Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Ottoman Empire

Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Ottoman Empire is a tale of how women’s triumphs as well as their failures shaped a global society-not despite, but because of, gender. The Ottoman Empire was among the longest-lived polities in history, stretching between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries across three continents, several seas, and scores of cities, deserts, mountain ranges, rivers, and forests.This volume provides a compendium of idiosyncratic life stories and explores how women from these eras and regions understood the shape of the world in which they lived, and how they brought their consciousness of their gender to their efforts to re-shape it. Among the questions explored in the book are how women have negotiated and constructed the public and private spheres, how to define “women’s speech” in a world mediated by men and male-dominated genres and institutions, and how women experienced their bodies as sites of politically inflected reproduction, death and decay. The book is t