Recovering the oft-neglected role of women in Ottoman high society and power politi, this book brings to life the women who made their mark in a male domain. Though historical records tend to favour the glitter of palaces over the trials of daily life, Goodwin also reconstructs ordinary women's domestic toil. As the Ottoman Empire first expanded and then shrank, women travelled its width and breadth whether out of necessity or merely for pleasure. Some women owned slaves while others suffered the misfortune of being enslaved. Goodwin examines the laws which governed women's lives from the harem to the humblest tasks. This perceptive study of Ottoman life culminates with the nineteenth century and explores the advent of modernity and its impact on women at a time of imperial decline. 'The best book on the subject and likely to remain so for some time.' Times Literary Supplement 'A fascinating account by the foremost authority on the Ottoman period.' The Middle East 'Goodwin is an exceptional scholar with an insight that reveals itself in every sentence.' Asian Affairs 'Offers excellent scholarship into a history that has been much neglected by the West.' Judaism Today

Reconstructing the role of women in Ottoman high society and power politics, Godfrey Goodwin brings to life the women who made their marks in a male domain.? He examines the laws which governed women's lives from the harem to the humblest tasks, and contrasts the lives of rural women with those of women in the towns, discussing pivotal events such as courtship, marriage, divorce, and motherhood.? This perceptive study culminates in the nineteenth century, exploring the advent of modernity and its impact at a time of imperial decline.

During war time, the everyday experiences of ordinary people - and especially women - are frequently obscured by elite military and social analysis. In this pioneering study, Elif Mahir Metinsoy focuses on the lives of ordinary Muslim women living in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. It reveals not only their wartime problems, but also those of everyday life on the Ottoman home front. It questions the existing literature's excessive focus on the Ottoman middle-class, using new archive sources such as women's petitions to extend the scope of Ottoman-Turkish women's history. Free from academic jargon, and supported by original illustrations and maps, it will appeal to researchers of gender history, Middle Eastern and social history. By showing women's resistance to war mobilization, wartime work life and the everyday struggles which shaped state politics, Mahir Metinsoy allows readers to draw intriguing comparisons between the past and the current events of today's Middle East.

From the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, the janissaries were the scourge of Europe. With their martial music, their muskets and their drilled march, it seemed that no one could withstand them. Their loyalty to their corps was infinite as the Ottomans conquered the Balkans as far as the Danube, and Syria, Egypt and Iraq. They set up semi-independent states along the North African coast and even fought at sea. Their political power was such that even sultans trembled. Who were they? Why were they an elite? Why did they decline and what was their end? These are some of the questions which this book attempts to answer. It is the story of extraordinary personalities in both victory and defeat. 'An incredible book ... a tour de force' Middle East International 'Well written and lucid.' Muslim World Books Review 'Goodwin has done so much in his scholarly career to introduce a wide audience to Ottoman culture.' Financial Times

The unprecedented political power of the Ottoman imperial harem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is widely viewed as illegitimate and corrupting. This book examines the sources of royal women's power and assesses the reactions of contemporaries, which ranged from loyal devotion to armed opposition. By examining political action in the context of household networks, Leslie Peirce demonstrates that female power was a logical, indeed an intended, consequence of political structures. Royal women were custodians of sovereign power, training their sons in its use and exercising it directly as regents when necessary. Furthermore, they played central roles in the public culture of sovereignty--royal ceremonial, monumental building, and patronage of artistic production. The Imperial Harem argues that the exercise of political power was tied to definitions of sexuality. Within the dynasty, the hierarchy of female power, like the hierarchy of male power, reflected the broader society's control for social control of the sexually active.

In A Social History of the Late Ottoman Women, Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou bring together new research on women of different geographies and communities of the late Ottoman Empire focusing particularly on the ways in which women gained power and exercised agency.

Guided by the accounts of such female travellers as Lady Montagu, Julia Pardoe, and Lucy Garnett, all of whom lived in Ottoman lands for significant periods of time, this beautifully illustrated book explores -- and hopes to overturn -- the 19th-century stereotypes of Ottoman women. Both Eastern and Western accounts of Turkish society during that time made much of the harem, with the Orientalists describing Turkish women as exotic, indolent, and depraved, while some European writers described them as noble and elegant. Then, with the advent of the first women's movement in the West, the harem began to be criticised as an institution that trapped women and enforced their submission to men. All of these ideas were refuted by Montagu, Pardoe, and Garnett, who argued that Ottoman women were perhaps the freest in the world; this book backs up that claim with historical research showing that women frequently prevailed in cases against their husbands and other male relatives in the Ottoman courts.