Volume 2 / Athens 2000 by Christine Philliou Review of Madeline C. Zilfi (ed), Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era. Leyden (Brill), 1997 The field of Ottoman History is relatively new and at times inconsistent. The topic of Ottoman women is even newer and, as such, there is even less consensus about the issues that pertain to women in Ottoman society. Women in the Ottoman Empire, made up of fourteen papers presented at a 1994 conference on Ottoman women, is, in sum, a diverse contribution to the field. This review will first consider the book as a whole, its stated purpose and overall structure, then it will briefly focus on articles contained in the collection that are additions to the current field of Ottoman social history. In her introduction, editor Madeline Zilfi discusses what the place of the "study of women" should be in the field of the "Islamic Middle East'" which for her means the Arab and Turkish populations of the Middle East. Perhaps this point of departure is not without problems; the organizing principles for the editor are those of Islamic History (and the Ottoman era here appears as subsumed in that history) and Women's History (as represented by historians of the US and Western Europe like Joan Scott and Elizabeth Fox-Geno?ese). Will the specific internal logic and processes of Ottoman society fit these categories? It is admirable that Zilfi focuses attention on an often ignored period (from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century when the Tanzimat Reforms were initiated), but the Ottoman Empire was a unique state formation, drawing for its legitimating discourses as well as political practice of Islamic sources at times, but also on countless other traditions. Thus, Zilfi's approach, though creative and thought-provoking in its own right, also rules out many experiences in the diverse and changing Ottoman Empire. In particular, the influences of, contact with, and experiences of Christians and Jews are pushed out of this collection as Zilfi sees it, yet they constituted economically and socially significant portions of the population in many areas of the empire. Zilfi does provide a helpful discussion of sources common to social historians of the Ottoman Empire, including those who study women. This is particularly helpful since surviving evidence is often Iimited to the records of various courts of the empire, thus allowing a vivid look at certain aspects of daily life, but omitting far more about the overall structures and practices in society. Court records as a source present a challenge for rigorous study of a given time and place, and certainly do not provide ready or complete answers for any sociaI issues. Interestingly, however, many of the individual papers in the collection defy the very category of "Islamic History" that the editor sets in her Introduction, and go on to offer the reader treatments that include non-Muslim women and solid social contexts in discussions of issues related to women. Dina Rizk Khoury's contribution, entitled "Slippers at the Entrance or Behind Closed Doors: Domestic and Public Spaces for Mosuli Women" (pp. 105-128) is a consideration of gender and space in the city of Mosul in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes a sensitive application of non-Ottoman historians/theorists (Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, for example). Her theoretical arguments are well connected to the larger social context of eighteenth-century Mosul that she describes eloquently. Khoury discusses households, occupational and class categories, and religious groups, and uses both court records and local proverbs and chronicles as evidence, to locate various patterns of behavior by women having to do with social space in the city. What emerges is a rich and intricate local society that included women, Muslims (both Sunni and Shi'ite) as well as social and state institutions. Suraiya Faroqhi's "Crime, Women, and Wealth in the Eighteenth-century Anatolian Countryside" (pp. 6-27), on a murder case from near Kayseri (Anatolia) in 1743, begins with a mention of some extra-Ottoman models and an anthropological frame for conflict resolution in rural Anatolia. She sketches not only the figures (most of whom are non-Muslim-Greek and Armenian) and events related to the murder, but also some of the social and economic changes under way in the area through the possessions of litigants (a basket of jewels and textiles belonging to the "deceased woman included woollens that could ha?e come from England via Istanbul because of new trade routes, for instance). This interesting case shows the commonplace use of "Islamic" courts by non-Muslims in the Kayseri area, and reveals modes of mediation and conflict resolution in the eighteenth-century countryside in general. Fatma Müge Göçek and Marc David Baer's paper, "Social Boundaries of Ottoman Women's Experience in Eighteenth-Century Galata Court Records" (pp. 48-65) includes a statistical breakdown by ethno-religious group and gender of those who used the kadi courts at various points in the 18th century, revealing both the advantages and drawbacks in the application of sociological methods to Ottoman social history. While Göçek and Baer are sensitive to the context that produced court documents, they tend to apply models derived from very different settings too summarily (historian of gender and science Sandra Harding's model, for instance). This is not, however, the "add Foucault and stir" method employed by Mervat F. Hatem in her "The Professionalization of Health and the Control of Women's Bodies as Modern Govemmentalities in Nineteenth Century Egypt" (pp. 66-80). Another thought-provoking contribution is Leslie Peirce's "Seniority, Sexuality, and Social Order: the Vocabulary of Gender in Early Modern Ottoman Society" (pp. 169-196), wherein the author considers the various words used in court documents to refer to male and female subjects at every stage of their life cycle, with implications as to how social identity was understood and used. Although not much light is shed on possible changes from one historical period to another, Peirce does look at the specificities in the Ottoman construction of gender and sexuality rather than accept the gender categories as set by historians of Western Europe and North America. There are also several contributions in the field of legal history which, in general have a tendency to neglect the social context of legal documents. Overall, the "Islamic" framework for the collection as a whole is happily undermined by several strong papers which add to our understanding of eighteenth - and nineteenth - century Ottoman society. Return to Top