Reconstructing the history of the Constitutional Era in Ottoman Turkey through women's periodicals

Abstract

This article discusses the historical value of Ottoman women's periodicals published in the aftermath of the 1908 Revolution, which marked the beginning of the Constitutional Era (1908-1918). Through specific examples of women's writings in the press, it illustrates how these periodicals can shed light on the previously unexplored aspects of this period. The article argues that women's journals allow scholars both to recover the identities and stories of hundreds of women, which would have been lost otherwise, and to challenge the mainstream historiography, which has traditionally presented a one-dimensional portrayal of the Constitutional Era by privileging men's voices and experiences over women's. It demonstrates that women's journals not only reveal a dynamic, flexible, and complex milieu, in which women could and did act as agents of both social and political change, but also signify the multifaceted transformation the Revolution of 1908 caused in Ottoman society in the early twentieth century.