“The Homeland Will Not be Saved Merely by Chastity”: Women’s Agency, Nationalism, and Morality in the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract:Social norms and customs, especially the ones regulating the women’s place in society, occupied a privileged space among the topics that precipitated heated discussions in the late Ottoman Empire. This article deals with Ottoman Muslim women’s strategies and discourses used to defy moralistic criticisms targeting “women’s emancipation.” By taking a closer look at the articles penned by women writers in various journals, it explores how women writers in the late Ottoman Empire approached the preoccupancy of “the woman issue” in discussion of morality and moral decline. This study aims to address the debates about how the relaxation of strict moral codes could allow women to further realize social agency and how this demand interplayed with the development of a secular and nationalist view of morality as well as the idea of a social reform in Ottoman society.