Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era.

• Author: STEIN, MARK
• Position: Review

Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era. Edited by MADELINE C. ZILFI. The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage: Politics, Society and Economy, vol. 10. Leiden: E. J. BRILL, 1997. Pp. xi + 333, 4 illustrations. $96.25.

This volume collects papers originally presented at the conference "Women in the Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy of the Early Modern Middle East, 1650-1830," held at the University of Maryland in 1994. As afield, Middle East history has lagged behind other disciples in studying women's history. Furthermore, the work that has been done has tended to focus temporally on the early-Islamic era or the twentieth century, and linguistically on Arabic or Persian sources. This collection of papers helps to fill the resulting historiographic gap by investigating women in the Ottoman period.

According to the editor, these studies all proceed from the same premises (p. vii). The first is that the unique documentation of the Ottoman period can be used to explore the complex conditions of women. Indeed, many of the papers draw on the same types of documents, most notably Ottoman sharia court records, fatwa collections, and waaf deeds. These materials prove to be valuable sources of information and are skillfully used in several articles to discuss topics as varied as property ownership, child custody, access to the legal system, women's participation in the economy, the use of domestic and public space, marriage, and divorce.

The other shared premises of this collection concern the choice of the early modern period as the focus of the volume, The authors believe that Middle Eastern women's roles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be seen in the light of the past. The past addressed here is the period 1650-1830, a period of great change in the Ottoman domains, and, according to the editor, one "whose history has often been either assumed as static or telescoped into unrelieved imperial decline" (p. 4). Thus this volume not only contributes to the discussion of women's history, but also to discussions of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period.

The articles are generally very strong, but several stand out. Leslie Peirce's contribution, "Seniority, Sexuality, and Social Order: The Vocabulary of Gender in Early Modern Ottoman Society," analyzes the terms used for men and women in legal documents to explore how Ottoman society...