Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Gülhan Balsoy (bio) This special issue of the Journal of Women’s History on Ottoman and post-Ottoman women’s and gender history is a selection of articles from a conference on “Feminist Paradigms and Cultural Encounters: Women’s Experiences in Eastern Mediterranean History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” The conference met in Istanbul in June 2013 and included historians of women and gender from Turkey, the United States, Europe, and the wider Middle East. The original call for papers noted that “changing feminist paradigms” refers to a shift from a Turkish-oriented historiography of women’s experiences to an emphasis on diversity in both the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. Scholarship has come a long way in producing “women’s histories,” but feminist critiques of national historiography and challenges to the conventional periodization of the Ottoman-Turkish historical narrative are tasks yet to be undertaken. Tackling this challenging project requires reconsideration and reformulation of many key terms and concepts first introduced by feminist scholars in North America; it was one of the key aims of the conference. In addition, this conference sought to rethink the interaction between “feminist activism and scholarship” with the purpose of bringing new perspectives to women’s and gender history in the Middle East and around the world. Now, with this publication, it is rewarding to see that many of the expectations were not only met but also surpassed. The articles in this issue uncover the experiences of women in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world and analyze some of the main themes of scholarly controversy through the perspective of gender. They touch upon a variety of themes from women’s activism and feminist organizations to crime, sexuality, slavery, and citizenship. With its wide array of topics, the collection promises to contribute both to the scholarship in women’s and gender history—regardless of national frameworks—and to the field of Ottoman and post-Ottoman history—with renewed emphasis on gender. One of the most important contributions of this collection is the challenge posed to the Eurocentric and nationalist assumptions that remain pervasive to date. Several studies in this issue, through the research on the encounters between the feminists from Europe and North America and those from Ottoman lands, decenter Europe from the history of women’s struggles and show that these encounters add to the complexity of women’s activism globally. The articles here unearth the experiences of feminist figures not well researched by the historiography in such periods as the [End Page 10] early twentieth century and the 1950s, assumed to be irrelevant for feminist history by the scholars of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman past. Analyzing the historical patterns of women’s activism enables our authors to question the links and legacies between the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds, a central preoccupation in the wider field. This theme challenges the validity of the existing chronologies of nationalist historiography by searching the continuities and ruptures in the imperial and nationalist contexts and reworking the intricacies of gender, state building, and ethnicity. Through the use of gender, the articles here pose a profound challenge to the nationalist interpretations of Ottoman and Turkish history. They moreover offer ways to reconsider women’s “agency” in the realms of crime, sexuality, and urban life. Finally, besides these significant conceptual contributions, several articles gender the fundamental question of freedom and slavery, the nationalist project, and the legal system, all of which are innovative topics in the historiography of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. They also make this scholarship compelling to readers of women’s and gender history outside the Ottoman framework. The issue opens with three articles reexamining women’s activism and challenging the nationalist assumptions and boundaries that typically frame scholarly work on feminist struggle in eastern Mediterranean women’s and gender history. The first two address transnational women’s activism, while the third refines the debate further by adding a comparative dimension to the encounters between different ethnoreligious groups within the Ottoman imperial context. The first article by Nicole A.N.M. van Os, “They can breathe freely now,” explores the early twentieth-century interactions between two of the...