War, Women, and Sex Work in Occupied Istanbul, 1918–1923

Abstract

Abstract 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.