Ottoman Empire

Women, both free and enslaved, had a role as the social heads of the household in pre-Imperialism Ottoman Empire. However, as imperialism and globalization started to affect every part of daily life in the Ottoman Empire. Harem women were enslaved, yes, but they also had an important role in the household in which they served. They spoke to the harem slaves of other households in order to socially connect. Free women helped their husband in the private sphere by taking care of the children, unless their husbands died or had to leave. Globalization started to affect these roles, as shown in the case of Assaf, a man from nineteenth century Mount Lebanon, in the Ottoman Empire. He left his wife and children alone in Mount Lebanon when he migrated to Uruguay in order to try to get a job and send money back to his family. He was in South America for a number of years, which left his wife to cover both roles of husband and wife, in and out of the household. Even before he migrated, though, “[Assaf’s wife] worked hard on the plot of land that she owned as part of her dowry, and she also helped Assaf’s mother with her work in the house in order to make ends meet” (Khater and Khater 42).This quote shows how women’s role, particularly in poorer areas such as Mount Lebanon, had changed to ft the roles demanded of them since globalization, especially of trade, had changed how much work a household needed to produce and who in the household worked to produce it. Once Assaf did move, though, as “…times were… difficult for [Assaf’s wife], who had to care for and feed the three children by herself. [Gossip in the village] only added to the pressures with which she had to contend because of the absence of her husband” (Khater and Khater 43-4). This was not the only case of this in the Ottoman Empire due to globalization and the movement of peoples.

There was also a similar changing of roles of women in another place in the Ottoman Empire- Egypt. Although the trend of migration out of Egypt runs for over a century, the impact it has left on the family and on women’s roles have remained the same. As authors Sajeda Amin and Nagah H. al-Bassusi write in their work Education, Wage Work, and Marriage: Perspectives of Egyptian Working Women, “International migration influenced a reevaluation of household structure and family, and may have fostered a degree of independence among women as large numbers of women were left behind to manage households” (1290). This quote shows how immigration changed women’s roles in Egypt just like in Mount Lebanon, even though they were very different areas in the Ottoman Empire.

Western feminists also influenced how Ottoman women’s activists wrote and thought. In the Ottoman Turkish women’s journals such as Women’s World, “the authors raised radical demands for women in the Ottoman Empire…” (Bicer-Devici 247). However, they were not immune to the influences of the West. The authors published their early journals in both Ottoman Turkish and French as a way to get their word outside of the Ottoman Empire and have it taken seriously.