Abstract

An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

Nazan Maksudyan is Assistant Professor of History at the Sociology Department of Istanbul Kemerburgaz University and has held Wissenschaftskolleg and Alexander von Humboldt postdoc positions in Berlin at Zentrum Moderner Orient.

“An impressive work of seminal scholarship, Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective of Ottoman Urban History is a compendium of seven original articles… Enhanced with the inclusion of two pages of notes on contributors; an eighteen page bibliography; and a twenty-one page index, Women and the City, Women in the City is an especially recommended addition to academic library Women's Studies, Turkish Cultural History, and Ottoman History reference collections and supplemental studies reading lists." · Midwest Book Review

“This is a pioneering work on gender in the city in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world and fills an important lacunae in the literature on this subject. The different sections and chapters complement one another and the book as a whole is highly readable and compelling. Through richly textured case studies, the book demonstrates the central role of women as actors in the public sphere in the Ottoman Empire at a time of great political, social and cultural turmoil, challenging age-old stereotypes about women in the Middle East.” · Leyla Neyzi, Sabancı University

“All the essays display a very high academic standard and, according to my judgement, they deal with original and hitherto under-researched topics. An additional benefit is that all of them use various original sources in the different languages of the region that have not been made accessible before.” · Florian Riedler, Zentrum Moderner Orient