sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

Women’s petitions and telegrams to demand justice
Ottoman women’s wartime petitions and their telegrams which were sent to state bureaucracy
are full of detailed information about their everyday life experience and various forms of violence
they suffered. These sources reveal that women were especially exposed to maltreatment. For
example, women who demanded food relief, pensions or housing were in a vulnerable situation that
made them prone to violent behavior of angry or corrupt bureaucrats. Likewise the petitions and
telegrams show that those peasant women who resisted illegal actions by tax collectors or soldiers
were frequently attacked. Such kind of incidents usually happened during the implementation of
wartime mobilization measures such as forced labor and high wartime agricultural taxes.
Ordinary women as wives, sisters or mothers of Ottoman soldiers had serious problems in
receiving special pensions assigned to the soldiers’ families without a breadwinner. They often
demanded the payment of their pension in due time or in correct amount and complained about the
late payments, low amounts or bureaucratic red tape, which made them prone to verbal or physical
violence. Usually red tape went hand in hand with the bad treatment by the Ottoman civil servants of
the women who sought help. For instance, a telegram sent from the Şevketiye village of Andırın, a
town of Maraş, by Fatma and her friend, informed the government that they had been treated badly
by civil servants. To legitimize their position, they started their telegram with patriotic words,
declaring that they were “the families of soldiers who spilled their blood for the sake of the
protection of the fatherland.” After this partly true and partly rhetorical introduction, the women
complained that their pension certificates had been rejected unlawfully by the aggressive
bureaucrats. 5
Similarly, seven women living in İznik named Halime, Ümmühan, Ayşe, Emine Dudu, Fıtnat, Emine
and Şerife sent a telegram to both the İzmit governorship and the Ministry of Internal Affairs on 15
November 1917. They demanded their unpaid pensions and complained about the rude behavior of
the district governor toward them when they had asked him why their pensions had not been
distributed. They argued that their husbands had been in the army for the last three years and that
many women like them had great difficulties receiving their pensions.
According to their telegram, although they had applied to the İznik district governor who was also
the chairman of the İznik Commission for Soldiers Families without a Breadwinner (İznik Muinsizler
Komisyonu), he had not taken their demands into consideration. He had shirked his duty by driving
them out with offensive words and using violence against them. These women protested this
treatment, again employing a patriotic discourse and claiming that while their husbands had been
sacrificing their lives for the protection of the fatherland, they had not deserved this poverty and
such bad treatment by the state officials. They also demanded that their pensions be regularly paid.
Upon the complaints of these women, the Ministry of Internal Affairs started an investigation.
Against these accusations, the district governor first answered that these women were very probably
rich enough and therefore they had not been given pensions. However, at the end of the
investigations, it was understood that the problem stemmed from the disorganization of the record
books in which the names of pension receivers were written. Only after the women were identified
they began receiving their pensions again. 6
Low‐income women who demanded food from the state or who tried to save their scarce
agricultural crops from tax collectors during the hard years of the war were also exposed to violence.
For instance, in a telegram sent from Beypazarı on 18 November 1916 a group of women complained
of hunger due to the drought. It was signed by Hatice “on behalf of all soldiers’ wives” and her
friends who also signed their telegram referring their connection with a soldier as “soldier’s wife”
Zihniyye, “soldier’s son” Nuri and “martyrs’ daughter” Ümmühan. These women and children started
their telegram by reminding the authorities that their husbands and fathers had left them to the
protection of the state to do their military service. Due to the drought that year the price of the grain
had escalated, and as a result, they had gone hungry. They argued as well that the local government
which had previously announced that it would provide seed and provisions to the needy peasants