Overviewthe nineteenth and twentieth
centuries
The Woman Question early on became a key
component of state actors’ attempts to mobilize all
available resources to fend off encroachment by
European powers looking to colonize or simply
render usable (to them) the geostrategic assets of
the Middle East, North Africa, and other tradition-
ally Muslim territories. Beginning in the early nine-
teenth century, reformers in the Ottoman Empire
and the Egyptian khedival state started to expand
the roles of women in society as a distinct category
of modern state-building efforts. Mehmet Ali
(Mu™ammad ≠Alì) (r. 1803–48), as governor of
Egypt when it was a semi-autonomous province of
the Ottoman Empire, identified women as part of a
reproductive formula to create the strong and
healthy population he needed to build his military
and economic strength. Ironically, his reforms led
to famine and ill health through the loss of much
subsistence agriculture. Mehmet Ali implemented
reforms to reduce infant mortality and improve
female reproductive health, including founding a
state school of midwifery. The first classes of mid-
wives to graduate were African slave women, but
the school recruited more widely as it expanded.
Midwife graduates were married to medical school
graduates before being sent out to set up public
health services in the countryside. Such reforms,
driven by state necessity to create new roles for
women, were repeated throughout the remainder
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and con-
tinue today.
Beginning in the 1850s, Ottoman intellectuals
started to debate the implications of these policies.
The prominent intellectual and journalist Namık
Kemal argued in 1867 that Ottoman women had
become weak and wasteful in the nineteenth cen-
tury from aping Western bourgeois mores, while at
the same time becoming woefully ignorant, leaving
them unable to conceive of alternatives to what was
presented to them by local Europeans and by the
European press as new, chic, and appropriate.
Namık Kemal attempted to remedy this with the
first Ottoman publication for women, a supple-
ment to his own gazette, in which he argued for a
distinctly Ottoman and Muslim vision of modern
Women’s Rights: Male Advocacy
women through discussions of education, public
comportment, educated motherhood, and patriotic
shopping as part of managing a household’s finances.
In 1882, another prominent Ottoman intellectual
tied the nation’s progress to its treatment of
women, in a formula that was to become charac-
teristic of modern Muslim intellectuals. Çemseddin
Sâmi’s pocket paperback entitled Kadınlar
(Women) became a bestseller, and was reissued in
1895, but he was forced by censors to cut out a sec-
tion on veiling as a condition of being allowed to
publish it. Our only indication of what this section
argued is a photograph of himself and his wife,
both dressed in Western style, and she without
charshaf(unveiled). Like Namık Kemal, Çemseddin
Sâmi saw education as the key to progress not sim-
ply for women but through women, for Muslim
societies and states in general.
At roughly the same time in Egypt, Qàsim Amìn
published in Arabic very similar arguments for
changes in the status of modern Muslim women. In
the 1880s, women began to enter these debates
on their own behalf, and to challenge, adapt,
and manipulate state reform agendas to expand
women’s roles. In the Ottoman center of Istanbul
and the main port cities of the empire, the Woman
Question arose at the same time that newspapers
and other cheap print media began to spread from
state-sponsored gazettes to more private and cor-
porate productions, and as public education was
vastly expanded and modernized. Here again, state
imperatives opened doors for women, and female
journalists, teachers, and entrepreneurs began to
achieve prominence under the protection of male
publishers and bureaucrats. By 1900, the Woman
Question had taken the form it has held mainly to
this day among Muslim thinkers ranging from con-
servative to radical: delineating the place of women
in society and the role of education in allowing
them to fulfill their societal duties; providing a his-
tory of women’s rights in other eras and concur-
rently in other countries; and describing the place
of women according to any given writer’s under-
standing of Islam. Among these three writers,
Çemseddin Sâmi seems to have been the most radi-
cal, and the only one to argue consistently that
women’s education would not simply benefit the
health and well-being of their families, but could
also allow women into the workplace. From the