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OTTOMAN WOMEN’S RESISTANCE TO VIOLENCE THROUGH THEIR
EVERYDAY NARRATIVES DURING WORLD WAR I 1 Elif MAHİR METİNSOY *1
World War I was one of the most important historical periods for women’s movement and
women’s history. It was a “total war” which required mobilization of all the segments of the society
including the civilians. 1 During World War I women played an important role in war making on the
home front. Consequently, throughout the war years women’s lives and status in society underwent
a radical transformation in combatant countries. 2 Women started working in professions that had
been exclusive to men before the war as a result of the military conscription of a huge number of
men. Furthermore, women obtained new opportunities for higher education. Most importantly they
acquired their political rights in many European countries and in the United States during or right
after World War I. 3
As opposed to these positive developments, on the home front those women whose husbands,
fathers or brothers were conscripted and left their homes for years became targets of physical and
many other forms of violence coming from both external “enemies” such as occupation forces and
from internal “enemies” such as their rude male neighbors, ill‐intended relatives, local state officials
or corrupt soldiers. 4
Ottoman women as well were especially vulnerable to the internal violence in the form of
physical, psychological, legal, social or economic violence during the long war years. In the face of
this unjust or cruel treatment they received, Ottoman women were not passive victims of wartime
violence. They resisted the negative conditions created by the war. Women’s struggle to survive and
to protect their legal and economic rights is an unknown and less studied part of Ottoman women’s
history.
Ottoman women’s everyday narratives as a strategy of resistance and negotiation
In their fight with the negative wartime conditions and violence, Ottoman women’s everyday
narratives were very important. Through such narratives, women recorded a social memory of the
unjust or cruel treatment they had received during the chaotic years of the war. In addition, they
used these narratives as a means to search for justice. In terms of historiography, these narratives
created an important memory on the wartime conditions of Ottoman women and their spontaneous,
unorganized and mostly individual movements for their rights in everyday life.
Unfortunately, ordinary women’s stories in their own terms have been overshadowed and
overlooked by modernist, nationalist and elitist historical narratives so far. In order to better
understand the voices of ordinary women that had been ignored in Ottoman‐Turkish historiography
there is a need to explore new sources. Women’s wartime search for very survival and protection of
their basic rights was not only recorded in the memoirs or literary works penned by intellectual and
middle class women of the time. Ordinary women as well created a mass of information on their
everyday experiences through their letters or petitions they had written to the state. Even
anonymous folk songs recited by local women give us important clues about the cruel wartime
experience of ordinary Ottoman women. This paper examines these new sources not only as
historical documents that reveal women’s everyday experience of the war but also as a means by
which ordinary women resisted cruel treatment, violation of their rights, oppression and exploitation
by local men and prompted the state authorities to alleviate their poverty.
*
Middle East Technical University, Department of History
1
I thank TÜBİTAK for supporting this research financially. I also thank Murat Metinsoy for
his
comments on this paper.