Representations: women between ‘East and West’

In the Ottoman East as in other societies, women’s lived experience and society’s representation of women seldom coincided. In early modern Istanbul and Damascus, as in London and Lyons, or for that matter ancient Rome and Athens, women’s lives were more complex and varied than their contemporaries were ready to concede. In Western and Mediterranean literary traditions, women’s daily lives, like the lives of most men, went unremarked. But unlike men, women tended to be aggregated into idealised or deplored versions of a collective self – women as they should be, set against the dire potential of the Eve within. It is not that real women, individual and identified, lacked social validity in Ottoman consciousness. Rather, the integral category of ‘womankind’, though undifferentiated by class, vocation, or creed, was more fully realised and answered larger cultural needs. ‘Womankind’ comprehended a stock of images expressive of society’s anxieties and aspirations. Sometimes very good, sometimes very bad, women as womankind were staples of moralists and belletrists a like. In those rare instances when ordinary women were permitted to touch ground in the literature, they were customarily limited to sexualised or domestic preoccupations.

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the depiction of Ottoman Muslim women did not differ significantly from their representation in earlier times. All in all, it was a story that was rarely told, at least for the written record. Even the genre of the privileged, that of illustrious women, is thin in comparison to its counterparts in early Islamic and contemporaneous European societies; few women are included at all, within a scant few categories of representation.