Content area
Full Text
DUYGU KÖKSAL and ANASTASIA FALIEROU, eds. A Social History of Late Ottoman Women: New Perspectives, (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Pp. 348. $171.00 cloth.
A Social History of Late Ottoman Women brings to the study of women's experience in Ottoman-era Middle Eastern history a collection of fourteen articles, plus a lengthy introduction by editors Köksal and Falierou that stands as an article in its own right. All in all, the collection lives up to its title in providing "new perspectives" on women in the Ottoman Empire from the late nineteenth century to the early years of the Turkish Republic.
The contributions are divided almost equally under five headings: "Women as Economic Actors," "Education for Life," "Female Ottoman Artists," "Womanhood in Print Culture," and "Dilemmas of Nationalism." The themes alone promise perspectives that differ from most historical writing on this particular period. In contrast to the fruitful social-historical focus of much of the historiography on the pre-Tanzimat centuries, with few exceptions, historical writing on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has concentrated on intellectual history, that is, women as part of national struggles or women's role and participation in print media. The present volume achieves its editors' aim of broadening the scope of inquiry to previously unexplored arenas, noting where women acted despite resistance and managed occasionally to strike out on their own. The geographical range of the volume is also a welcome turn from the nationalized monographs and collections that commonly focus on only one locale or linguistic group at...