Single, poor women in Istanbul, 1850-1915: Prostitution, sexuality, and female labor

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the lives and experiences of single, poor women in late Ottoman Istanbul, along with new governmental policies controlling their urban mobility, sexuality, and labor. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, single, poor women closely associated with prostitution and vice emerged as a source of anxiety for the middle- and upper-class residents of Istanbul. Ideally, women were to remain in the private sphere of their houses, engaging in sexual activity only in the interest of maternity. Yet a number of sexually-active women who lacked customary familial relations and proper households increasingly appeared in the newly expanding public spaces of the Ottoman capital. The government formulated policies to exclude them from urban space and confine them to certain regulated spaces—to regulated broth-els as prostitutes, to households as domestic servants, and to relief institutions as needy women. I argue that these institutions and administrative practices were designed in such a way to control female sexuality, labor, and mobil-ity.The study also aims to provide a gendered analysis of some well-established concepts and topics such as urbanization, public order, social policy, and labor. For such an analysis, I examine single, poor women’s presence in the newly emerging urban life in Istanbul.