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Erika Loeffler FriedlThe Ottoman EmpireMuslim women’s place in Ottoman society was
constructed on a complex foundation of ideals and
actualities. As in other Islamic communities, the
internal configuration of the family and the socio-
economic location of the household were shaping
conditions. In combination with these, the patriar-
chally inclined customs and expectations of the
larger society, particularly as projected in Islamic
law, served to define women’s roles. However, the
ambiguities and contradictions of law and custom,
and women’s own efforts to operate within that
interpretive space, moderated patriarchal rigidities,
enabling women to achieve a larger share of famil-
ial and communal power.
Although women were generally excluded from
Ottoman narratives of empire, their experience in
real-life terms emerges from less hierarchical docu-
mentation. Court records, which are uniquely volu-
minous for the Ottoman period, have overturned
the received wisdom of strictly enforced female
seclusion and subordination. The degree of women’s
autonomous action cannot be compared to that of
the present era, but Ottoman women, despite miso-
gynistic popular discourse and restrictive govern-
ment policies, were able to affect decisions about
their own lives and to exercise control over others.
As in the premodern world generally, Ottoman
women’s social existence and personal identity cen-
tered on the family. Marriage, childbearing, and
participation in the family economy were para-
mount. Family members were the principal – usu-
ally the only – source of female instruction in
religion, social conduct, and work. Most young
women married into domestic households like
those of their mothers and grandmothers. Virgin
brides, prized for their youth, sexual innocence,
and tractability, fetched the highest bride-price
(Arabic, mahr; Turkish,mehr), but previously mar-
ried women were not at all shunned. Divorcees,
widows, and the deserted, prompted by the absence
of independent economic opportunities for women,
sought and found new husbands.
Despite the idealization of female submission,
factors internal and external to the family often
compelled more egalitarian practice. The size of the
the ottoman empire 201Ottoman Empire, its heterogeneous demographics,
and the difficulties of communication before the
nineteenth century, promoted regional distinctions.
Different understandings of appropriate female
behavior also arose from changes in provincial gov-
ernors, shifts in women’s productive roles, and
other structural and historical factors.
Probably no one geographical area or socioeco-
nomic arrangement was consistently more liberal
than others with respect to women’s status and
roles. Women in Cairo seem to have enjoyed
greater public visibility and voice than women in
Istanbul, but the evidence is not systematic for the
entirety of Ottoman rule. In any case, as the impe-
rial capital, Istanbul was the main arena for the
exemplary projection of government power. Thus
Istanbul’s women were subject to more frequent
and forceful policing than women elsewhere. Even
in kindred Turkish-speaking cities such as Bursa
and Edirne, women had to contend with fewer offi-
cial limitations on their movements and dress.
Veiling, including concealment of the face, was the
norm for all classes on urban streets, but styles of
head and face covering differed from place to place
and across ethnic groups as well as between classes.
In Istanbul, the fashion center of the empire, the
prescribed dress for Muslim women in the seven-
teenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries was
the feracedust-coat with separate pieces of fabric
for the head wrap and veil. Poorer women, tribal
women, and provincial visitors obeyed the spirit of
the law with respect to facial and bodily anonymity,
but adoption of Istanbul’s female uniform was not
always necessary if women kept to their own resi-
dential neighborhoods or enclaves.
In general, women were denied access to institu-
tions and collectivities that bespoke sociopolitical
equality with male members of the community.
Thus women were discouraged, if not forcibly pre-
vented, from attending congregational mosques at
prayer time, and with few exceptions over the cen-
turies women were kept from active membership in
the craft guilds. Again, though, restrictions varied,
especially with regard to mosque attendance. Istan-
bul’s massive cathedral mosques, physically and
psychologically located at the center of power,
tended to be off-limits to female worshippers. Some
other mosques, in the capital and elsewhere, were
more genuinely communal. Women’s long-recog-
nized patronage of popular forms of worship,
notably local pilgrimage and saint reverence,
helped compensate for their exclusion from male-
gendered rituals. The most revered of the shrines
frequented by women in the Ottoman Turkish-
speaking world was the burial place of AbùAyyùb