often resulted in the increased importance of using
ethnicity or religion to disaggregate Ottoman soci-
ety. Calls from various Christian communities for
greater autonomy or even outright independence
from the Ottoman state helped reformulate the self-
perceptions of the Ottoman elite, resulting in the
transformation of the Osmanlı milleti into a more
rigid and ultimately self-defeating definition of
Ottoman identity that relied on shared religious
and, later, linguistic associations to determine an
individual’s affiliation to community.Bibliography
A. Cohen, A tale of two women. Facets of Jewish life in
nineteenth-century Jerusalem as seen through the Mus-
lim court records, in A. Levy (ed.), Jews, Turks, Otto-
mans. A shared history, fifteenth through the twentieth
century, New York 2003, 119–27.
A. Duben and C. Behar, Istanbul households. Marriage,
family and fertility, 1880–1940, Cambridge 1991.
J. Hathaway, Marriage alliances among the military
households of Ottoman Egypt, in Annales islamologi-
ques29 (1995), 133–49.
A. Khair, “House” to “Goddess of the House.” Gender,
class and silk in 19th century Mt. Lebanon, in Inter-
national Journal of Middle East Studies28:3 (1996),
325–48.
M. Mundy, Women’s inheritance of land in highland
Yemen, inArabian Studies5 (1979), 161–87.
L. Peirce, The imperial harem. Women and sovereignty in
the Ottoman Empire, New York 1993.
T. Shuval, The Ottoman Algerian elite and its ideology, in
International Journal of Middle East Studies32:3
(2000), 323–44.
J. E. Tucker, In the house of law. Gender and Islamic law
in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, Berkeley 1998.
M. C. Zilfi (ed.), Women in the Ottoman Empire. Middle
Eastern women in the early modern era, Leiden 1997.Isa BlumiTurkeyThe intersection of race and gender in Turkey can
best be understood in the context of Turkey’s ethnic
diversity, the paradoxical construction of Turkish
nationalism, and the state’s official denial of non-
Turkish identities within its borders. A well-known
Turkish saying holds that “there are seventy-two-
and-a-half peoples in Turkey.” The category “Turk-
ish” thus masks a wide range of ethnic heritages,
encompassing many people of Balkan, Anatolian,
Caucasian, and Asian origin. In the context of this
diversity, the Turkish state has promoted a contra-
dictory formulation of national identity, first artic-
ulated during Ottoman times in the writings of
Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924). “Turkishness” came to
refer at once to a civic identity (all those who are
citizens of the Turkish state, regardless of ancestry)
and to an exalted ethnic group, the Turkic people of694 race, gender, and difference
Anatolia (Kadıo©lu 1996). Since the early years of
the Turkish Republic (founded in 1923), gendered
ideologies of nationalism have both valorized rural
women as the workers and mothers of the Turkish
nation, and, at the same time, glorified the ideal of
the “modern” Turkish woman who would take her
place beside men in the Westernized public sphere
of the nascent state (Kandiyoti 1987, Göle 1996).
Turkish national identity has thus been configured
through contested and sometimes contradictory
representations of women and the social-spatial
enactment of gender roles.
From the Laz of the Black Sea region to the Kurds
of the southeast and the Arabs of the southern bor-
der regions, the boundaries of Turkey thus encircle
many different groups that can claim non-Turkic
ethnic identities; Peter Andrews (1989) catalogues- While Arabic is spoken as the mother tongue
of about 2 percent of the population, the Kurds
are Turkey’s largest linguistic minority, comprising
approximately 15 percent of the population and
speaking two different dialects of Kurdish (Kur-
manji and Zaza). The everyday circumstances of
ethnically marked women in Turkey are linked
to larger patterns of material inequality. Among
Turkey’s linguistic minorities, almost a quarter of
women (compared to 1 percent of men) do not
speak Turkish. Kurdish and Arabic speaking women
in Turkey have notably lower rates of literacy and
educational access than do other women, although
these differences decline in the urban areas (Gündüz-
Hoçgör and Smits 2001). The predominantly Kurdish
and Arab provinces of the southeast comprise the
poorest region of the country and these ethnic
minorities are relatively worse off compared to the
country as a whole (Içduygu et al. 1999). However,
for women of all backgrounds, educational oppor-
tunities and economic conditions are also shaped
by social values, patriarchal structures, and levels
of family control (Gündüz-Hoçgör and Smits 2001,
Cindo(lu and Sirkeci 2001).
Like Turkish national identity, Kurdish identity
has also been articulated in part through repre-
sentations of women and ideologies of gender. The
idea that Kurdish society is notably egalitarian has
been promulgated by both Western Orientalists and
Kurdish nationalists, whose modernist political
ideology encouraged the ideal, if not the reality, of
gender equality. The claim that Kurdish culture has
historically afforded women relative strength and
power is often staked on the prominence of indi-
vidual women leaders in Kurdish history. More
recently, scholars have begun to challenge these
narratives and to look more closely at the patriar-
chal structures that pervade rural Turkey (Mirzeler