions between state policy, wartime social upheaval, and changing attitudes towards marriage. Part of the quasi-state Society for the Employment of Muslim Women’s compulsory marriage campaign, this matchmaking effort is exemplary of the way civil society and the Ottoman authorities cooperated to promote marriage as a pathway to social stability and demographic viability in the context of war. The notices also provide a unique window into how individual men and women viewed the marital relationship, and a rich sense of how the material, physical, and social environment of wartime Istanbul shaped the expectations and demands of Ottoman marriage seekers. This paper argues that an imbalanced marriage market resulting from wartime demographic changes and favoring men, eroded the normative socioeconomic bargain of marriage based on the breadwinner/housewife nuclear family. What emerged from the war was a weakened version of this model, wherein women were expected to forego the expectation of economic dependence in order to maintain the viability of marriage as a universal practice at the center of political and social life in the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman geographies.

This paper examines the legal interventions made by the Ottoman Empire to restrict the religiously illicit and officially unauthorized marriages during the WWI. As the economic and social difficulties of the war struck the Ottoman population in the homefront, many women, whose husbands and male relatives were conscripted, were in dire need of financial support. When the traditional Islamic legal practice in the Ottoman Empire had precluded most married Muslim women from annulling their marriages, conducting illegitimate marriages became a course of action for those women who wished to alleviate their financial distress. In addition to relieving the public anxieties caused by the disseminating news of extramarital affairs women involved, the need to financially support the women without resources for subsistence became a crucial burden for the Ottoman state. Apart from the unlawful marriages of soldiers’ wives, the Ottoman administration tackled with the contested cases of intermarriages (particularly the ones between Armenian women and Muslim men), the civil marriages of the Ottomans with the European citizens, suspected conversions of non-Muslim women for marriage, and child marriages as well as the legal status of children born out-of-wedlock. Out of this renewed sense of urgency, the Young Turk regime came out with a pragmatic agenda to standardize the Islamic matrimonial laws, regarded to be ineffective in preventing illicit marriages. Ottoman administration not only introduced new legislation for marriages (the most momentous of all was the codification of family laws in 1917, i.e. the Ottoman Law of the Family Rights). But the state also took measures to strictly monitor the registration of marriages, impose prenuptial licenses, and enforce fines and penalties for violation of these regulations. Through an analysis of successive legislation on marriage and divorce, and how these laws were put into practice in local settings, I examine how Ottoman state undertook initiatives to police the family in response to the everyday realities of the war. Based on Ottoman archival records of criminal legal disputes pertaining to marriage, the paper also accounts for how the local state officials, religious authorities, and deserted wives engaged in the mundane operation of the law. Attending both to the laws and regulations, and the unintended consequences of such legal interventions in local settings, my paper offers a historical perspective, which combines the study of the law-in-the-making with the ones reflecting its practicalities within the late Ottoman context.