Women in Turkish Society: Seljuks, Ottoman Empire, and Turkish Republic, Livre de Lyon

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Sociology - Relationships and Family, grade: A, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: In most communities, women are viewed as the threads that knight the society together. They are the source of life and are treated with respect and highly valued. However, this was not the case in ancient empires. The rights for women have been a constant struggle that has come to be standardized in the twenty first century. Despite this, some societies especially in the less developed countries continue to deny women their basic human rights. To understand how women strive and contribute to the development of the society, this paper is dedicated to examining the role that women played in the ancient Turkish empire to date. It is worth noting the social, political, economic and religious inclination of a society to help in understanding the role that women play in such a community. As of 1500 to 1800, the Turkish Empire was among the three major Islamic empires that dominated the southern Europe to the far north of India. It was known as the Ottoman Empire. It was made of the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa and part of Eastern Europe . The ideas of the empire were closely tied with the Islamic culture and religious practices. As a result, there was a variety of challenges that women who lived in this empire experienced. At this point in time, there was a worldwide unrest as leaders tried to expand their empires. Issues of slavery were a common phenomenon as slaves were traded to enhance power of an empire and promoted development within the empire. To increase its power, the Ottoman Empire used Islamic laws to bring stability and contribute to the judicial system that governed the society and guaranteed stability. However, despite its efforts in achieving stability, this laws were biased and sidelined the needs of women and overlooked them as lesser beings. To curb the situation and ensure that they liberated themselves, women took different roles to spearhead a mutually fulfilling society that addressed their plight. On different occasions, the steppe culture that was dominant in this empire influenced the rule of the Muslim law bending some of the needs of the leaders to fit the needs of the states. The strength of a state, nation or empire is dependent on the structure of the family. If the family structure within a region is cohesive, then the state will enjoy peace and harmony and this will eventually contribute to development of the region. During the ottoman period, the family was patriarchal. This means that the structure of the family was m

Reconceptualising human experience through a holistic feminist approach, this book takes us behind the scenes to connect with women navigating the problems and contradictions of everyday working life.

This collection of articles by 14 Middle East historians is a pathbreaking work in the history of Middle Eastern women prior to the contemporary era. The collection seeks to begin the task of reconstructing the history of (Muslim) women's experience in the middle centuries of the Ottoman era, between the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth, prior to hegemonic European involvement in the region and prior to the "modernizing reforms' inaugurated by the Ottoman regime.

Born as a Greek Ottoman in Constantinople/Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. Her first book, Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Oriental Women, published in 1909, was based on experiences from 1901 when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances. On the one hand Haremlik is nostalgic for the Ottoman life that was rapidly disappearing, and on the other hand, its author enjoys the freedoms of a professional American woman. Tracing the emergence of a modern sensibility among Muslim women, Haremlik also reveals the predicament Vaka Brown faced in constructing an authorial and narrative identity in the interstices between East and West, modernity and tradition. Yiorgos Kalogeras is Professor of English in the School of Philosophy, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. Cultures in Dialogue returns to print sources by women writers from the East and West. Series One considers the exchanges between Ottoman, British, and American women from the 1880s to the 1940s. Their varied responses to dilemmas such as nationalism, female emancipation, race relations and modernization in the context of the stereotypes characteristic of Western harem literature reframe the historical tensions between Eastern and Western cultures, offering a nuanced understanding of their current manifestations.