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War, Women, and the State: The Politics of Sacrifice in the Ottoman Empire During the First World War
Abstract
The Ottoman Empire was one of the belligerents most severely affected by the First World War. The war lasted four years and required the most comprehensive mobilization of men and resources in the history of the empire. The extraction of millions of men from society and the economy, coupled with the state’s increasingly ruthless intervention in the everyday lives of the Ottoman people, placed unprecedented burdens on their shoulders. Women bore most of the brunt of the war and the state’s wartime policies on the home front. Focusing on their perceptions of and reactions to the war and the dramatic changes it brought to Ottoman society, this article examines how the war shaped women’s relationships with the state and influenced their understanding of gender roles. In doing so, it aims to challenge the historical and cultural construction of war as exclusively male centered and render Ottoman women’s wartime actions and experiences visible.
... Modernization steps did not affect the Muslim legal code advocating sex segregation and unequal legal treatment; however, it brought about modest reforms including the introduction of women's rights in inheritance, abolishment of female slavery, opening of secondary schools for girls and girls' vocational schools, women access to the university (Anadolu-Okur, 2005: 18). During the second constitutional period (1908)(1909)(1910)(1911)(1912)(1913)(1914)(1915)(1916)(1917)(1918)(1919), the movement was politicized and debates regarding women's rights became vigorous since women's organizations constituted an important role in the national liberation front in the Balkan Wars and First World War (Akın, 2014). Accordingly, women were admitted to universities in 1914, to the workforce in factories, and to public service in 1915 (Tekeli, 2010). ...
The patriarchy embedded in the social language is among the toughest obstacles to gender equality since it reproduces the traditional secondary position of women. It is a noteworthy reason why feminist movements have focused on language as a field of struggle in the last decades. One of the positive developments in terms of raising awareness about sexism in language was the widespread use of social media. To show this positive influence of social media, this study takes the "Let the Man Know His Place!" trend (#erkekyerinibilsin) on Twitter (X) in Türkiye as a case study and examines it by applying critical discourse analysis. By placing it within larger socio-historical and political frameworks, the study examines how women in Türkiye challenge the patriarchal patterns entrenched in the social language. It also shows how they use new media channels to give visibility to gender inequalities endorsed by social, religious, and political circles. Keywords Women's movement in Türkiye; linguistic sexism; social media feminism; gendered discourse; critical discourse analysis 1 Giray Gerim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4549-3876) has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary and is a Lecturer
... The situation was further complicated by what Uğur Ümit Üngör has described as a "program of demographic engineering" in eastern Anatolia, of which the Armenian genocide was merely the first wave, which made uncovering the depth of the impact of the war on civilians difficult because of the politically sensitive, highly charged debates over the fate of the Ottoman minority populations during and after the World War I (Göçek, 2006;Suny et al., 2011;Üngör, 2011). While the topic remains sensitive, the past decade has seen a shift as more scholars-both in Turkey and elsewhere-have begun to reassess the war's impact in Anatolia, examining the role that hunger, suffering, and disease wrought on the civilian population, particularly women, children, and orphans (Akın, 2014(Akın, , 2018Dağlar, 2008;Maksudyan, 2019;Metinsoy, 2017;Yanıkdağ, 2014). As in Europe, the widespread development and adoption of the fields of psychology and psychotherapy in the region are linked to the aftermath of the World War I (El Shakry, 2007;El Shakry, 2017;Yanıkdağ, 2014). ...
The field of Middle Eastern history began as an attempt to understand how Europeans came to dominate the region. As a result, when medicine and the environment were discussed, they were used to highlight European technological and scientific advances in these fields, and describe the processes through which Islamic medical and scientific concepts were replaced. The first wave of scholarship on the history of medicine in the region focused primarily on 19th‐century Egypt, where the state sponsored the development of a public health system to protect military readiness and combat epidemic diseases such as cholera and plague. This article highlights recent scholarship in the history of health, medicine, and the environment during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and illustrates how this lens (the “environmental‐medical turn”) provides new perspectives on the social and political history of the Middle East. I argue that the environmental‐medical turn provides a new avenue for locating illiterate members of society—the peasant and middle classes—in the archive; by exploring moments of crisis leading to protest and rebellion, and examining data revealing hardship and suffering, Middle Eastern historians can explore the complex roots of social and political events, and historians of medicine and the environment can include the region in transnational and comparative studies.
... Most recently an article by Yiğit Akın on Ot-toman women's petitions, titled "War, Women, and the State: The Politics of Sacrifice in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War" (2014), focused on how women appropriated the discourse of sacrifice promoted by the state to legitimate their demands and rights and how this process shaped women's relationship with the state. 44 These recent studies opened the door to new social history studies on ordinary Ottoman women's diverse patterns of experience, perceptions, and reactions in the face of the social, political, and cultural impact of World War I. Nevertheless, new theoretical and methodological tools and academic cooperation are needed to further unearth this history. ...
Ordinary women are among the least known subjects of Ottoman Turkish historiography. One of the most important reasons for this lack of information is that the Turkish archives are not organized in such a way that researchers can easily access documents on ordinary women. However, the difficulty in finding women's voices in historical documents is only one part of the problem. Whereas conventional Ottoman-Turkish historiography prioritizes the acts of those holding power, most Turkish feminist historiography focuses on the organized activities of elite and middle-class women rather than ordinary women due to various paradigmatic and methodological restrictions. This article explains these limitations and proposes less conventional methods for conducting research on ordinary Ottoman women, who were important actors on the home front during World War I. It discusses theoretical approaches, methodology, and alternative sources that can be used to conduct research on women in the Turkish archives. It also presents some examples of ordinary Ottoman women's voices and everyday struggles against the violence they suffered during World War I, using new, alternative sources like women's petitions and telegrams to the state bureaucracy as well as folk songs.
... Women who had been previously segregated in the home now began to appear in larger numbers in the workplace and other public spaces. 23 During the Great War, the government established the Society for the Employment of Muslim Women, which aimed to alleviate wartime labour shortages by encouraging women to take part in the labour force. Some 14,000 women in Istanbul applied for employment through this society. ...
This article examines the growing concern about female suicide in early republican Turkey. It shows that debates about modernisation intersected in various and complex ways with the scientific and more popular discourse about female suicide. Informed by the work of, amongst others, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood and Rosi Braidotti, it argues that the women who committed suicide exerted an agency which the new regime denied them and that it was largely for this reason that female suicide became such a public issue in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s.
While the discourse surrounding “decolonizing” risks becoming an abstract notion, the imperative to challenge the monopoly of Eurocentric knowledge systems remains urgent. Committed to the necessity of critical public communication that serves most of the world, the article aims to make a decolonizing intervention into the dominant discussions of critical public communication, which are still largely governed by theories of the public sphere(s). Rather than providing another critique of these theories, I propose an alternative concept: justice-seeking communication. Justice-seeking communication is a historical episteme and practice of the subaltern populations of the Middle East, uniting them as a reasoning, debating, and justice-demanding public in the face of injustices they encountered and defined as rectifiable oppression through their collective agency. Following a brief historical examination of Middle Eastern petitions and coffeehouses, I discuss how the justice-seeking communicative praxis of subaltern populations can inform our future imaginations of pluriversal critical public communication.
The occupation of Istanbul by British, French, and Italian forces and the broader political upheavals between 1918 and 1923 radically altered the lives of women selling sex in the Ottoman capital. Increased demand brought by Allied soldiers and increases in supply as waves of migration brought new and financially precarious women to the city led to an expansion in the scale of the sex trade, which soon became a major concern of Allied and Ottoman authorities, servicemen, and the wider public. British, French, and Italian soldiers not only visited brothels as paying customers, but also enforced new regulations on prostitution, making women sex workers particularly vulnerable to violence perpetrated by them. The end of occupation in 1923 posed further challenges, as shifts in the political and judicial framework and reductions in clientele instigated new outward flows of sex workers from the city, emigrations that were complicated by financial and legal restrictions. The article uses French, British, Turkish, and League of Nations sources to uncover the challenges that women faced while working in Istanbul’s brothels in this period and the ways in which they navigated occupation. In doing so, it hopes to contribute to the investigation of the occupation’s impact on subaltern Istanbulites, something that has been hitherto neglected in research centered on the political contest between imperialist, Ottoman, and Turkish nationalist cadres during these years.
Zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhundert bildete der aus zahlreichen Grenzgebieten bestehende und zwischen der Habsburgermonarchie, Serbien und Montenegro befindliche Sandžak die nördlichsten Teile der osmanischen Provinz Kosovo. Dessen multikonfessionelle und mehrsprachige Einwohner waren bis zu frühen 1920er Jahren den Regierungspraktiken von fünf Staaten unterworfen: dem Osmanischen Reich, Montenegro, Serbien, der Habsburgermonarchie und dem Königreich der Serben, Kroaten und Slowenen. Es gelang jedem dieser Staaten, die Einheimische für ihre eigenen militärischen Zwecke zu mobilisieren. Bislang hat sich die Geschichtsschreibung entweder auf eine imaginäre Gemeinschaft oder auf Regierungsstrukturen konzentriert. Die vorliegende Dissertation bietet einen umfassenderen und differenzierteren Ansatz, indem sie eine lokale Perspektive einnimmt und bei den Mobilmachungsbemühungen des Staates nach dem „Großen im Kleinen“ sucht. Die Studie zeigt, dass die militärischen Mobilisierungen ein Feld konstruierten, das er ermöglicht, verschiedene Staatsziele zu analysieren, einschließlich der Figurationen zwischen der herrschenden Eliten und den Einheimischen. Die Erzählung konzentriert sich auf staatliche Pläne, die die Mobilmachungen zu verschleiern versuchten, und auf die Lebenswelten der Einheimischen. Hierzu werden verschiedene Ebenen des Regimewechsels, die Vorstellungen von Loyalität, Sicherheit und Ungewissheit im Wandel untersucht. Die Dissertation befasst sich mit Praktiken der Abgrenzung und Verdinglichung auferlegter Kategorien, mit Strategien der herrschenden Eliten, mit Widerstandstaktiken der Einheimischen, mit der Position von Frauen und Kindern in diesem Kontext. Die militärischen Mobilmachungen des Staates zielen darauf ab, den Übergang von Grenzgebieten als Ort, an dem gesellschaftliche Gefüge verschwommen sind, zu angrenzendem Land, wo feste ethnonationale Hierarchien und die Verwaltung von Ressourcen – in staatlicher Hand etablieret sind, zu erleichtern. Die Studie zeigt, dass dies kein eindimensionaler Prozess war.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Sandžak, a mental map that consisted of numerous borderlands, made up the northmost parts of the Ottoman province of Kosovo. By the early 1920s, its multi-confessional and multi-lingual inhabitants were subject to the governmental practices of the five polities: The Ottoman Empire, Montenegro, Serbia, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Each of these states managed to mobilize the locals for their own military purposes (the Balkans Wars (1912/13) and World War I). The historiography has dealt namely with the broader setting, either by focusing on one imagined community or on governmental structures. The present study offers a more nuanced approach by attending to a local perspective and searching for the “big in the small” in the state’s mobilization efforts. The study contents that the military mobilizations constructed a field through which analyzing various states' goals, including figurations between the ruling elites and the locals of various forms of capital and gender, is feasible. The narrative is centered on the state’s hidden plans, which the mobilizations aptly veiled, and on the lifeworld of the locals by investigating various levels of regime change and the notions of loyalty, security, and uncertainty from Ottoman to SCS rule. The study deals with the practices of demarcation and/or reification of imposed categories; its strategies for achieving mobilization of the borderlands’ inhabitants; how the tactics of the latter, regardless of confession, were used to defy the governance policies; the position of women and children in this game; and all their local social networks. The state’s military mobilizations were aimed at facilitating the transition of borderlands, as a place where societal boundaries were blurred, to bordered land, where fixed ethno-national hierarchizations and the management of resource – in the hands of the state – were achieved. The dissertation shows that this transition was not a one-dimensional process.
Cambridge Core - Twentieth Century British History - Irish Women and the Great War - by Fionnuala Walsh
This essay begins by investigating the possibility of a global literary history through the lens of periodization and its challenges for comparatists, starting from World War I. Second, by examining neglected texts from the periphery, it seeks to ‘provincialize’ the Eurocentric focus of our histories of war literature. To address the complex temporality of this epoch, we must accommodate the multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, as well as the long-term recovery of texts. Belatedness reflects the reemergence of memories from trauma, the discovery of manuscripts, the paucity of translations, and the long silencing of marginalized voices from the periphery. In turn, shifts in critical values and the translation of materials permit us to enlarge and reconstitute a globalized archive, as a few examples demonstrate. Great War texts by Huidobro, Svarnakumari, and Diallo as well as oral laments offer fruitful perspectives from the periphery on that epochal experience.
The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 helped transform the time-honored Ottoman petitioning system. The reinstatement of parliamentary life, the reintroduction of the suspended constitution of 1876, and the lifting of the ban on the press and political action all generated profound political and social changes. Subjects’ petitions reflected these changes vividly and in often surprising detail. As the sultan became a figurehead with little actual power, petitions which hitherto had been addressed to the sultan either directly or through the grand vizier and had requested his benevolence and mercy, while also granting him much needed legitimacy, now began to be sent instead to the Council of State ( Şura-yı Devlet ), the parliament, and various government ministries. Their content changed as well, as will be shown in this article through an analysis of dozens of petitions from Ottoman Palestine. Petitions now sought to obtain political rights and ensure civil equity and constitutional rights. In focusing on rights, the rule of law, and the deficiencies of the former system, the petitions echoed changes in popular discourse and mirrored the transformation from justice as a sultanic prerogative to constitutional and civil law.
As feminist scholarship has illustrated, historical resurgences of global migration raise questions about the intersections between war politics, persecution of activists, and its gendered implications. Informed by a new historicist approach, this article seeks to contextualize contemporary scholarly conversations on journalism, migration, and feminist studies by conducting a historical analysis of a bi-weekly column entitled “Half the World.” This column was published in the Daily Worker and was written by little-known Caribbean activist and journalist Claudia Jones. A close reading of all printed columns between 1950 and 1953 illustrate that despite Jones’ tendency to reinforce gendered dichotomies of war discourse, where women represented peace and men violence, she also placed women as the creators of a national and transnational movement against US intervention in Korea. Jones’ story, therefore, contributes to previous feminist histories on the role female journalists and activists have played in shaping the relationship between gender, nation, and war politics.
This article focuses on petitions by Ottoman women from Greater Syria during the late Ottoman era. After offering a general overview of women's petitions in the Ottoman Empire, it explores changes in women's petitions between 1865 and 1919 through several case studies. The article then discusses women's "double-voiced" petitions following the empire's defeat in World War I, particularly those submitted to the King-Crane Commission. The concept of "double-voiced" petitions, or speaking in a voice that reflects both a dominant and a muted discourse, is extended here from the genre of literary fiction to Ottoman women's petitions. We argue that in Greater Syria double-voiced petitions only began to appear with the empire's collapse, when women both participated in national struggles and strove to protect their rights as women in their own societies.
The above quote, taken from a letter written 6 August 1915 by F. H. Leslie, US missionary in the Ottoman city of Urfa, to US Consul Jesse B. Jackson in Aleppo, encapsulates much of what was the Armenian genocide – the killing of 1–1.5 million Ottoman Armenians during World War I – including the fundamental gendered aspect of this event. But when it comes to massive extermination campaigns like the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide, gendered aspects have usually been downplayed in scholarly works. This is perhaps understandable considering the all-encompassing nature of what has rightly been called the total genocides of the past century.2 The Armenian genocide was the almost completely successful attempt by the Young Turk dictatorship (also known as the Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) at ‘cleansing’ from Anatolian soil not only the approximately 2 million Ottoman Armenians, but also other mainly Christian nationalities like the Ottoman Greeks and Assyrians, and it was usually secured through a number of methods of direct and indirect killings: massacres, drownings, death marches under the guise of relocations, imposed starvation and diseases, etc.3
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the estimated thirty million people living within its borders. It was perhaps the most cosmopolitan state in the world--and possibly the most volatile. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire now gives scholars and general readers a concise history of the late empire between 1789 and 1918, turbulent years marked by incredible social change. Moving past standard treatments of the subject, M. Sükrü Hanioglu emphasizes broad historical trends and processes more than single events. He examines the imperial struggle to centralize amid powerful opposition from local rulers, nationalist and other groups, and foreign powers. He looks closely at the socioeconomic changes this struggle wrought and addresses the Ottoman response to the challenges of modernity. Hanioglu shows how this history is not only essential to comprehending modern Turkey, but is integral to the histories of Europe and the world. He brings Ottoman society marvelously to life in all its facets--cultural, diplomatic, intellectual, literary, military, and political--and he mines imperial archives and other documents from the period to describe it as it actually was, not as it has been portrayed in postimperial nationalist narratives. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the legacy left in this empire's ruins--a legacy the world still grapples with today.
The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War examines how the Ottoman Empire tried to cope with the challenges of permanent mobilization and how this process reshaped state-society relations in 1914-1918, focusing mainly on Anatolia and the Muslim population.
From the beginning the 1914 Ottoman jihad proclamation was portrayed by the Allies as the linchpin of a German scheme to revolutionize Muslim populations in the territories of Berlin’s enemies: in British Egypt and India, in French North Africa, and in the Russian Caucasus and Central Asia. This article questions the cliché of the German jihad by situating the 1914 declaration in its deeper Ottoman historical context. Did the Ottomans need Berlin’s blandishments to convince them of the advantages of issuing a jihad (jihād) declaration in 1914?
Successive Ottoman governments excluded the religious colleges (medreses) from the ambitious educational policies they pursued beginning in the 19th century. Many historians and contemporary observers have seen this trend as an anomaly, because this was a period characterized by governmental activism and broad changes imposed from the top, including in the field of education. The inactivity of the government during the long reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) appears particularly intriguing. The Hamidian regime enunciated the ideological, social, and political importance of Islam and extended its patronage to the religious establishment and its institutions. Nevertheless, the Hamidian government kept medrese education outside the fold of its educational project. The medreses were left unchanged in terms of administration, pedagogy, and curricula, even as the Hamidian regime impressively expanded the state school system, initiated a series of educational reforms, and promoted state education as a vanguard of progress and modernity. Meanwhile, in other parts of the Islamic world, initiatives were taken to reform and modernize institutions of Islamic learning. In the Ottoman Empire, the government took similar steps to reorganize medrese education only after the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) came to power in the wake of Constitutional Revolution of 1908. However, the new regime also gradually, but consistently, diminished the former prominence of the religious establishment and its institutions and prepared the ground for the complete nationalization of religious education in 1924 by the fledgling Turkish Republic.
On 4 February 1934, the secretary-general of the Republican People's Party (RPP) received an utterly distressed letter penned by Kerimog̀lu Ethem, a young waiter employed at the restaurant of Şakir Usta, located in the small western Anatolian town of Bergama. Ethem's letter contained harsh complaints about the head of the RPP's Bergama branch, who had sworn at the waiter and beaten him because of a minor problem with service. "Except a few loyal supporters, no one likes him in Bergama,"wrote Ethem, "but people are afraid of raising complaints against him as he is the head of the party. I write to inform you about this immoral man, who degrades the esteem of the party in Bergama and openly defies the government's authority." Upon receiving Ethem's letter, the secretary-general immediately ordered party inspectors to investigate the allegations. Ethem's complaint was just one among many that flooded the secretary-general's mailbox during the early 1930s.