well as through labor sharing and emotional and
other types of support in hard times.
Kinship terminology shows that men who would
not necessarily belong to the same circles are linked
by their relations to women’s kin networks. Per-
ceiving the ways in which people are brought to-
gether by networks of female relatives adds a
dimension to an understanding of juridical paternal
kin relations or male dominated religious, guild, or
military organizations.Friendship
The reciprocity that allowed female relatives to
exchange visits, time, labor, and even financial sup-
port across households provided a template for vis-
its based on physical proximity, namely the custom
of the ßub™iyya(literally, morning event) in which
neighbors would regularly get together for conver-
sation, coffee, or refreshments, or seasonal or occa-
sional communal labor after the men had left the
house and before the daily routine of housework
and food preparation had begun in each home.
These neighborly gatherings or visits were marked
by informality of dress and manner and access
through back doors, over rooftops, or within build-
ings or compounds. Other neighborly networks
were cultivated by the occasional exchange of a
plate of cooked food from one house to the next. To
return an empty plate would be a breach of eti-
quette and a lost opportunity to strengthen a bond
of proximity and friendship.
The informal morning visits in particular were
the locus for the exchange of information ranging
from marital politics and advice to discussion of the
market, often based on the last evening’s discussion
with menfolk, and formed a parallel track to what
male merchants would discuss in the market and
coffeehouse. The neighborly ßub™iyyamay often
have served as a financial pool in which periodic
contributions were combined and paid out in turn
to the members of the pool for emergencies, per-
sonal items (such as gold), or even subsidies for
male relations’ enterprises.
More formal afternoon gatherings took place
after the day’s work had been done and the day’s
main meal had been served. These istiqbàlor recep-
tion visits reinforced broader but more select social
groups, and they involved formal dressing, exiting
the compound or the neighborhood, and more
mannered self-presentation. A hostess might invite
her group of friends, neighbors, and relatives to a
special occasion to invoke God’s blessing for a par-
ticular problem or individual in her family. Similar
festive gatherings took place in cities’ most private
public place, the bath or hammam. The musicians530 networks
who entertained at female gatherings, as well as the
midwives who attended to women from all walks of
life, circulated between various milieus and pro-
vided points of contact between distinct quarter
and class social circles.Patronage, civic associations,
and reform
The women’s networks that underlay elite
Istanbul society provided an important infrastruc-
ture for discourses of reform and enlightenment. In
the 1870s and 1880s, the female poet Sair Nigar
Hanım held a weekly salon on Tuesdays at her man-
sion in Istanbul attended by intellectuals and
reform politicians. Her intellectual-in-residence for
these salons was the newspaper woman and novel-
ist Fatma Aliye and the circle included the promi-
nent educator Ayçe Sidika. These women, all
members of prominent Istanbul reformist families,
used the local tradition of women’s sociability as
well as a French model of the salon to nurture an
Ottoman national reform agenda.
Women’s traditional networks were also mobi-
lized at the end of the Ottoman period around char-
itable work and war relief efforts. Between 40 and
100 women’s civic organizations were established
between the fall of Sultan Abdülhamid and the
founding of the Turkish Republic. These ranged
from the Ottoman Ladies’ Organization for the
Uplifting of the Homeland (officially registered
under the Committee of Union and Progress’s “Law
of Organizations” in 1909), to the Turkish Women
Tailor’s Cutting Home (registered in 1913), to the
Mutual Support Organization of Circassian Women
(registered in 1919). The legacy of Ottoman
women’s formal and informal networks continued
to be important well into the national period.Bibliography
N. Bekiroglu, Ottoman female poets, in K. Çicek et al.
(eds.), The great Ottoman-Turkish civilization, Ankara
2000, 249–59.
H. Edib, Memoirs of Halidé Edib, New York 1926.
H. Gerber, Social and economic position of women in an
Ottoman city, Bursa 1600–1700, in International
Journal of Middle East Studies12 (1980), 231–44.
L. Hanimefendi, The imperial harem of the sultans. Daily
life at the Çiragan Palace during the nineteenth century,
Istanbul 1995.
K. Kreiser, Women in the Ottoman world. A bibliograph-
ical essay, in Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations
13:2 (2002), 197–206.
A. Marcus, Men, women and property. Dealers in real
estate in eighteenth-century Aleppo, in Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient26 (1983),
137–63.
Ç. Mardin, The genesis of young Ottoman thought. A
study in the modernization of Turkish political ideas,
Princeton, N.J. 1962.