In April 2020, I received a friendly and sincere email from Suraiya Faroqhi asking for advice on literature about World War I from a female perspective for an online graduate course she was teaching during the pandemic. She wrote: “Locked up in a small apartment for over four weeks now, I have started to work on a fairly elaborate set of class notes on Ottoman women’s history”. In the months that followed, we continued to correspond on similar topics, including the fate of Armenian women during the genocide, the philanthropic activities of Ottoman women in the nineteenth century, the life and works of Zabel Essayan, and so on. As Faroqhi notes in her preface, the origin of Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History was the detailed lecture notes she prepared during lockdown. Despite being disconnected from archives and libraries, she engaged in a lively dialogue with many colleagues who shared their suggestions and publications. Faroqhi’s impressive and enviable diligence and enthusiasm, even under difficult circumstances, have enabled her to produce a broad panorama of women’s lives in the Ottoman Empire from the 1500s to the early 1900s, touching on a wide range of issues including, but not limited to, marriage, divorce, and inheritance; moneylending, women’s labour and slavery; patronage, artists, and educators; abortion, midwifery, and (royal) motherhood. The book effectively acquaints “the reader with the state of the art, sketching an overall view of the current historiography” (p. 9). However, as Faroqhi herself explicitly asserts, the book is “about women rather than about gender” (p. 4). The most recent critical feminist historiography and theoretical discussions, particularly on sexuality, performativity, embodiment, and subjectivity, are not addressed in this overview.

The book begins with three introductory sections: Introduction, Prologue, and Chapter One. The Introduction sets the main axes of the book and defines the nature of this broad overview of Ottoman women’s history. It covers the main arguments and theoretical underpinnings (agency, resilience strategies, giving voice), sources and methods, and chronological and spatial focus. The Prologue, on the other hand, provides a gender-inclusive political history of the period under consideration, touching on separate issues such as the Ottoman-Safavis conflict, the palace and the harem, the Tanzimat reforms, and the disintegration of the empire. Chapter One, “How women fitted into Ottoman history”, discusses the periodization used and the resulting changes in women’s lives in each period. The body of this book is divided according to this periodization: Part One covers the 200 years between 1500 and 1700; Part Two covers a somewhat shorter period between 1700 and 1870; and Part Three extends from 1870 to 1918. As might be expected, the shortest period in this division translates into a longer section in terms of pages, given the availability of sources and secondary literature.

The three chapters in Part One present the legal frameworks that governed women’s everyday lives and their agency in matters of marriage and divorce (ch. 2); women’s economic agency in the form of paid work, property ownership, charitable foundations (ch. 3); and the artistic and intellectual agency of women poets, educators, and mystics (ch. 4). Part Two brings together two chapters, both titled “Ottoman Diversity” (with different subtitles), and chronologically follows some of the issues raised in Part One, such as marriage, divorce, charity, women’s work, and women artists, and also deals with new issues, such as household structures, ulema aristocracies, and prostitution. In addition to taking a chronological approach, the second part expands geographically beyond Anatolia to Ottoman Syria and Egypt (ch. 5). The final part consists of three chapters on the emancipation of late Ottoman women through education and voluntary organizations (ch. 7), women with limited resources and difficult circumstances and their coping strategies (ch. 8), and women’s lives during World War I and the end of the empire (ch. 9). The book’s conclusion does not summarize the entire content of the survey but suggests several possible conclusions that might be drawn. In particular, it suggests that the position of women at court and in the family varied considerably from region to region and between town and country; that more research is needed on women’s education prior to the nineteenth century; that “defensive modernization”, whether in the form of demographic biopolitics, medicine, education, nationalism, or genocide and ethnic cleansing, had a major impact on women’s lives; and finally that women have a well-deserved place as agents in Ottoman history.

For colleagues in the field, these are not necessarily new insights or agendas. In an earlier article on the agency of foster daughters in the late Ottoman Empire,Footnote ¹ I challenged the idea that these girls were “silenced, compliant, or passive characters”, arguing that they “played an active role in negotiating or refusing abuse and in determining their fates”. That was seventeen years ago. While “agency” is still an important concept in feminist historiography, it is no longer the most fashionable topic in the field. In that respect, this volume focuses more on synthesizing and summarizing existing work than on theorizing and revisioning on the basis of new and unearthed material. As the author mentions several times, this volume has the character of a survey, providing a detailed account of many possible directions that women’s history has taken and is currently taking in Ottoman Studies. Particularly in terms of introducing new scholars to the field and of valorizing the publications of younger scholars, Faroqhi does an important job of bringing different generations of Ottoman historians working on women’s history into dialogue with each other.

Furthermore, given the story of its origins and the compelling prose of its renowned author, Women in the Ottoman Empire: A Social and Political History has considerable potential to be used as teaching material in undergraduate and graduate surveys. The front matter of the book, which includes maps of the empire and a timeline of events and characters referenced in the text, as well as the eighteen-page “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the end of the book, are particularly noteworthy in this regard. Each chapter presents a series of compelling case studies, drawing upon both primary and secondary sources, and is articulated in a manner that is both captivating and engaging.