Displaced women, law and competing patriarchies in late Ottoman Serbia

Focusing on women who were displaced, unclaimed, or left without protection in the shifting legal order of early nineteenth-century Ottoman Serbia— runaway wives, enslaved and manumitted women, fugitives, and kidnapped girls —this article argues that the burdens of transition into the modern state were experienced most acutely by women who fell through the cracks of overlapping spatial and legal regimes of control. Despite their varied circumstances, women shared a structural problem: they had no pathway to legal personhood, no rights to return to or leave their homes, and no protection unless recognized within a patriarchal household. Their legal belonging remained tethered to household authority even as new centralizing political and legal orders took shape. In this unstable transitional period, patriarchy was distributed and enforced across competing scales and legal structures, including households, villages, Ottoman imperial institutions, and emerging Serbian state structures. Drawing on Serbian court and administrative records from the 1820s–30s, this article traces how various local and imperial officials negotiated these tensions, suggesting that transitional legal systems inscribed gendered asymmetries into modern practices of repatriation, citizenship, trafficking, and statelessness. The article contends that modern patriarchies emerged out of early modern household-based legal regimes and systems of village authority, and that modern forms of statelessness stem from problems that became legible during transitional periods and were never resolved.