| Description |
This dissertation offers a study of the configurations of the idealized, new female gender identity in the public discourse within the late 19 th- and early 20th- century Ottoman Muslim urban context and investigates Ottoman Muslim women of letters' involvement in this discourse targeting their own images and presences. The new woman was configured as both the guardian of native values and a potent agent of social development. This study contends that women's increasing participation in public writing and their diversified literary input on issues related to female modesty and feminine/domestic identity created a collective agency in this venue, complicating and unsettling the constructions of the new woman's identity. Women with varying alliances to Islam, nationalism and modernity had changing interpretations of progress and cultural integrity. It brought about contestations, more often than not, over a range of conditions and practices, including Muslim women's attire, their appearance in public places, at gatherings, at work and school, with regard to its propriety for the idealized Ottoman Muslim womanhood. The discussion in this work also speaks accordingly to the general issue of subjectivity, in the face of dominant ideas, identities and projects that attempt to shape and represent individuals. A more inclusive picture of women's intellectual existence in history, in terms of ideological attitudes, and of social status and prominence, is offered based on (re)examination of primary sources, to counter the different ways of silencing and the avoiding of acknowledgment in the historiographies of the period. |
