Poor Ottoman Turkish women during World War I: women’s experiences and politics in everyday life, 1914-1923

Abstract

This dissertation examines the social impact of World War I in the Ottoman Empire on ordinary poor Turkish women and their everyday response to the adverse wartime conditions and the state policies concerning them. Based on new archival sources giving detailed information about the voice, experience and agency of these women and based on the history from below approach, this study focuses on poor, underprivileged and working Turkish women’s everyday experiences, especially their struggle against and perception of wartime conditions, mobilization and state policies about them. By doing so, it contributes to filling the great gap in late Ottoman historiography and women studies, which rarely examine ordinary women and their everyday problems and struggles for survival and rights. This monograph, in this respect, is centered on two major themes. First, it scrutinizes how ordinary women experienced the war and argues that, in contrast to the modernization accounts that overlook women’s sufferings at the cost of post-war developments in women’s rights and liberties and of upper and middle class educated women’s activities and experiences, ordinary Turkish women had great difficulties during the war years. In this regard, it presents a major caveat to accounts accepting the war years as a period during which Turkish women monolithically experienced a gradual liberty and “emancipation.” Second, focusing on their everyday activities to deal with difficulties, problems and sufferings, it brings the undiscovered and unexamined forms and aspects of women’s critical and subjective views, their everyday politics to circumvent the adverse conditions and state policies, to make their voices heard, to pursue their rights, and to receive government support into the light.|Keywords : World War I, women’s history, Ottoman women, poor women, ordinary women, social impact of the war, home front, women’s everyday politics, social policy.