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EBRU BOYAR and KATE FLEET, eds. Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016), Pp. 294 $149 Cloth
The purpose and theme of this path-breaking book is to demonstrate that public space was a natural locus for women in living in Ottoman lands and that the presence of females in public was routine. No longer can we automatically assume that the home was the default site of women's lives. Acknowledging the scholarly progress made in recent decades in challenging the notions that women were confined to the home and that the home was a space of secondary importance to the public arena, the book pushes further to assert unambiguously that Ottoman women were quotidian players in public space and therefore in the economies and societies of the empire.
Ottoman Women in Public Space, edited by Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, is the product of a team project growing out of a conference on women at the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies at Newnham College, Cambridge. The book's introductory chapter is collectively written by the five members of the team-in chapter order, Palmira Brummett, Svetla Ianeva, Kate Fleet, Edith Gülçin Ambros, and Ebru Boyar. It sets the stage by asking what is public space-for example, should it include the neighborhood (mahalle), a much-studied entity? It then parses public space for the myriad purposes women inhabited it-to work, buy and sell, enjoy public festivals, and observe religious duties (e.g., pilgrimage). Women also appeared as commodities (slaves for sale), perpetrators of crimes, and litigants at court. Drawing on recent research, the chapter notes that women were present not only visually but also through their voices and even their smells and fragrances, while their names might circulate as sponsors of public charities. A good deal of this is not new; rather, the book is a tipping point in the study of Ottoman women that roots them firmly in non-domestic spaces. Women were not only present and consequential in public space but they "expected success from actions within it" (17).
Palmira Brummet's chapter-the "what if' of the Ottoman female-invites us to a conceptual-thinking exercise in which we are encouraged to discard old but tenacious assumptions that women's concerns and influence were limited in premodern times to the domestic...