sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

do agriculture and they worked night and day to do the agricultural work of about three or four
families with only one pair of animals. Emphasizing that they were in a critical season for agriculture,
these women claimed that they did not have enough animals to carry their tax to the remote
destinations determined by the army commanders. Furthermore, they complained that they had
been forced to go this ten hour distance. Instead of going this long road, they wanted to carry the
crops to the train station at Çivril, which was two hours from their village. Explaining that this could
relieve their economic sufferings to some extent, they also wanted that money be paid for rent of
their draught animals. The government ordered the Kütahya governor on 17 March 1918 to deal with
this telegram. The Kütahya governor wrote in return on 3 April 1918 that in response to the request
of these peasants, the governorship had sent 30 to 40 camels to the village to carry the tax instead of
laying the burden of transportation of the crops collected as tax on the peasant women. 13
Women’s folk songs to protest forced labor
Finding records of peasant women’s reactions to violence during war mobilization is rather
difficult in the archive documents other than what was recorded in telegrams or petitions. We have
fortunately a huge amount of them. Nevertheless, sometimes Ottoman women revealed their
feelings about the obligatory mobilization duties and the physical, psychological and economic
violence they suffered because of taxes, requisitions or forced labor in folk songs. A peasant woman
from the Moso village of Araç district of Kastamonu composed a folk song during the war years to
complain about the heavy wartime taxes and the obligation of transporting the crops collected as tax
long distances, when she carried the tithe tax from her village to Bartın. She had had to leave her
suckling baby at her village for this task, therefore she feared that her baby would die because of
hunger and neglect and she protested this situation with the following verses:
My oxen are lying down exhausted
Which of us is taken care of by friend and foe?
My baby! My milk has come oozing out
....
Don’t the tears of mothers stop?
Doesn’t Sultan Neşat14 know our situation?
....
How many years did this greedy state
Not leave behind even one shirt to the people?
Love makes you cry, trouble makes you complain, of course
I go and go, but Bartın is out of sight
My legs are swollen, these roads can’t be walked.15
Unlike the petitions and telegrams of ordinary Ottoman women this folk song that had been
composed by a peasant woman was not sent directly to the state authorities. Therefore, its impact
on the state bureaucracy cannot be examined. However, together with the similar folk songs of this
period it created a collective memory of the wartime social conditions and especially women’s
complaints about them.
Concluding remarks
To sum up, Ottoman women’s resistance to violence through their everyday narratives during the
war years can be examined in the light of not only educated women’s memoirs, literary works or
letters but also new archival sources that have not been evaluated thoroughly so far, such as
Ottoman women’s petitions and telegrams to the state agencies or folk songs composed by peasant
women. These sources are vital to deeper understanding ordinary Ottoman women’s everyday
experience and their forms of political action. They show us that Ottoman women did not only
remain as passive victims of wartime violence but they used rhetorical strategies which made them