“Print Capitalism and Women’s Sexual Agency in the Late Ottoman Empire”

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Print Capitalism and Women’s Sexual Agency in the Late Ottoman Empire

İrvin Cemil Schick

ooks and periodicals about or oriented toward women increasingly made their ap-pearance in Ottoman publishing, starting with the last decades of the nineteenth century and peaking after the restoration of the constitution in 1908. Issues as diverse

as women’s rights, good housekeeping, work and employment, family, health, and sexuality were treated again and again. In addition, explicitly erotic publications also appeared in in-creasing numbers, presenting a vision of women and sexuality that, if not novel, had never received such wide exposure or support in the Ottoman context. Monogamous and compan-ionate marriages were upheld while polygamous and arranged marriages were condemned, and women were portrayed as legitimately sexual beings entitled to the pursuit of physical pleasure and to control over their own bodies.

To date, studies of these publications and of their role in the formation and development of the Ottoman women’s movement have tended to focus on writers, their thoughts, and the influences that shaped them. By contrast, the institutional framework that enabled this surge of publications has been almost completely neglected. As a consequence, a direct and unmedi-ated relationship has implicitly been posited between ideas and their appearance in the form of publications. The goal of the present article is to document the development of Ottoman print capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to reveal its role in the publication of books and pamphlets that challenged established ideas of personal relations between men and women, notably sexual relations. This is not to suggest that the au-thors and readers of these publications were not ideologically committed to the emancipation of women or to downplay the importance of the various intellectual influences that shaped their commitment — including what is known by the unfortunate shorthand “Westernization.” However, the process whereby such ideas were transformed into publications deserves to be problematized in its own right.

My argument is that print capitalism opened certain doors for newly emerging ideolo-gies and that just as publishing was nourished by new ideas, likewise publishing in turn made it possible for those new ideas to gain momentum and influence society in ways and to an extent that had not previously been possible. In this respect, this article may be viewed as a corrective to the substantially idea- centric analyses of Ottoman women’s publications offered

I am grateful for information and assistance generously pro-vided during the writing of this article by Püzant Akbaş, Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Carter Vaughn Findley, A. Nilüfer İsvan, Emin Ne-dret İşli, Fatma Kılıç, Rober Koptaş, Mustafa Özdemir, Serdar Poyraz, András Riedlmayer, Zafer Toprak, Özgür Türesay, and Boghos Levon Zekiyan. All translations are mine unless other-wise noted.

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to date, one that seeks to bring to the fore some of the practical underpinnings of the women’s movement’s initial course.1

Ottoman- Turkish Print CapitalismThe printing press was introduced into the Ot-toman Empire by Iberian Jews some time in the mid- 1490s. Over the following two centuries, Greek, Armenian, Church Slavonic, and Chris-tian Arab presses were established in various parts of the empire. The first Muslim press using movable type was finally launched in Istanbul in 1727 – 28 by İbrahim Müteferrika, a Hungarian convert to Islam.2

For a variety of reasons, the first century of Muslim- Ottoman printing progressed in fits and starts, only managing to produce some 180 editions by 1830.3 By way of comparison, it is estimated that thirty to thirty- five thousand different editions were published during just the first fifty years of European printing, repre-senting ten to fifteen thousand distinct texts.4 By the First Constitutional Period (1876 – 78), al-

most half a century later, the number of Turkish books published in the Ottoman Empire had risen to only 3,066.5 Yet by the time the Republic of Turkey adopted Latin script in 1928, another half century having elapsed, well more than twenty- five thousand distinct titles had been printed, many in multiple editions.6 Indeed, be-tween thirty and thirty- five thousand different editions were published from 1876 to 1928.7

Certainly such factors as the rise in liter-acy8 during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876 – 1909) must have played a major role in enabling this publishing explosion, which was, however, delayed for a time by the rigors of Hamidian censorship.9 But it was the free-doms ushered in by the Young Turk revolution (1908 – 9) during its early days that did so much to fill the books and periodicals responding to an increasing demand for publications with new kinds of content. This, and the proliferation of privately held printing houses, make it possible to speak of a late- Ottoman “print capitalism” (in the sense of Benedict Anderson)10 that not

1. For a rare discussion of the institutional mecha-nisms underlying the publication of Ottoman wom-en’s writings, such as the salon, the periodical press, schools, and philanthropic organizations, see Victoria Rowe, “Armenian Writers and Women’s Rights Dis-course in Turn- of- the- Twentieth- Century Constanti-nople,” Aspasia 2 (2008): 44 – 69.

2. On early printing in the Ottoman Empire, see, e.g., Franz Babinger, Stambuler Buchwesen im 18. Jahr-hundert (The Istanbul Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century) (Leipzig: Deutscher Verein für Buchwesen und Schrifttum, 1919); Selim Nüzhet [Gerçek], Türk Matbaacılığı: İki Yüzüncü Sene- i Devriyesi Münase-betiyle (Turkish Printing, on the Occasion of Its Two Hundredth Anniversary) (Istanbul: Matbaa- ı Ebüzziya, 1928); Aladár v. Simonffy, Ibrahim Müteferrika: Bahn-brecher des Buchdrucks in der Türkei (İbrahim Müte-ferrika, Pioneer of Book Printing in Turkey) (Budapest: Dr. Vajna and Bokor, 1944); Osman Ersoy, Türkiye’ye Matbaanın Girişi ve İlk Basılan Eserler (The Entrance of the Printing Press into Turkey and the First Books to Be Printed) (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih- Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayınları, 1959); Günay Alpay Kut, “Matba’a: Turkey,” The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition, vol. 6 (Leiden: Brill, 1960 – ), 799 – 803; William J. Watson, “İbrahim Müteferrika and Turk-ish Incunabula,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88 (1968): 435 – 41; A[khmet] Kh[alilovich] Rafikov, Ocherki istorii knigopechataniya v Turtsii (Es-says on the History of Book Printing in Turkey) (Len-ingrad: Nauka, 1973); Wahid Gdoura, Le début de l’imprimerie arabe à Istanbul et en Syrie: Evolution de l’environment culturel (1706 – 1787) (The Beginning of Arabic Printing in Istanbul and Syria: Evolution of the Cultural Environment) (Tunis: Publications de l’Institut Supérieur de Documentation, 1985); Orlin

Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika, ya da İlk Osmanlı Matbaa Serüveni (1726 – 1746): Yeniden Değerlendirme (İbrahim Müteferrika, or the First Ottoman Adventure in Print-ing (1726 – 1746): A Reassessment) (Istanbul: Yeditepe Yayınları, 2006); Fikret Sarıcaoğlu and Coşkun Yılmaz, Müteferrika: Basmacı İbrahim Efendi and the Mütefer-rika Press (Istanbul: Esen Ofset, 2008).

3. Jale Baysal, Müteferrika’dan Birinci Meşrutiyete kadar Osmanlı Türklerinin Bastıkları Kitaplar (Books Printed by Ottoman Turks from Müteferrika to the First Constitutional Period) (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakül-tesi Basımevi, 1968), 13 – 14.

4. Lucien Febvre and Henri- Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450 – 1800, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1990), 248; first pub-lished in Paris, 1958. No doubt part of this disparity can be explained by the fact that the printing of reli-gious books was initially prohibited in the Ottoman Empire, while in Europe, they were by far the best sellers.

5. Baysal, Müteferrika’dan Birinci Meşrutiyete, 14.

6. This estimate is based on M[ehmet] Seyfettin Özege, Eski Harflerle Basılmış Türkçe Eserler Kataloğu (Catalog of Turkish Books Printed with Old [i.e., Arabic] Letters), 5 vols. (Istanbul: n.p., 1971 – 79).

7. These figures, and others reported here without attribution, were calculated on the basis of Kudret Emiroğlu and İlker Mustafa İşoğlu, eds., Eski Harfli Basma Türkçe Eserler Bibliyografyası (Bibliography of Printed Turkish Books in Old [i.e., Arabic] Letters) (An-kara: Kültür Bakanlığı Millî Kütüphane Başkanlığı, 2001). Corrections as needed are based on Özege, Eski Harflerle Basılmış Türkçe Eserler Kataloğu; Müjgân Cunbur et al., Türkiye Basmaları Toplu Kataloğu (Arap

Harfli Türkçe Eserler), 1729 – 1928 (Union Catalog of Turkish Printed Books: Turkish Works in Arabic Script), 6 vols. (to date) (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı Millî Küt-üphane Başkanlığı, 1990 – 2004). Totals do not in-clude a significant number of works in the Arabic and Persian languages or those lacking a date or place of publication.

8. Ahmed Emin Yalman estimates that there was a threefold increase in the number of literate Ot-tomans during the reign of Abdülhamid II. Ahmed Emin [Yalman], “The Development of Modern Turkey as Measured by Its Press,” Studies in History, Econom-ics and Public Law, vol. 59, no. 1 (New York: Faculty of Political Science, Columbia University, 1914), 78 – 79.

9. See, e.g., Cevdet Kudret, Abdülhamid Devrinde Sansür (Censorship during the Reign of Abdülhamid) ([Istanbul]: Milliyet Yayınları, 1977); Süleyman Kâni İrtem, Abdülhamid Devrinde Hafiyelik ve Sansür: Abdülhamid’e Verilen Jurnaller (Secret Agents and Censorship during the Reign of Abdülhamid: Reports Sent to Abdülhamid), ed. Osman Selim Kocahanoğlu (Istanbul: Temel Yayınları, 1999); and Fatmagül Demirel, II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Sansür (Censor-ship during the Reign of Abdülhamid II) (Istanbul: Bağlam Yayınları, 2007).

10. Benedict [Richard O’Gorman] Anderson, Imag-ined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (1983; London: Verso, 1991), chap. 3. For a model study of print capitalism in a non- Western setting, see Christopher A[lexander] Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capital-ism, 1876 – 1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

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only fostered the much belated emergence of Turkish nationalism but also contributed to the redefinition of a variety of societal norms, nota-bly gender and sexuality.

Most studies of Ottoman- Turkish print-ing have focused on either the incunabula of İbrahim Müteferrika and his immediate succes-sors or newspaper publishing by the Young Ot-tomans and Young Turks. With a handful of ex-ceptions, nothing has been done on the subject of book publishing after the Tanzimat reforms

of 1839, an absence made all the more glaring by the momentous upsurge of printing during the Second Constitutional Period (1908 – 22).11 More than thirty years ago, Sami N. Özerdim charac-terized book publishing between 1876 and the establishment of the republic in 1923 as “the un-known period,” and that remains true today.12

Figure 1 shows the number of editions (books and pamphlets) in Turkish published in the Ottoman Empire (and the very early re-public) during each year between 1875 and 1928.

Figure 1. The estimated number of distinct editions (books and pamphlets) in Turkish published within the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, 1875 – 1928

11. A notable exception is Erkan Serçe’s published master’s thesis, which focuses on book printing and the book trade in the port city of Izmir (Smyrna): İzmir’de Kitapçılık, 1839 – 1928: Kitaplar, Kitapçılar, Matbaalar ve Kütüphaneler (The Book Trade in İzmir 1839 – 1928: Books, Bookstores, Printing Houses, and Libraries) (Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1996). More such analyses of publishing in provincial centers — whose output was, of course, quite limited relative to that of the administrative and cultural capital of Istan-bul — will, one hopes, pave the way for a study of publishing in the Ottoman Empire as a whole, in all its complexity. A remarkable historical survey of Armenian printers, including many who were Otto-man subjects, but which relates to printing in Turk-ish only peripherally, is T’ēotig [Teotoros Lapchin-jian], Dib u Dar: ‘Kir’in Dzakman yev Michazkayin u

Haygagan Dbakrut’yan Vra Tskuats Agnarg Me (Print-ing and Letter: The Birth of Writing and a Glance at the History of International and Armenian Printing) (Istanbul: Hradaragut’un yev Dbakrut’un, Vahra-may yev Hrach’e Dēr- Nersēsyan, 1912). Other useful but brief references include Pars Tuğlacı, “Osmanlı Türkiye’sinde Ermeni Matbaacılığı ve Ermenilerin Türk Matbaacılığına Katkısı” (“Armenian Printing in Ottoman Turkey and the Contribution of Armenians to Turkish Printing”), Tarih ve Toplum 15, no. 86 (1991): 112 – 20; Johann Strauss, “Les livres et l’imprimerie à Istanbul (1800 – 1908)” (“Books and Printing in Is-tanbul [1800 – 1908]”), in Turquie: Livres d’hier, livres d’aujourd’hui, ed. Paul Dumont (Strasbourg: Centre de Recherche sur la Civilisation Ottomane et le Do-maine Turc Contemporain, Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg; Istanbul: Isis, 1992), 5 – 24;

Strauss, “Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire (19th – 20th Centuries)?” Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 6 (2003): 39 – 76; Strauss, “‘Kütüp ve Re-sail- i Mevkute’: Printing and Publishing in a Multi- ethnic Society,” in Late Ottoman Society: The In-tellectual Legacy, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 225 – 53; Emin Nedret İşli, Ki-taphaneden Yayınevine Bâbıâli (The Bâbıâli [Sublime Porte] District from Kitaphane to Yayınevi) (Istanbul: Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, n.d.); Alpay Kabacalı, ed., Cumhuriyet Öncesi ve Sonrası Matbaa ve Basın Sanayii (Printing and the Press Industry before and after the [Proclamation of the] Republic) (Istanbul: Cem Ofset Matbaacılık Sanayii, 1998), 95 – 115.

12. Sami N. Özerdim, Elli Yılda Kitap (1923 – 1973) (Books in Fifty Years [of the Republic] [1923 – 1973] ) (Ankara: Sevinç Matbaası, 1974), 13.

Sources: Figures derived from Emiroglu and İşoğlu, Eski Harfli Basma Türkçe Eserler Bibliyografyası, with corrections as needed based on Özege, Eski Harflerle Basılmış Türkçe Eserler Kataloğu and Cunbur et al., Türkiye Basmaları Toplu Kataloğu (see note 7)

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These numbers should be considered tentative and approximate, as inconsistencies in dating (three different calendars were used on Turkish publications, not to mention the fact that publi-cation dates are sometimes entirely absent) and rapidly changing geographical borders make an accurate accounting very difficult. Nonetheless, some patterns are clear: publishing declined during the second half of the reign of Abdül-hamid II, largely because of increasingly strict censorship. A meteoric rise followed the proc-lamation of the constitution on 24 July 1908, though this upward trend was interrupted several times by hostilities — the Balkan Wars (1912 – 13), the First World War (1914 – 18), and the War of Independence (1919 – 22). In partic-ular, the Balkan Wars and the First World War resulted in a drop in the number of publications not only because of wartime shortages (partic-ularly of paper), loss of life and property, and general misery but also as a result of territorial losses. For example, Salonica, a major Ottoman intellectual center, was lost to Greece in 1912; Egypt, Palestine, Syria, the Lebanon, and Iraq were lost to the British and the French from 1914

onward. Although some works in Turkish contin-ued to be published in areas lost by the empire, they are not included in the totals in figure 1.

That book publishing flourished in the immediate aftermath of the restoration of the constitution is incontrovertible, but what is even more significant for the purposes of the pres-ent study is the proliferation of privately owned printing houses. Figure 2 shows the number of private printers that published books and pam-phlets during the period 1901 – 12. Once again, these numbers should be considered tentative, both for the reasons given earlier and because publisher information is often inconsistent in Ottoman books. Except for a drop in 1906 – 7, due in large part to increasingly harsh censor-ship and the imprisonment or exile of many dissidents, a slight upward trend is evident throughout the later years of the reign of Ab-dülhamid II. The number of private printing houses exploded, however, in 1908, following the restoration of the constitution, continuing its sharp rise until the First Balkan War. At its peak, it was more than three times the highest total achieved during the late Hamidian pe-

Figure 2. The estimated number of privately owned printing houses that published books and pamphlets in Turkish within the Ottoman Empire, 1901 – 12

Sources: Figures derived from Emiroğlu and İşoğlu, Eski Harfli Basma Türkçe Eserler Bibliyografyası, with corrections as needed based on Özege, Eski Harflerle Basılmış Türkçe Eserler Kataloğu and Cunbur et al., Türkiye Basmaları Toplu Kataloğu (see note 7)

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riod. Seeing this graph, it is easy to understand Server İskit’s comment that in the early stages of the Second Constitutional Period, “the customs warehouses were filled with printing presses.”13

The publisher Ahmet İhsan Tokgöz re-called in his memoirs that “those who did not have ready cash sold the furniture in their homes in order to establish printing houses and newspapers.”14 Indeed, many private presses were associated with newspapers and maga-zines — hardly surprising, as more than two hundred applications for the privilege to pub-lish newspapers were received by the authorities during the first month and a half following the restoration of the constitution. The 1933 alma-nac of the Istanbul Printing Association lists no fewer than 353 newspapers and magazines published in 1908 – 9, albeit some short- lived.15 A very significant number of printing houses, however, were either entirely independent or issued periodicals as only one among several publishing activities. The great majority had a very limited output. Between 1908 and 1912, an average of nearly 72 percent of the private printers published five books per year or less, and another 13 percent or so published between six and ten books per year. Only about 3 per-cent of the private printers published thirty or more books per year. Yet the output distribu-tion was very skewed: while about 34 percent of the books and pamphlets published between 1908 and 1912 were produced by printers whose yearly output was ten works or fewer, 42 percent were produced by those whose yearly output was thirty works or more. In other words, 85 percent of the publishers produced 34 percent of the publications, while 3 percent of the publishers

produced 42 percent. Thus while most printers were small, one cannot conclude that the mar-ket was dominated by small printers.

Still, most of even the largest publish-ers had started out as small businessmen. In a conversation with the popular writer and jour-nalist Ahmed Rasim, a veteran of the book trade recalled that such prominent bookseller- publishers as Arakel [Tozliyan], Karabet [Keşişyan], and Kasbar [Kayseryan] had started their careers as mere newspaper vendors.16 Yet between 1908 and 1912, Karabet Efendi man-aged to publish 141 books and pamphlets in Turkish, and the heirs of Kasbar Efendi (who died in 1894) 88. Indeed, Yervant Gomidas Çark commented (certainly with some exaggeration) that Karabet Efendi “had established a virtual monopoly on printing,” producing very many schoolbooks and several newspapers.17 Another prominent Armenian printer, Artin (Harutyun) Asaduryan, ranked third countrywide during the same period, with 221 books and pamphlets. After emigrating from Kayseri to Istanbul and working for many years as a typesetter, Artin Efendi had purchased the printing press of Şirket- i Mürettibiye in 1890 and renamed it for himself and his sons four years later.18

The private company Matbaa- ı Hayriye ve Şürekâsı led the industry with 286 published works during the same period. Mahmud Bey, whose printing house came in second with some 270 works, was qualified as “an entrepre-neur” by Tokgöz, his well- known contemporary. He had rented eight adjacent shops from the re-cently established endowment of a local school and set up a technologically advanced print-ing house.19 As for Tokgöz himself, his house

13. Server [Rifat] İskit, Türkiyede Matbuat İdareleri ve Politikaları (Directorates of the Press and [Their] Poli-cies in Turkey) (n.p.: Başvekâlet Basın ve Yayın Umum Müdürlüğü Yayınları, 1943), 148.

14. Ahmet İhsan Tokgöz, Matbuat Hatıralarım (My Memoirs of the Press), ed. Alpay Kabacalı (1930 – 31; Is-tanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1993), 151.

15. İskit, Türkiyede Matbuat İdareleri ve Politikaları, 144, 159.

16. Ahmed Rasim, “Matbuat Tarihinden bir Nokta Daha” (“Another Item from the History of the Press”), Vakit, 15 September 1921, reprinted in Münir Süleyman Çapanoğlu, Basın Tarihine Dair Bilgiler ve Hatıralar (Istanbul: Hür Türkiye Dergisi Yayınları, 1962), 44 – 48. See also Ahmed Rasim, Matbuat Hatıralarından: Mu-

harrir, Şair, Edib (From Memoirs of the Press: Reporter, Poet, Litterateur) (Istanbul: Kanaat Kütübhanesi, 1342 [Hijrī]/1924), 182. T’ēotig (Dib u Dar, 95 – 96) mentions several Tozliyan brothers including Arakel (“He was a well- known Turkish bookseller, and for twenty years the owner of a publishing company that produced school books in Turkish and French”), noting as well that his older brother Hovannes sold bread and also owned a press between 1869 and 1875.

17. Y[ervant] G[omidas] Çark, Türk Devleti Hizmet-inde Ermeniler, 1453 – 1953 (Armenians in the Service of the Turkish State, 1453 – 1953) (Istanbul: Yeni Matbaa, 1953), 250.

18. “Asaduryan, Artin,” in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (En-cyclopaedia of Istanbul), by Reşad Ekrem Koçu et al. (Istanbul: Reşad Ekrem Koçu ve Mehmed Ali Akbay

İstanbul Ansiklopedisi ve Neşriyat Kollektif Şirketi, 1958 – 74), 2:1087; Kevork Pamukciyan, Biyografileri-yle Ermeniler (Armenians and Their Biographies) (Is-tanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2003), 42. Official sources give the date of establishment of this press as 1302 [Hijrī]/1884 – 85. See Salnâme- i Nezâret- i Maarif- i Um-ûmiye (Yearbook of the Ministry of Public Education) (Istanbul: Matbaa- ı Âmire, 1318 [Hijrī/1900]), 922 – 23; Salnâme- i Nezâret- i Maarif- i Umûmiye (Yearbook of the Ministry of Public Education) (Istanbul: Asr Matbaası, 1321 [Hijrī/1903]), 266 – 67.

19. Ahmet İhsan Tokgöz, “Matbaacılıkta bir Hatıra” (“A Souvenir about the Printing Business”), Servet- i Fünûn – Uyanış, no. 2160 – 475 (1938), reprinted in Çapanoğlu, Basın Tarihine Dair Bilgiler ve Hatıralar, 133 – 35.

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ranked fourth between 1908 and 1912, with 208 works. The son of a state functionary, he had worked in government jobs and newspapers before cofounding the Âlem printing house in 1890. Having bought out his partners in 1907, he renamed it after himself and proceeded to import numerous innovative technologies from Europe.20 He was influential in late Ottoman culture as a supporter of the Edebiyat- ı Cedîde (New Literature) movement and owner of the journal Servet- i Fünûn; the latter also played a significant role in the history of Ottoman women: as Zafer Toprak has noted, “Concrete female types, with their thoughts, their feelings, and the full range of their personalities, first showed up in the Servet- i Fünûn novel.”21

M. Brett Wilson recently made the inter-esting point that during its early phases, “the Ottomans intentionally took the capitalism out of printing and thereby undermined its revo-lutionary nature.” The government did so, for example, by prohibiting the production of re-ligious books as well as their importation and trade, thus not only thwarting the entrepreneur-ial efforts of several European printers but also preventing the establishment of local print capi-talism.22 But that was not all. The government also actively discouraged private printing for the simple reason that it cut into the earnings of the Government Printing Office (Tabhâne- i Âmire). Thus an imperial edict issued in 1854 complained that earnings had dropped by more than half between 1852 and 1853 and stated that henceforth no books or documents could be printed without official permission. Presumably unsanctioned printing continued, for another edict issued in 1856 said that certain lithogra-phers had lately appeared and were engaging in printing activities and that this would be per-mitted only on the condition that they present their products to the Ministry of the Official Gazette (Takvimhâne Nezâreti) and pay a cer-

tain fraction of their revenue to the Treasury. The government also attempted to turn idle ca-pacity into profit by urging private publishers to commission the Government Printing Office to print their books: an imperial edict issued in 1840 stated that press officials were often reluc-tant to print books out of fear that they would remain unsold, that many commendable works thus remained unprinted, and that henceforth anyone wishing to publish a book could pay to have it printed by the Government Printing Of-fice, after which it could be sold to the public at any chosen price. This practice is likely to have encouraged private publishing, if not private printing.23

By the turn of the twentieth century, all this was at most a distant memory. The first pri-vate Ottoman press that printed books in Turk-ish (using the relatively new process of lithogra-phy) had been established in Istanbul in 1836, after a century or so of exclusively government- funded printing, by two French cousins named Henri Cayol and Jacques Caillol.24 They were followed by many others, and by the turn of the twentieth century, the number of private printing houses in Istanbul and the provinces had grown considerably. While the fraction of books and pamphlets produced by private print-ers remained relatively steady during the period 1901 – 12, within a few percentage points of 77 percent, in absolute numbers they increased al-most threefold between the periods 1876 – 1907 and 1908 – 12 and more than fourfold between the periods 1901 – 7 and 1908 – 12. This heralded the emergence, despite numerous setbacks, of a dynamic printing sector largely dominated by the profit motive — a development that had wide- ranging consequences in the Ottoman Empire, as it did in other contexts.

In his seminal work Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson famously argued that “the development of print- as- commodity is

20. Tokgöz, Matbuat Hatıralarım, 45 – 51, 251 – 60. A brief history of this press was published and distrib-uted as a supplement to Servet- i Fünûn, no. 1070 (1328 [Rûmî/1912]); it is in part reproduced in this book.

21. Zafer Toprak, “Meşrutiyet’ten Cumhuriyet’e Müstehcen Avam Edebiyatı” (“Obscene Popular Lit-erature from the [Second] Constitutional Period to the Republic”), Tarih ve Toplum, no. 38 (1987): 25.

22. M. Brett Wilson, “The Qur’an after Babel: Qur’an Translation and the Vernacularization of Islam in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2009). I am very grateful to Wilson for the opportunity to read this material in draft form.

23. Server R. İskit, Türkiyede Neşriyat Hareketleri Tari-hine bir Bakış (Aperçu of the History of Publishing Ac-tivities in Turkey) (Istanbul: Devlet Basımevi, 1939), 42, 33.

24. Grégoire Zellich, Notice historique sur la lithogra-phie et sur les origines de son introduction en Turquie (Historical Note on Lithography and the Origins of Its Introduction into Turkey) (Istanbul: Imprimerie A. Zel-lich Fils, 1895), 47. See also Selim Nüzhet Gerçek, Türk Taş Basmacılığı (Turkish Lithography) (Istanbul: Dev-let Basımevi, 1939). Gerçek’s work is largely based on Zellich’s.

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the key to the generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity” — that is, to helping individu-als view themselves as members of a collectiv-ity — and that print capitalism influenced the emergence of national consciousness in three ways: by creating a shared sphere of vernacular communication, by arresting the rapid evolu-tion of language and fixing it in a commonly comprehensible form, and by creating “lan-guages of power,” that is, selecting some dialects over others for the creation of a print language and thereby privileging the groups that spoke them.25 Though the accelerated growth of pri-vate printing in the Ottoman Empire during the Second Constitutional Period can be said to have accomplished each of Anderson’s three functions, thus helping promote the emergence of Turkish national consciousness, it is specifi-cally the creation of “unified fields of exchange and communication” that is most relevant to the issue at hand here.26 More specifically, I would argue that print capitalism acted as a conduit for the diffusion of new ideas about the relation-ship between men and women, including sexual relations, and that in this manner it helped cre-ate new models and norms that, slowly and over a long period of time, came to contribute to the transformation of gender relations in Turkey.

Interestingly, many erotic novels and sto-ries published in the Ottoman Empire during the early twentieth century were subtitled “na-

tional novel” or “national story” — perhaps be-cause they were domestic productions rather than translations or possibly because national-ism was very much in vogue at the time. Not surprisingly, this greatly irritated national-ists offended by sexual content.27 In fact, how-ever, national novels and stories are precisely what these works were, because — accurate or not — they contributed to the construction of a repertoire of shared ideas, aspirations, fanta-sies, and norms that is an essential precondition to self- representation as a nation.

Also of crucial importance is the fact that these developments were “largely unselfcon-scious processes resulting from the explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity.”28 Here Anderson echoes Lucien Febvre and Henri- Jean Martin, who wrote, “One fact must not be lost sight of: the printer and the bookseller worked above all and from the beginning for profit. . . . Like their modern counterparts, 15th- century pub-lishers only financed the kind of book they felt sure would sell enough copies to show a profit in a reasonable time.”29 However, the effects of the will to profit in the Ottoman context differed, at least in part, from that of fifteenth- century Europe. Noting that most printed books were previously well- known texts, Febvre and Martin concluded that European printing popularized established beliefs and thus did not contribute

Figure 3. Letterhead of Alâaddin Matbaası, a modern printing press located in Istanbul, dating from the 1920s. Both the illustration and the list above detailing the various printing techniques employed by the establishment betray a certain exuberance quite representative of the period.

25. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37, 44 – 45.

26. Ibid., 44.

27. See, e.g., [Ayın] Refik Sıdkı [Gür], İnkılâblar Muva-cehesinde Türk İnkılâbı (The Turkish Revolution before [Other] Revolutions) (Istanbul: Yeni Matbaa, 1927), 185.

28. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 45.

29. Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, 249.

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to the spread of new ideas.30 The global con-text in which print capitalism flourished in the Ottoman Empire was that of modernity. That meant that novelty, originality, and change were now the order of the day, and best sellers were likely to be not tried old texts but rather fresh and provocative new ones. Furthermore, the early- twentieth- century Ottoman reading public — and particularly the segment that pur-chased printed books — was much more nar-rowly circumscribed than its sixteenth- century European counterpart: largely urban, relatively educated, and wishing to learn from the West if only in the interest of preventing the empire’s final collapse before the onslaught of Western aggression.

I would argue, therefore, that Ander-son’s “revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism”31 should be interpreted in a broad sense that goes far beyond the linguistic realm, extending to the demonstrably unsurpassed ability of capitalism to inject promiscuously cir-culating ideas, norms, and practices into broad- based cultural formations. This is the reason that print capitalism was an effective conduit not only for new ideas of Turkish nationhood but also for new norms of gender and sexuality in Ottoman society.32

Companionate MarriageToward the end of the nineteenth century, books and periodicals about or oriented to-ward women were published in increasing num-bers in the Ottoman Empire, a trend that rose sharply after the restoration of the constitution in 1908.33 The inexorable dissolution of the em-

pire in a series of military defeats and territo-rial losses, the collapse of traditional lifestyles and of the metanarratives built around them, and the growing influence of Western ideas to-gether with the rise of the West European and North American women’s movements have all been suggested as important factors in their emergence.34

Yet although these factors may well clar-ify the reasons why an increasing number of women — and more than a few men, too — held certain views regarding women’s rights and the necessity to improve the status of women in Ot-toman society, they do not adequately explain the mechanism by which this surge of publica-tions actually came to unfold. I would suggest that this mechanism was precisely print capital-ism. That is not to say that print capitalism was a deus ex machina that created out of whole cloth the writers and readers of these publications or the ideas expounded in them. However, driven by profit and striving to cater to emerging new markets, it was without any doubt the foremost medium through which a certain status group spoke to itself, discussed its options, and for-mulated new courses of action with regard to gender. Figure 4 illustrates the efforts of Otto-man print capitalists to tap the new market of female readers, and perhaps to create reading groups among them. A woman is shown reading a book and is quoted as saying, “Not only do I buy all my books from Kitâbhâne- i Sûdî, I rec-ommend that my friends do so as well, for this publisher is a most serious institution.” To the best of my knowledge, there are no published studies of the Ottoman female reading public

30. Ibid., 249 – 52, 278. That this assertion is not en-tirely true even in the special case of Europe follows from the well- known relationship between the com-mercialization of book printing and the Protestant Reformation. It is estimated, for example, that more than one- third of all German books sold between 1518 and 1525 were by Martin Luther himself. Maurice Gravier, Luther et l’opinion publique: Essai sur la lit-térature satirique et polémique en langue allemande pendant les années décisives de la réforme (1520 – 1530) (Luther and Public Opinion: Essay on the Satyric and Polemical Literature in the German Language during the Decisive Years of the Reformation [1520 – 1530]) (Paris: Montaigne, 1942), cited in Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, 291. See also Elizabeth L. Eisen-stein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Com-munications and Cultural Transformations in Early- Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1979), 1:303 – 450; Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Louise W. Holborn, “Print-ing and the Growth of a Protestant Movement in Germany from 1517 to 1524,” Church History 11 (1942): 133 – 34. It would seem that those new ideas for which the public was ready were indeed disseminated most effectively precisely through the print medium, as printers enthusiastically responded to new trends in popular demand.

31. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 39.

32. For an interesting analysis of a case of gender relations buttressed by print capitalism, see Nancy Reagin, “The Imagined Hausfrau: National Identity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in Imperial Germany,” Journal of Modern History 73 (2001): 54 – 86.

33. On debates surrounding women during the Sec-ond Constitutional Period, see, e.g., Faik Bulut, İttihat ve Terakki’de Milliyetçilik, Din ve Kadın Tartışmaları (Debates on Nationalism, Religion, and Women in the [Committee of ] Union and Progress), 2 vols. ([Is-tanbul]: Su Yayınları, 1999). See particularly the first volume, which contains an interesting selection of articles that appeared at the time in the press. See also Sadık Albayrak, Meşrutiyet İstanbul’unda Kadın ve Sos yal Değişim (Woman and Social Change in Istan-bul during the [Second] Constitutional Period) (Istan-bul: Yeditepe Yayınevi, 2002).

34. Aynur İlyasoğlu and Deniz İnsel, “Kadın Dergileri-nin Evrimi” (“Evolution of Women’s Periodicals”), in Türkiye’de Dergiler, Ansiklopediler (1849 – 1984) (Istan-bul: Gelişim Yayınları, 1984), 163.

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comparable, for example, to the studies of West-ern women readers; advertisements such as this one may, however, provide a starting point for studies of this kind.

One of the principal forms this medium took was women’s magazines, of which a signifi-cant number appeared both before and espe-cially after 1908 — by one accounting, as many as thirty- nine, though some were short- lived.35 Several content analyses and bibliographi-cal studies have appeared to date, affording a reasonably clear picture of the scope of these publications.36 For this reason, I do not dwell on them here. Suffice it to say that like books, they too were produced by private publishers and printed on private presses, notably that of one Seyyid Mehmed Tâhir Bey, a prolific source of books and periodicals on, by, and oriented toward women. Better known as “Baba Tâhir” and owner of the newspapers Malûmat (Infor-mation) and Servet (Fortune), Tâhir Bey was the kind of person who gives entrepreneurs a bad name — reputed to have used his newspapers for blackmail and extortion, routinely informed on fellow journalists, sold favors by exploiting his contacts at the palace, and even manufactured and sold counterfeit imperial medals.37 The output of his press, founded around 1895, was eclectic to the extreme, including an Ottoman translation of P. T. Barnum’s How I Made Mil-lions.38 A private press like this naturally pro-vided a suitable medium for debates on such sensitive topics as gender and sexuality, and Tâhir Bey was not above creating some contro-versy of his own.

Thus, in 1899, a book was published in Istanbul titled Taaddüd- i Zevcât (Polygyny) and

written by Mahmud Esad b. Emin Seydişehrî, legal adviser to the Ministry of Finance, well- known scholar, and a prolific author of books on religion, economics, and the law.39 It was fol-lowed shortly thereafter by another, Taaddüd- i

Figure 4. An advertisement for the publisher Kitâbhâne- i Sûdî, targeting female readers. The text on the front (left- hand) cover reads: “All sorts of works — scientific, literary, social.” On the back cover: “Not only do I buy all my books from Kitâbhâne- i Sûdî, I recommend that my friends do so as well, for this publisher is a most serious institution.” From Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World).

35. Zehra Toska et al., İstanbul Kütüphanelerindeki Eski Harfli Türkçe Kadın Dergileri Bibliyografyası (1869 – 1927) (Bibliography of Turkish- Language Wom-en’s Periodicals in Old [i.e., Arabic] Letters in Istan-bul Libraries [1869 – 1927]) (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1992).

36. İlyasoğlu and İnsel, “Kadın Dergilerinin Evrimi”; Aynur Demirdirek, Osmanlı Kadınlarının Hayat Hakkı Arayışının bir Hikayesi (An Account of Ottoman Wom-en’s Quest for Emancipation) (Ankara: İmge Kitabevi, 1993); Toska et al., Kadın Dergileri Bibliyografyası; Hatice Özen, Tarihsel Süreç İçinde Türk Kadın Gazete ve Dergileri (1868 – 1990) (Turkish Women’s Newspa-pers and Journals in a Historical Context [1868 – 1990]) (Istanbul: Graphis, 1994); Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi (The Ottoman Women’s Movement) (Is-

tanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1994), which focuses on the periodical Kadınlar Dünyası; Vuslat Devrim Altınöz, “The Ottoman Women’s Movement: Women’s Press, Magazines, Journals, and Newspapers from 1875 to 1923” (MA thesis, University of Miami, 2003); Ayfer Karakaya- Stump, “Debating Progress in a ‘Serious Newspaper for Muslim Women’: The Periodical Kadın of the Post- revolutionary Salonica, 1908 – 1909,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 30, no. 2 (2003): 155 – 81; Yıldız Akpolat, Sosyoloji Araştırmaları: Osmanlı’da Kadın Dergileri ve Sosyoloji Dergileri (Stud-ies in Sociology: Women’s and Sociology Journals in the Ottoman Empire) ([İstanbul]: Fenomen Yayıncılık, [2004]), which focuses on Kadın, Süs, and Mahâsin; Fatma Kılıç, “Kadın: A Young Turk Magazine in the Sec-ond Constitutional Period (1908 – 1909)” (MA thesis,

Boğaziçi University, 2005); Fatma Kılıç Denman, İkinci Meşrutiyet Döneminde bir Jön Türk Dergisi: “Kadın” (A Young Turk Magazine in the Second Constitutional Pe-riod: Kadın) (Istanbul: Libra Yayıncılık, 2010).

37. Mahmud, Hafiyelerin Listesi (List of the Secret Agents) (n.p., n.d.), 2:65 – 67. Baba Tâhir is mentioned in the memoirs of many of his contemporaries, nota-bly Ahmed Rasim and Tokgöz. See also Hatice Aynur, “Malûmatçı Baba Tâhir” (“Baba Tâhir, [Publisher] of Malûmat”), Toplumsal Tarih, no. 128 (2004): 62 – 65.

38. Phineas Taylor Barnum, Barnum’un Milyonları, trans. M. Nuri Şeyda (Istanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaası, 1318 [Hijrī/1900]).

39. Mahmud Esad, Taaddüd- i Zevcât (Polygyny) (Is-tanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaası, 1316 [Hijrī/1899]).

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Zevcât: Zeyl (Polygyny: Addendum), this one under the names of both Mahmud Esad and Fatma Aliye Hanım — the highly literate and very pro-lific daughter of the prominent statesman, histo-rian, and jurist Ahmed Cevdet Pasha.40 The first book was an impassioned defense of polygyny as true to both divine and natural law. The second contained not so much an argument against po-lygyny as a critique by Fatma Aliye of some of the former’s arguments in favor of it. As a staunch defender of Islam against its detractors, she could hardly have argued against something ex-plicitly licensed in the Qur’an; however, under the guise of searching for effective arguments that would convince her Christian interlocutors, she presented an articulate critique of Mahmud Esad’s analysis. For example, he had argued that “the only purpose of marriage is the pro-duction of progeny and the preservation of the species,” rather than “a temporary and perhaps momentary lustful pleasure.”41 Therefore he wrote, since a woman cannot actualize a man’s perpetually available reproductive potential while she is pregnant, nursing, or menstruating, it is only logical that a husband should turn dur-ing such periods to another wife. Furthermore, Mahmud Esad dismissed the claim that the man bears the responsibility of taking care of his wife during and after pregnancy, and of his infant child, inexplicably relegating that issue to the “populous” — that is, developed — coun-tries. In response, Fatma Aliye wrote:

If the only issue is reproduction and the preser-vation of the species, is there any need for mar-riage? [You] state that the male’s only purpose in this world is in the service of reproduction,

and that woman is inoperative in this regard for long periods of time; that the need for the hus-band to work in order to feed his family while his wife is busy with child care arises only in the populous countries; and that your exalted wish is to speak only of the necessities imposed by na-ture. But where is this world of natural necessi-ties? Does it rain bread there, without the need to work for it?42

Such a public debate could not have occurred in the government- controlled press. Tâhir Bey, however, certainly had a vested interest in public debate if only because controversy sold books. His ignominious career strongly suggests that it was the profit motive and not a commitment to the emancipation of women that led him to provide Fatma Aliye Hanım with a forum to voice her critique of polygyny. Be that as it may, a forum was provided her, and she made elo-quent use of it.

Another important work by Fatma Aliye Hanım was Nisvân- ı İslâm (Women of Islam), pub-lished in 1892.43 It was written in the form of three dialogues with foreign visitors, of which the first focused on concubinage and Islam, the second on polygyny and veiling, and the third on attire and fashion, the respective merits of local and imported materials (including a not- so- subtle critique of conspicuous consump-tion), and divorce. Fatma Aliye stressed the importance of love and companionship in mar-riage — not only in theory, but indeed as a real-ity. Though she ostensibly addressed herself to foreigners, to European women whose misinfor-mation about Ottoman society she eloquently strove to dispel, her real target was clearly the

40. Fatma Aliye and Mahmud Esad, Taaddüd- i Zevcât: Zeyl (Polygyny: Addendum) ( Istanbul: Tahir Bey Matbaası, 1316 [Hijrī/1899]). On Fatma Aliye, see also Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Fatma Aliye Hanım, yahud Bir Muharrire- i Osmaniye’nin Neş’eti (Fatma Aliye Hanım, or the Emergence of an Ottoman Woman Writer) (Istanbul: Kırk Anbar Matbaası, 1311 [Hijrī/1893]); Mübeccel Kızıltan, Fatma Aliye Hanım: Yaşamı, Sanatı, Yapıtları ve “Nisvan- ı İslam” (Fatma Aliye Hanım: Her Life, Art, Works, and “Nisvân- ı İslâm”) (Istanbul: Mutlu Yayıncılık, 1993).

41. Mahmud Esad, Taaddüd- i Zevcât, 18.

42. Fatma Aliye and Mahmud Esad, Taaddüd- i Zevcât: Zeyl, 15 – 16.

43. Fatma Aliye, Nisvân- ı İslâm: Bazı Âdât- ı İslâmiye Hakkında Üç Muhavereyi Hâvidir (Women of Islam: Contains Three Conversations on Certain Islamic Cus-

toms) (Istanbul: [Tercüman- ı Hakikat Matbaası], 1309 [Hijrī/1892]). Nisvân- ı İslâm was twice translated into French: Alihé Hanoum, Les musulmanes con-temporaines: Trois conférences (Contemporary Mus-lim Women: Three Debates), trans. Nazimé- Roukié (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1894); and Fathma- Alié, Nisvan- i- Islam: Les femmes musulmanes (“Nisvân- ı İslâm”: Muslim Women), trans. Olga de Lébédeff [also known as Madame Gülnar, Ol’ga Sergeevna Le-bedeva] (Paris: Le journal l’Orient, [1896]). Fatma Ali-ye’s personal papers suggest that the book may have also been translated into English and published in the United States (Kızıltan, Fatma Aliye Hanım, 59), but I have found no evidence of it. It is worth noting that Olga de Lébédeff knew well both Fatma Aliye and her publisher and promoter Ahmed Midhat Efendi. The paper she presented at the Twelfth Congress of Orientalists was published as De l’émancipation de la

femme musulmane (On the Emancipation of the Mus-lim Woman) (Lisieux, France: Morière, 1899). It was subsequently translated into Turkish as Müslimeler Hürriyeti: İslâm Kızının Evvelki ve Şimdiki Hâli (The Liberation of Muslim [Women]: The Past and Present State of the Muslim Girl), trans. Kaya Nuri (Istanbul: Kader Matbaası, 1335 [Rûmî/1919]). On Madame Gül-nar, see also Johann Strauss, “Ol’ga Lebedeva (Gülnar Hanım) and Her Translations into Ottoman Turkish,” in Arts, Women, and Scholars: Studies in Ottoman So-ciety and Culture; Festschrift Hans Georg Majer, by Sabine Prätor and Christoph K. Neumann (Istanbul: Simurg, 2002), 1:287 – 314; Carter Vaughn Findley, “An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gülnar, 1889,” American Historical Review, vol. 103 (1998): 15 – 49.

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domestic public. This is evidenced not only by the fact that the text was first serialized in Turkish in the popular newspaper Tercüman- ı Hakikat (Interpreter of the Truth) and then pub-lished in book form by the same press but also by the introduction in which she bemoaned the ignorance of her fellow Ottomans in matters pertaining to their own culture and traditions.

The newspaper Tercüman- ı Hakikat was owned by an archetypical print capitalist, Ahmed Midhat Efendi.44 An interesting (and prodigiously prolific) late Ottoman intellec-tual, he was a correspondent and impassioned promoter of Fatma Aliye and one of the first Ottomans to write consistently about gender.45 In novels, short stories, and opinion pieces, he repeatedly called for measures to improve the condition of Ottoman women. The settings of some of his appeals, moreover, are interesting in their own right. As early as 1870, as a young man of twenty- six, he published an enigmatic epis-tolary novella titled Felsefe- i Zenân (Philosophy of Women), which reads very much like a transpo-sition of Sappho’s Fragment 31 — the well- known Poem of Jealousy — to his own time and place.46 The story ends with a twist, in which the hero-ine overcomes her grief and goes back to a life of reading and meditation, unburdened by po-tentially constraining masculine attachments.

Mihran [Nakkaşyan] Efendi was another prominent late- nineteenth- century publisher, a highly capable entrepreneur who ran the news-paper Sabah (Morning).47 In 1879 he printed the book Kadınlar (Women) by the great ency-clopedist and lexicographer Şemseddin Sâmi [Fraşerî] Bey.48 This latter’s approach was any-thing but radical: invoking both natural and di-vine law, he took as given many existing gender

relations, accepting as fact that child care was a woman’s responsibility, that women’s constitu-tional weakness and emotional nature rendered them unsuitable for certain professions (though more suitable than men for others), and that the morality of a society is a reflection of the moral-ity of its women. Yet he also argued that women should not be denied education, not only be-cause (as is usually argued) they are responsi-ble for the upbringing of the next generation but also because the mind is a divine gift that should be cultivated, and that women should be permitted to work outside the home because depriving humanity of one- half of its produc-tive power was unjustifiable. Moreover, he criti-cally discussed polygamy, veiling, divorce, and concubinage, offering a fairly enlightened per-spective on these controversial institutions. He also argued in favor of companionate marriage. Qualifying Islam — and not entirely without jus-tification — as “a religion whose Prophet falls in love and sanctifies love by giving those who do the same the good tidings that they are mar-tyrs for the Faith,” he argued for the equality of spouses:

The formation of family and society in the world requires that men and women live in partnership (iştirak) and companionship; for this reason, it is essential that there exist equality between men and women. . . . Man’s superiority must only be in the sense that his vote carries more influence when it comes to mutual consultation (meşveret). There must not be, between spouses, the dif-ference between a superior and a subordinate; for such a difference would necessarily cause inequality, and there cannot be companionship without equality. . . . One does not find only food, drink, and clothing within the family; in addi-tion to those needs, which can also be met else-

44. On Ahmed Midhat Efendi, see, e.g., Mustafa Baydar, Ahmet Mithat Efendi: Hayatı, Sanatı, Eser-leri (Ahmed Midhat Efendi: His Life, Art, and Works) (Istanbul: Varlık Yayınevi, 1954); Münir Süleyman Çapanoğlu, İdeal Gazeteci, Efendi Babamız Ahmet Mithat (The Ideal Journalist, Our Esteemed Fa-ther Ahmed Midhat) (Istanbul: Gazeteciler Cemi-yeti Yayınları, 1964); Orhan Okay, Batı Medeniyeti Karşısında Ahmed Midhat Efendi (Ahmed Midhat Efendi before Western Civilization) (Ankara: Atatürk Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1975); and Himmet Uç, Ahmet Mithat’ın San’at ve Edebiyatı (The Art and Literature of Ahmed Midhat) (Ankara: H. Uç, 2000).

45. See, e.g., A. Holly Shissler, “The Harem as the Seat of Middle- Class Industry and Morality: True Love, Prostitution, and Self- Interest as Understood in Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi and Just Seventeen,” in Harem Histories: Envisioned Places and Living Spaces, ed. Marilyn Booth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

46. Ahmed Midhat, Felsefe- i Zenân (Women’s Philos-ophy) (Istanbul: Muharririn Zâtına Mahsûs Matbaa, 1287 [Hijrī/1870]). A second edition was printed by Kırk Anbar Matbaası in 1292 [Hijrī/1875]. Both presses were owned by the author himself.

47. On Mihran Nakkaşyan, see Enis Tahsin Nil, “‘Sabahçı’ Mihran Efendi” (“Mihran Efendi, [Pub-lisher] of Sabah”), Müteferrika, no. 13 (1998): 201 – 16; Pamukciyan, Biyografileriyle Ermeniler, 316; Strauss, “Printing and Publishing,” 226, 233.

48. Ş[emseddin] Sâmi [Fraşerî], Kadınlar (Women) (Is-tanbul: Mihran Matbaası, 1296 [Hijrī/1879]). A second edition appeared in 1311 [Hijrī/1894]. See also İrfan Karakoç, “Şemseddin Sami ve Kadın” (“Şemseddin Sâmi and Woman”), Tarih ve Toplum, no. 183 (1999): 61 – 65. On Şemseddin Sâmi, see, e.g., Dağlı Oğlu Himet Turhan, Şemsettin Sami Bey: Hayatı ve Eserleri (Şemseddin Sâmi Bey: His Life and Works) (Istanbul: Resimli Ay Matbaası, 1934); and Agâh Sırrı Levend, Şemsettin Sami (Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 1969).

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where, one also finds love and compassion. . . . One can only pity the poor man who travels on this earthly journey without a lover, a friend, all alone; who suffers troubles, afflictions, and dif-ficulties by himself; who has to taste pleasures and delights alone; who has no one to offer him partnership of the heart whether in pleasure or in grief, in happiness or in sorrow. . . . No matter how knowledgeable, wealthy, and well- respected a man may be, can he find happiness with an un-educated, ignorant wife? And if he fails to find the happiness he seeks within his family, is it pos-sible for him to find happiness outside of it? 49

In the years that followed, a number of other prescriptive books oriented toward a fe-male reading public came to market. For ex-ample, Nâzım [İçsel] wrote a book titled İslâm Hanımları ve Âlem- i İslâmiyette Hayât- ı Aile (Muslim Ladies and Family Life in the Muslim World), which appeared in 1901 as the first volume of the “Fam-ily Library” published by Kütübhâne- i Cihan.50 The book contained religious lessons for women; discussed women’s health, education, and mar-riage; and also provided samples of the works of prominent female writers and poets. Mihran [Mardirosyan Acun] Efendi, the publisher, wrote a two- page preface in which he made clear the commercial rationale for the book:

Though our Ottoman Library is adorned with authors of every category, works proper to women are not present in quantities commensu-rate with existing demand. For this reason, I was contemplating the creation of a new library that would publish works to benefit girls and women, when the writer Nâzım Bey approached me for a competitive bid for the printing and publication of the present book. I considered his application an opportunity to realize my humble wish and explained this to him, whereupon we resolved to establish a new library.51

Before this book, Nâzım Bey had written a num-ber of articles in Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete (News-paper for Ladies) on such topics as “Women,” “The Duties of Women,” and “The Turkish Woman and Family Life among the Turks,” as well as another book, İslâm Hanımlarına Mahsûs Fennî ve Ahlâkî Mektublar (Scientific and Moral Let-ters for Muslim Ladies), this one produced by the militant publisher Tüccarzâde İbrâhim Hilmi’s [Çığıraçan] Kütübhâne- i İslâm ve Askerî.52 As Nâzım Bey’s emphasis on family, duty, moral-ity, religion, and nationality might suggest, he was concerned not with radically changing the status of women but with making incremental improvements to it.

All in all, close to 150 editions of nonfic-tion books explicitly concerned with women were published between 1875 and 1907, repre-senting somewhat fewer distinct titles. Many were schoolbooks, and the overwhelming majority were printed at private presses, par-ticularly after 1900. The rate at which books oriented toward women were published more or less doubled after the restoration of the constitution in 1908. Moreover, while books of a religious or prescriptive nature decreased in number, those concerned with women’s health (including sexuality) and work, and those that engaged in a protofeminist questioning of tra-ditional gender relations, increased markedly. Several books on “The Woman Question” ap-peared soon after the constitution was restored, including some that explicitly dealt with femi-nism: İslâmiyette Feminizm, yahud Âlem- i Nisvânda Müsâvât- ı Tamme (Feminism in Islam, or Total Equality in the World of Women) by Halil Hâmid, Feminizm: Âlem- i Nisvân (Feminism: The World of Women) by Bahâ Tevfik, and an Ottoman trans-lation of Tahrir al- Mar’ah (Liberation of Women) by the Turko- Egyptian feminist Qasim Amin.53

49. Şemseddin Sâmi, Kadınlar, 55, 52 – 53, 18 – 19, 21. It is noteworthy that the words used here for “partner-ship” and “mutual consultation” both became highly politicized in subsequent years.

50. Nâzım [ İçsel] , İslâm Hanımları ve Âlem- i İslâmiyette Hayât- ı Aile (Muslim Ladies and Family Life in the Muslim World) (Istanbul: A[rtin] Asaduryan Şirket- i Mürettibiye Matbaası, 1318 [Hijrī/1901]). On Mihran Mardirosyan Acun, see T’ēotig, Dib u Dar, 123; and Strauss, “Printing and Publishing,” 242.

51. Mihran [Mardirosyan Acun], “Publisher’s Preface,” in Nâzım [İçsel], İslâm Hanımları.

52. Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete, nos. 78 – 91 (1314 [Hijrī/1896]) . Nâzım [İçsel] , İslâm Hanımlarına Mahsûs Fennî ve Ahlâkî Mektublar (Scientific and Moral Letters for Muslim Ladies) (Istanbul: A[rtin] A[saduryan] Şirket- i Mürettibiye Matbaası, 1316 [Hijrī/1899]). On the publisher Tüccarzâde İbrâhim Hilmi, see Başak Ocak, Bir Yayıncının Portresi: Tücca-rzâde İbrahim Hilmi Çığıraçan (Portrait of a Publisher: Tüccarzâde İbrahim Hilmi Çığıraçan) (Istanbul: Müt-eferrika Yayınları, 2003).

53. Halil Hâmid, İslâmiyette Feminizm, yahud Âlem- i Nisvânda Müsâvât- ı Tamme (Feminism in Islam, or Total Equality in the World of Women) (Istanbul: Ke-

teon Bedrosyan Matbaası, 1326 [Rûmî/1910]); Bahâ Tevfik, Feminizm: Âlem- i Nisvân (Feminism: The World of Women) (Istanbul: Müşterekü’l- Menfaa Osmanlı Şirketi Matbaası, n.d.). Though the latter is undated, the earliest dated book printed at Müşterekü’l- Menfaa Osmanlı Şirketi Matbaası bears the date 1909, suggesting that Feminizm: Âlem- i Nisvân was almost certainly published after the restoration of the constitution. Kasım Emin, Hürriyet- i Nisvan (The Liberation of Women), trans. Zeki Magamez (Istan-bul: Kütübhâne- i İslâm ve Askerî, printed by Matbaa- ı Hayriye ve Şürekâsı, 1329 [Rûmî/1913]). For an English translation of this work, see Qasim Amin, The Libera-tion of Women and the New Woman: Two Documents

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İslâmiyette Feminizm was the first volume of a “Women’s Rights Library,” of which the third volume, Dünki, Bugünki, Yarınki Kadın (Woman Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow), was also written by Halil Hâmid.54 Somewhat gushing and subjec-tive, it began with a review of the history of women’s status in various societies, working its way from prehistory to modern times, and proceeded to tackle the controversial topics of the day, including universal suffrage, women’s education, veiling, and equal rights. As for Bahâ Tevfik’s Feminizm: Âlem- i Nisvân, it was composed of an Ottoman translation of Odette Laguerre’s pamphlet Qu’est- ce que le féminisme? (What Is Feminism?), followed by an appendix titled “İslâmiyet ve Feminizm” (“Islam and Feminism”) by Bahâ Tevfik himself.55 There it was argued that while Judaism and Christian-ity are oppressive of women because they bear the traces of Greco- Roman culture, Islam bet-ter captures the true spirit of the Orient, which values women and advocates equality between the sexes. The reason Ottoman women were not free, according to the essay, was that Arabs and Turks had veered away from true Islam, which, it claimed, “is feminism.”56

It is noteworthy that both Halil Hâmid and Bahâ Tevfik included letters from promi-nent detractors at the beginning of their books. The former printed a letter from Köprülüzâde Mehmed Fuad Bey, at the time an up- and- coming intellectual and poet endowed with a most illustrious family name (and later a lead-ing historian, politician, and foreign minister),

while Bahâ Tevfik Bey went one step further and printed a long and rather condescending letter from Besarya Efendi, a member of the Ottoman Senate (Meclis- i Âyân). Tellingly, Besarya Efen-di’s letter was placed under the heading “About the Environment.”57 Neither letter saw any merit whatsoever in feminism, Fuad Bey going as far as to write, “In my opinion, trying to posit and establish equality between man and woman in any shape or form is absurd and futile. For there exists, between the two sexes, such a deep chasm of differences and conflicts in terms of both their biological apparatuses and their spiritual makeups, that even the most extreme feminists who support absolute equality, attrib-uting no importance to this lack of equality dic-tated by nature, cannot deny it.”58 While it was customary to print letters of support (takriz) at the beginning of Ottoman books, the fact that such highly critical letters were included here (along with some favorable ones) suggests that controversy was actively sought. Then, as now, controversy sold books, and books that sell well enter many people’s lives, sometimes, at least, using the opportunity to change them.

Other notable books on women published soon after the restoration of the constitution include Vazife ve Mes’uliyet, Üçüncü Cüz’: Kadın (Duty and Responsibility, pt. 3, Woman) by Ahmed Rıza Bey, Bizde Kadın (Women in Our Society) by Ahmed Cevad [Emre], and Kadınlarımız (Our Women) by Celâl Nûri [İleri], all three leading Young Turk ideologues.59

Celâl Nûri Bey, a prominent late Otto-

in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2001). For a (perhaps slightly too harsh) cri-tique, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 144 – 68.

54. Halil Hâmid, Dünki, Bugünki, Yarınki Kadın (Woman Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow) (Istanbul: Necm- i İstikbal Matbaası, 1334 [Rûmî/1918]).

55. Odette Laguerre, Qu’est- ce que le féminisme? (What Is Feminism?) (Lyon: Société d’Éducation et d’Action Féministes, 1905). Although this volume is labeled “third edition,” I have been unable to locate earlier editions. The French Union Catalogue lists only the Bibliothèque nationale de France copy, which is also the third edition.

56. Bahâ Tevfik, Feminizm: Âlem- i Nisvân, 85; empha-sis added. It is worth noting that these arguments pose a bit of a paradox, as Bahâ Tevfik Bey was a ma-terialist and a founder of the Ottoman Socialist Party.

According to Şükrü Hanioğlu, this is the only work where he adopted an Islamic viewpoint, “employing Qur’an and hadith literature in order to blunt attacks from the ulema.” Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Blueprints for a Future Society: Late Ottoman Materialists on Science, Religion, and Art,” in Özdalga, Late Ottoman Society, 70. On Bahâ Tevfik, see also Mehmet Akgün, Matery-alizmin Türkiye’ye Girişi ve İlk Etkileri (The Penetra-tion of Materialism into Turkey and Its Earliest Influ-ences) (Ankara: Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1988), 235 – 80; Rıza Bağcı, Baha Tevfik’in Hayatı, Edebi ve Felsefi Eserleri Üzerinde bir Araştırma (A Study on Bahâ Tevfik’s Life and His Literary and Philosophical Works) (Izmir: Kaynak Yayınları, 1996). Note also that views similar to Bahâ Tevfik’s ideas on the receptiv-ity of “true” Islam to feminism continue to be articu-lated by a number of Muslim feminists today. While many of the claims on which such arguments are based are factually true, there is a fundamental(ist) flaw in the mode of argumentation, which is that it assumes the possibility of recovering a religion in the

abstract, without reference to many centuries of ex-egesis and practice.

57. Bahâ Tevfik, Feminizm: Âlem- i Nisvân, 3 – 14.

58. Köprülüzâde Mehmed Fuad, “Letter,” in Müsâvât- ı Tamme (Total Equality), by Halil Hâmid, 2nd ed. (Is-tanbul : Sühûlet Kütübhânesi, Leon Lûtfi, 1328 [Rûmî/1912]), 14.

59. Ahmed Rıza, Vazife ve Mes’uliyet, Üçüncü Cüz’: Kadın (Duty and Responsibility, pt. 3, Woman) (Paris: n.p., [1324 (Rûmî/1908)]); Ahmed Cevad [Emre] , Bizde Kadın (Women in Our Society ) ( Istanbul : Kader Matbaası, 1328 [Rûmî/1912]); Celâl Nûri [İleri], Kadınlarımız (Our Women) ( Istanbul: Matbaa- ı İctihad, 1331 [Hijrī /1913]). It is also possible that Ahmed Rıza’s booklet appeared shortly before the restoration of the constitution, since he returned from exile soon thereafter. In any case, it was printed in Paris and therefore technically not produced by Ot-toman print capitalism.

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man and early republican intellectual, was a Westernizer and materialist but chose (perhaps for tactical reasons) to adopt the position of Is-lamic reformism in this book. Like many of his contemporaries, he argued in Kadınlarımız that the miserable state in which Ottoman women found themselves was due not to Islam but to the abandonment of Islamic principles and that the door remained wide open for the institution of reforms under the leadership of the sultan and caliph. He focused on many of the usual topics, including polygamy and divorce, spatial segregation and veiling, concubinage and pros-titution, and companionate marriage. For ex-ample, he wrote that in the past,

it was believed that the purpose of marriage was to experience the utmost [bodily] pleasure. The primary criterion in choosing a wife was her beauty. For this reason, little attention was given to education, homemaking, knowledge, or the ability to educate children. The most beautiful, most vivacious, most attractive and coquettish woman would be taken for a bride. This is why the poor Circassian and Georgian nations brought up their daughters to be the most competent mistresses. Often, if not gener-ally, women were bought for money. Many of us have mothers or grandmothers purchased like merchandise for a hundred, two hundred, or five hundred liras.60

Elsewhere, Celâl Nûri complained about the custom of arranged marriages, saying that hus-band and wife do not have the opportunity to get to know each other and verify that they are compatible. He followed his critique with a very colorful description of the proceedings lead-ing to an arranged marriage that is well worth reading. Again, it was the lack of spiritual com-munion between men and women that Celâl Nûri bemoaned, as much as the roadblocks that prevented women from acquiring an education and becoming fully functional members of soci-ety and polity.

In many ways, Ahmed Cevad Bey’s book is more interesting, even if quite short.61 Though better known nowadays for his contributions to

linguistics (and for his able translations from classical Greek), Bizde Kadın shows him to have thought deeply and intelligently about gender as well. His analysis is much more sophisticated than those of most of his feminist contempo-raries: where, for example, Halil Hâmid pro-vided a sentimental example of “putting women on a pedestal,” Ahmed Cevad dispassionately explored the role of patriarchy (a term he ex-plicitly used, together with its Ottoman equiv-alent, übüvviyet) in shaping gender relations historically and in his own time. His devastat-ing critique of spatial segregation by gender in both the urban setting of Istanbul and the rus-tic excursion spots that surrounded it deserves to be much better known today. The resulting homosociality of Ottoman life, he argued, has deprived men and women of each other’s spiri-tual support and companionship, resulting in a state where

in order to enter men’s minds, hearts, and con-versation, women have to be more or less pretty, more or less elegant, more or less coquettish. But those who fit this description can only in-terest men from the standpoint of animal lust, of temporary love without warmth, of procur-ing a liaison, a shameful relationship without future. . . . [Women] seek friendship, affection, love from you, a sincere and spiritual partner-ship; but all that flows in your veins is a lustful agitation.62

Ahmed Cevad went on to say that homosocial-ity had led to “unnatural love,” which I take to mean not homosexuality between consenting adults but rather sexual relations between men and young boys. In his own time, he wrote, this had abated somewhat, but at the expense of an increase in prostitution, as Muslim women increasingly followed the lead of the Frankish demimonde of Beyoğlu (Pera) in an effort to re-gain the attention of men.

Ahmed Cevad Bey’s assertion ties in well with another book published during the Second Constitutional Period, Türk Kadınlığının Tered-disi, yahud Karılaşmak (The Degeneration of Turk-

60. Celâl Nûri, Kadınlarımız, 130 – 31. 61. For more details, see İsmail Doğan, Bizde Kadın: Ahmet Cevat’ın Aynı Adlı Eseri Üzerine bir Değerlendirme (Women in Our Society: An Assessment of Ahmed Cevad’s Work of the Same Name) (Istanbul: Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı Yayınları, 2003).

62. Ahmed Cevad, Bizde Kadın, 4 – 5, 11.

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ish Womanhood, or “Femme- ization”) by Salâhad-din Âsım.63 The focus of this intriguing book was the process whereby women are deprived of social agency and reduced to mere sexual objects, a process for which the author coined the “sociological term” karılaşmak, or “femme- ization,” explaining that it was intended to con-vey an excess of stereotypically feminine traits. It is important to note that what Salâhaddin Âsım did here was to construct a straw man, which he then proceeded to beat to death. The work of a great many contemporary historians has shown unambiguously that secluded Muslim women could nevertheless participate in social, economic, and political activities and that the suggestion that seclusion necessarily deprived women of agency and societal functionality is without foundation. Still, Salâhaddin Âsım’s book is an interesting, if not typical, assessment of the state of Ottoman women around the turn of the twentieth century.

While most of the works discussed earlier saw Islam as fundamentally favorable to wom-en’s equality, Salâhaddin Âsım wrote from a Turkist (racialist- nationalist) point of view, bit-terly attacking religion as the very root of the problem.64 Pre- Islamic Turkish women had been honored and respected and often assumed the leadership of their clans, he said, whereas under Islam, Ottoman women had become nothing but “femmes,” deprived of active participation in society and valued only as objects of male lust. The principal cause of femme- ization, ac-cording to him, was veiling and segregation. As a result of this practice, men and women grew up in separate and homosocial environments, robbed of each other’s company and therefore poorly socialized toward the opposite sex. This,

he wrote, was at the root not only of men’s ob-jectification of women but also of such social “evils” as masturbation and lesbianism, not to mention the sexual abuse of young boys not only by men but by women as well. He attacked popular literature as encouraging young girls to sexual debauchery, railed against concubi-nage, and qualified the polygamous household as nothing more than “a brothel catering to a single client.”65

EroticismIn the immediate aftermath of the restoration of the constitution, according to İskit, Ottoman publishers shook off the yoke of years of increas-ingly harsh Hamidian censorship by engaging in a spontaneous flare of chaotic publishing:

The press was exuberant. Every other person was starting a newspaper. This was the expres-sion of people thirsting for freedom, of grudges resulting from accumulations of suffering, even of intensified ambitions that overflowed upon suddenly finding favorable conditions. It was unbridled and unchecked.

Not only had the practice of submitting all material to prepublication control by the censors vanished spontaneously, but no post-publication punishment was forthcoming either, because there was no government. This was a period of unlimited freedom of the press, which went beyond freedom and into anarchy.66

The absolute liberty of the first few months did not last, however. Some measures were passed to reestablish censorship after the attempted counterrevolution known as the Thirty- first of March Incident (31 March 1325 Rûmî/13 April 1909) and more after the so- called Sublime Porte Putsch of 23 January 1913.67

63. Salâhaddin Âsım, Türk Kadınlığının Tereddisi, yahud Karılaşmak (The Degeneration of Turkish Wom-anhood, or “Femme- ization” ) (Istanbul: Türk Yurdu Kütübhânesi, printed by Resimli Kitab Matbaası, n.d.). Note that though this book is undated, the earliest dated book printed at the Resimli Kitab Matbaası bears the date 1912, strongly suggesting that this book was published after the restoration of the constitution.

64. On Turkist views about women during the Sec-ond Constitutional Period, see Albayrak, Meşrutiyet İstanbul’unda Kadın ve Sosyal Değişim, 283 – 357. Surprisingly, however, Albayrak does not mention Salâhaddin Âsım at all.

65. Salâhaddin Âsım, Türk Kadınlığının Tereddisi, es-pecially 51 – 66, 89 – 92, 132 – 42. Needless to say, mar-riage does not have to be polygamous to be likened to prostitution, as critics from Charles Fourier through Emma Goldman to Angela Carter have pointed out. Friedrich Engels famously said as much: “Marriage of convenience turns often enough into the crass-est prostitution — sometimes of both partners, but far more commonly of the woman, who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piece- work as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.” Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Mor-gan, ed. Eleanor Burke Leacock (New York: Interna-tional Publishers, 1972), 134.

66. İskit, Türkiyede Matbuat İdareleri ve Politikaları, 143.

67. On censorship during the Second Constitutional Period, see, e.g., ibid., 139 – 201.

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In particular, the measures adopted in February 1913 included a change to article 20 of the Press Law of 1909, which concerned the publication of material “contrary to common decency or in violation of public morality.” While the original article referred only to news-papers and periodicals, the new version enu-merated “books and articles and pictures.”68 This very telling change had been occasioned by a sudden explosion of erotic publication, in which both homegrown texts and translations from foreign languages (particularly French) had flooded the market.69

To be sure, erotic works had existed be-fore; many works in Ottoman had been partly or fully translated from Arabic or Persian sources, themselves owing much to Indian originals, with translators freely revising the originals, adding and subtracting at will.70 These works generally regarded sexual fulfillment as equally the do-main of women and men and viewed sexuality as healthy and good, if enjoyed in moderation. Their function was to teach readers how to make the sexual “system” work as well as pos-sible, for the sake of their personal fulfillment and that of their partner, and also as a means of paying homage to God’s creation. The pres-ence of eminent mainstream scholars among the authors and translators of these books, and the fact that many were commissioned by and/or presented to imperial patrons, suggest that these early works of erotica were not forbidden or clandestine. However, it is also true that in a manuscript- centric society, erotic literature was necessarily limited and reached a relatively small audience — though there is evidence of

the practice of lending and renting out manu-scripts. In addition to books, a good deal of orally transmitted erotica managed to reach a much broader audience, but oral transmission meant that it changed rapidly as it spread across the population.

The rise of printing on the one hand fixed and stabilized erotic literature and on the other made it accessible to a public larger than ever be-fore. At the same time, printed erotica was more vulnerable to government intervention and was sometimes suppressed by secular or religious authorities. Thus, for example, Enderunlu Fâzıl Bey’s Zenânnâme (Book of Women), first printed in 1837, was banned by the Ottoman government, though not because of its erotic content (which included hints of lesbianism at a public bath) but rather on account of its declared opposition to the institution of marriage.71 The 1913 amend-ment to the Press Law mentioned earlier was an institutionalization of such controls prompted by the recognition that erotic printing had fi-nally come of age.

Commentators widely separated across the political spectrum have attributed the surge of erotic publication during the Second Constitu-tional Period to the “moral decadence” that sup-posedly accompanied the empire’s collapse and have causally linked it to a rise in prostitution and other social problems.72 But the notion of “moral decadence” is too obviously value laden to be of scholarly use, and besides, the connec-tions between erotic publication and various societal ills remain to be substantiated, as does the very claim that such problems significantly worsened during the period in question: decline

68. İskit, Türkiyede Neşriyat Hareketleri Tarihine bir Bakış, 100.

69. It is, of course, not always easy to determine whether a particular book is a translation or a do-mestic production, even in more recent works. See Müge Işıklar Koçak, “Problematizing Translated Pop-ular Texts on Women’s Sexuality: A New Perspective on the Modernization Project in Turkey from 1931 to 1959,” (PhD diss., Boğaziçi University, 2007).

70. On eroticism in the Ottoman context, see İrvin Cemil Schick, “Representation of Gender and Sexual-ity in Ottoman and Turkish Erotic Literature,” Turkish Studies Association Journal 28, nos. 1 – 2 (2004 [2008]): 81 – 103; and Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Chang-ing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500 – 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). On Arabic sources, see, e.g., J. C[hristoph]

Bürgel, “Love, Lust, and Longing: Eroticism in Early Islam as Reflected in Literary Sources,” in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi al- Sayyid Marsot (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1979), 81 – 117; Abdel-wahab Bouhdiba, La sexualité en Islam (Sexuality in Islam) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 171 – 93; Edgard Weber, Imaginaire arabe et contes éro-tiques (The Arab Imaginary and Erotic Tales) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990); Erdmute Heller and Hassouna Mosbahi, Hinter den Schleiern des Islam: Erotik und Sexualität in der arabischen Kultur (Behind the Veil of Islam: Eroticism and Sexuality in Arab Culture) (Mu-nich: C. H. Beck, 1993); Lorenzo Declich, “L’Erotologia araba: profilo bibliografico” (“Arab Eroticism: Biblio-graphic Sketch”), Rivista degli Studi Orientali, no. 68 (1994 – 95): 249 – 65; and Everett K. Rowson, “Arabic: Middle Ages to Nineteenth Century,” Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, ed. Gaëtan Brulotte and John Phil-

lips (London: Routledge, 2006), 58 – 61. On Persian sources, see Paul Sprachman, Suppressed Persian: An Anthology of Forbidden Literature (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1995).

71. Fâzıl Bey, Defter- i aşk, Hubânnâme, Zenânnâme . . . (The Book of Love, the Book of [Male] Beauties, the Book of Women . . .) (Istanbul: Darü’t- tıba’ati’l- âmire, 1253 [Hijrī/1837]); Murat Bardakçı, Osmanlı’da Seks. Sarayda Gece Dersleri (Sex in the Ottoman Empire: Night Classes at the Seraglio) (Istanbul: Gür Yayınları, 1992), 122.

72. See, e.g., D. Fatma Türe, “Binbir Buse’den ‘En Şen En Şuh Hikâyeler’” (“The Most Joyous, Most Saucy Sto-ries” from Bin Bir Buse”), Tarih ve Toplum 35, no. 208 (2001): 51 – 52; and Mehmet Eminoğlu, Müsteh cenlik Sorunu (The Question of Obscenity) (Istanbul: Beyan Yayınları, 1984), 11.

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and consciousness of decline, after all, are two very different things. It is true that prostitution was widely discussed during this period and that measures were called for and taken to cur-tail it.73 But was that because prostitution had actually increased or because the idea that it had increased endowed political discourse with a language with which to externalize anxieties and grievances during those deeply unsettling times? For now, this remains an open question. Furthermore, even if prostitution did increase, it is not possible to assert with any certainty that the rise of erotic publishing was causally related to that increase. Certainly, prostitution existed well before 1908, but sexually explicit publica-tions did not rise explosively.74 The simple truth is that from sex manual, through court poetry, to shadow theater, erotic expression was always present in Ottoman society; the challenge is to explain the specific form it took in the early twentieth century, and once again print capital-ism played a key role in this regard.

Government repression, embarrassment on the part of those who inherit such books (many of whom are loath to remember their parents or grandparents in this light), and pub-lic libraries’ reluctance to collect this material all conspire to make Ottoman erotica rather rare today. A comprehensive survey of this cor-pus, which numbers in the hundreds, therefore remains to be undertaken. Still, based on a sam-pling of surviving works, it is possible to draw some preliminary inferences concerning the subjects covered and the attitudes taken. Not-ing that “obscenity was an expression of free-dom,” Toprak has characterized these works as a “literature of social change” that voiced “the aspirations of generations for relations between men and women.”75 They featured the sexes in-termingling freely, women aware and in control of their bodies taking initiative for their own sexual gratification, and couples enjoying sex-

ual relations outside the confines of marriage. Although the Second Constitutional Period witnessed significant social changes, includ-ing some pertaining to gender relations, and though prostitution provided a certain frame-work for extramarital sex, still these books can-not be said to be representative of sexuality as it actually existed at the time, except perhaps for a small minority of people. However, not only did they articulate fantasies and aspirations — after all, they would not have sold well if they did not strike a chord with the reading public — but they also further diffused and legitimated them through publicization and repetition. In this re-spect, they cannot have failed to influence the course of gender and sexual relations in the late Ottoman and early republican periods.

Perhaps the most interesting erotic novel of the Second Constitutional Period is Zifaf Hâtırası (Memento of a Wedding Night) (fig. 5), published anonymously but attributed by Meh-met Seyfettin Özege to Enis Avni, also known as Akagündüz.76 It is well written and uses the literary device of a diary, starting two days after the restoration of the constitution. The narrator- protagonist is a young woman who is to be married against her will to a man she de-spises. Since “freedom has come,” she decides that she no longer has to obey her despotic fa-ther and writes letters to two well- known pub-lic figures, the journalist Ahmed Rasim and the philosopher- turned- politician Rıza Tevfik [Bölükbaşı], pleading for help. The former is patronizing and dismissive and urges her to marry the man and get it over with. The latter writes her a long and detailed response that posits convoluted arguments from many dif-ferent angles but finally reaches the same con-clusion. Was the author voicing criticism of the leading intellectuals — both Young Turks and the opposition — for not paying enough atten-tion to women’s rights? Probably. In any case,

73. See, e.g., Mustafa Galib, Fahişeler Hayatı ve Re-daet- i Ahlâkiye (The Life of Prostitutes and Immorality) (Istanbul: Mahmud Bey Matbaası, 1338 [Rûmî/1922]). Interestingly, Mustafa Galib attributed prostitution first and foremost to “cinemas and theaters that dis-play films and topics too open for our local mentality to digest, and thereby inflame lust and sentiments in virginal minds already poised to catch fire,” and sec-ondarily to women’s recently granted “license to be freely admitted into all kinds of gatherings” (7 – 8).

74. See, e.g., Paul de Régla [Paul André Desjardin], Les bas- fonds de Constantinople (The Underbelly of Con-stantinople) (Paris: Tresse and Stock, 1892), 246 – 71, 294 – 95; Ahmed Rasim, Eski Maceralardan: Fuhş- ı Atik (From among Past Adventures: Prostitution in the Olden Days) (Istanbul: İkdam Matbaası, 1340 [Hijrī /1922]). Though this latter title was published only in 1922, it recounts the author’s youthful philandering; he was born in 1865.

75. Toprak, “Meşrutiyet’ten Cumhuriyet’e Müstehcen Avam Edebiyatı,” 91 – 92.

76. Anonymous, Zifaf Hâtırası (Memento of a Wed-ding Night) (Istanbul: Cem’i Kütübhânesi, printed by Matbaa- ı Hayriye ve Şürekâsı, 1330 [Rûmî/1914]).

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nothing of an erotic nature takes place until the final pages of the book. She relents, an elabo-rate wedding takes place, and she finds herself alone with the bridegroom. In a daze, she lies with him, feels a momentary sharp pain, and then: “Aah . . . My love, faster . . . Faster my lion . . . I am fainting, I am dying . . . A little more, a little more . . . Aahhh . . . Do it . . . Do it . . . Do . . . it . . .” 77 Was the entire book — half serious, half comedic — an excuse for this final climax? Or was the climax the author’s way of getting people to buy the book and read it to the end? That is uncertain, but the moral of the story is

clear: women are entitled to and do freely par-take in sexual pleasure and sexual pleasure is to be found even in the worst of circumstances.

Another interesting example that re-lates to the social realities of the day is Anahtar Deliğinde (Through the Keyhole), a supposedly autobiographical novella by a certain Ali Bey.78 The main purpose of the book was to poke fun at a country bumpkin who had come to Istan-bul and proceeded to make a fool of himself in every conceivable way. What is noteworthy is that along with crowded streets, tall build-ings, the subway, car traffic, fancy restaurants, and everything else he encounters for the first time, one of the defining features of Istanbul for him turned out to be sexual freedom. This he experienced on three occasions. The first time, walking aimlessly in the Frankish district of Beyoğlu, he was enticed by a prostitute whom he mistook for a friendly native. The second time, he peeped through a keyhole at his hotel and watched his pretty neighbor enjoying the company of a man. The third time is most sig-nificant, in a way, because it took place at the Bosphorus waterfront mansion of his “uncle,” a senior Ottoman dignitary who had taken him in. The description of the house and its attrac-tive denizens, his “plump and blonde” fellow guest, and her sexual escapades with one of the young men of the house suggest that the idea of sexual freedom was not limited to prostitutes and the Frankish district but had spread into the very bosom (as it were) of Muslim society.

As with European erotica in this period, many books focused on virginity as a prelude to defloration. Given the importance attached to maidenhood as the repository of an unmarried woman’s “honor and virtue,” the way in which this theme is handled is always of some signifi-cance. An interesting dynamic takes place in two novellas by S[in] Hidâyet, Bir Dakikalık Bekâret (One Minute’s Virginity) and Karyolada Tatlı Dakikalarım (My Sweet Moments on the Bed).79 In both works, the man first pursued the woman, and she, of course, resisted, voicing qualms

Figure 5. Cover of the anonymous novel Zifaf Hâtırası (Memento of a Wedding Night), published in Istanbul in 1914. Written in the form of a young woman’s diary, it blends eroticism with an articulate critique of gender relations and political conditions in the immediate aftermath of the restoration of the constitution.

77. Ibid., 60.

78. [Elif ] Ali Bey, Anahtar Deliğinde (Through the Key-hole) (Istanbul: Meşrutiyet Kütübhânesi, printed by Hürriyet Matbaası, 1330 [Rûmî/1914]).

79. S[in] Hidâyet, Bir Dakikalık Bekâret (One Minute’s Virginity) (Istanbul: Zerâfet Matbaası, 1330 [Rûmî/ 1914]); S[in] Hidâyet, Karyolada Tatlı Dakikalarım (My Sweet Moments on the Bed) (Istanbul: Zerâfet Matbaası, 1328 [Rûmî/1912]).

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about honor and virtue. He, not unexpect-edly, rejected them outright on “philosophical” grounds: “Both are just fantasies and illusions, they are nothing.”80 Gradually, however, the bal-ance shifted; the woman relented and then actu-ally took the initiative. Deliberately and know-ingly, she led the way and gave up her virginity: “Come, you cruel man, she said, dragging me out of the room. Holding a lamp, she opened a door nearby . . . A few seconds later, I was kissing her tiny breasts.”81

A number of books published during this period were moralistic, but their authors evidently chose to accompany their moralizing with a fair degree of titillation. Ahmed Reşad’s Yakıcı Kadın (The Woman Who Sets One on Fire), İbnülhakkı Mehmed Tahir’s Sefâlethâneler (Dens of Iniquity), and the anonymous Fâhişe (The Whore) are good examples.82 The first is a cau-tionary novel about the “diabolical women” who drag honorable men and women to perdition. In Sefâlethâneler, İbnülhakkı Mehmed Tahir — a rel-atively prolific author whose harangues against conspicuous consumption and Westernization often crossed the line into straightforward mi-sogyny — described an almost certainly fictitious account of the ruination of an old friend, an up-right and virtuous young man, by a French pros-titute “possessing a high degree of conjugal tal-ent.”83 Fâhişe is the story of a prostitute who was loved by a naive young man and returned his love, but was unable to keep herself from betray-ing him for the sake of money. What is interest-ing is that both the titles and the cover illustra-tions of such books were designed to arouse and excite, so that it is once again difficult to deter-mine whether moralization was the primary or the secondary intent. Moralistic books with an erotic twist became increasingly common dur-ing the early republican period, in the hands of such mainstream authors as Peyami Safa

(also known as Server Bedii), Hüseyin Rahmi [Gürpınar], Halide Edib [Adıvar] (also known as Halide Salih), Selâhaddin Enis [Atabeyoğlu], and Yakup Kadri [Karaosmanoğlu].

Without any doubt, the most notorious erotic books of the period were Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi (Tale of a Lily) and Kaymak Tabağı (Plate of Cream), both published anonymously.84 The former is known to have been written by one of the most distinguished Ottoman novelists, Mehmed Rauf, and the latter may have been as well. They virtually achieved cult status as young readers circulated and hand copied them well into the 1960s. Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi is narrated by a self- confessed rake, and Mehmed Rauf’s contemporaries had no doubt that it was auto-biographical. Indeed, he was widely reputed to have married his second wife, Besime Hanım, after she read the book and promptly proposed to him.85 Beautifully written and sexually ex-plicit, the text is also quite revealing when it comes to interactions between men and women in polite Istanbul society. For example, the au-thor comments that the only places for unac-quainted men and women to meet were boats, trains, and the [Galata] Bridge, and he de-scribes the importance of letter writing, which, he notes, replaced formal presentation as prac-ticed in Europe. Expressing sympathy for West-erners who have to go through the pain of small talk when they first meet, he wrote, “Thank God we are innocent of this torment, because either the women into whose presence we are admitted are our relatives or there is license to love and lust as soon as we come face- to- face.”86 The sexual scenes are written with relish and make it clear that the author worshipped the female body and knew well how to show his ap-preciation; little wonder that he had a wide fol-lowing not only among men but among women as well.

80. S[in] Hidâyet, Bir Dakikalık Bekâret, 8 – 12.

81. S[in] Hidâyet, Karyolada Tatlı Dakikalarım, 9 – 15.

82. Ahmed Reşad, Yakıcı Kadın (The Woman Who Sets One on Fire) (Istanbul: Keteon Bedrosyan Matbaası, 1329 [Rûmî/1913]); İbnülhakkı Mehmed Tahir, Mütee-hhil ve Gayr- ı Müteehhillere: Sefâlethâneler (For the Married and the Unmarried: Dens of Iniquity) (Istan-bul: İtimad Kütüphanesi Sahibi Seyyid Tahir, printed by Tevsi- i Tıba’at Matbaası, 1328 [Rûmî/1912]); Y. K[ef], Fâhişe (The Whore) (Istanbul: Ebussuûd Caddesinde 54 Numaralı Matbaa, 1328 [Rûmî/1912]).

83. İbnülhakkı Mehmed Tahir, Sefâlethâneler, 15.

84. [Mehmed Rauf], Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi (Tale of a Lily) ([Istanbul]: [Hilâl Matbaası], [1910]); [Mehmed Rauf?], Kaymak Tabağı (Plate of Cream) ([Istanbul]: n.p., n.d.). On the former and the controversy it en-gendered, see Ali Birinci, “Müstehcenlik Tartışmaları Tarihinde Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi” (“Bir Zanbağın Hi-kâyesi in the History of the Debates on Obscenity”), Dergâh, no. 16 (1991); Rahim Tarım, Mehmed Rauf: Hayatı ve Hikâyeleri Üzerine bir Araştırma (Mehmed Rauf: A Study of His Life and Short Stories) (Ankara:

Akçağ Yayınları, 2000), 64 – 69; and Yavuz Selim Karakışla, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Müs tehcenlik Tartışmaları ve Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi” (“Debates on Obscenity in the Ottoman Empire and Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi”), Tarih ve Toplum, no. 35 (2001): 15 – 21.

85. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Gençlik ve Edebiyat Hatıraları (Memoirs of Youth and Literature) (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1969), 23.

86. [Mehmed Rauf], Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi, 4.

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Perhaps because he was too prominent to be forgiven this transgression, Mehmed Rauf was prosecuted, tried, and convicted of obscen-ity for writing Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi. The second book, Kaymak Tabağı, is quite a bit cruder; its eponymous narrator probably took her name from a well- known real- life prostitute.87 An-other publication credited to Mehmed Rauf is the short- lived erotic magazine Bin Bir Bûse (A Thousand and One Kisses), issued immediately after the end of the Second Constitutional Pe-riod, in 1339 – 40 Rûmî/1923 – 24.88 The stories in Bin Bir Bûse depicted the daily lives of members of an urban, Westernized, and fairly affluent stratum. They described a society without sex-ual segregation, where young men and women came together at tea parties and in department stores, walked arm in arm down the street, en-gaged in pre- and extramarital sex in bachelor pads, expressed their desire unreservedly, and freely chose their sexual partners. Most impor-tant, women were shown to be entitled to sexual gratification, which they pursued with consider-able assiduousness. Arranged marriages, with all the resulting ills of incompatibility, lovelessness, and age mismatch, were thoroughly ridiculed, and women involved in them were portrayed as using unfaithfulness as a legitimate weapon. While one would be hard- pressed to call these stories “realistic,” they do afford a unique per-spective on the texture of life in Istanbul man-sions where extended families of brothers- and sisters- in- law, cousins, aunts and nephews, un-cles and nieces, not to mention armies of male and female servants of every age and descrip-tion, came together in a climate fertile for love and lust, tension and release.

Whether blatantly erotic or not, the net effect of the many books with a sexual theme

published during this period was that women and sexuality were — or, more accurately, a femi-nized, woman- centric sexuality was — catapulted into public discourse with an intensity, consis-tency, and comprehensiveness never before seen in Ottoman society. This was, to use Michel Fou-cault’s phrase, a “veritable discursive explosion” that gave voice to a new “political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex.”89

ConclusionIncreasingly, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ottoman books and articles appeared that took issue with traditional norms of gender and sexuality and advocated alternatives. They criticized arranged marriages and supported companionate unions in which the spouses love and support each other and share in the pleasures and sorrows of life. They criticized polygyny and advocated monogamous unions where each spouse’s commitment to the other is total. They stressed the importance of a healthy and fulfilling sexual life in which the wife is an equal partner fully entitled to sexual gratification. They acknowledged sexual at-traction as legitimate and viewed the choice of a sexual partner as personally empowering. And, timidly at first, they suggested that sexual relations outside marriage were fun and worth pursuing. Such material both reflected and fur-thered newly emerging norms of gender and sexuality.

It is customary to view these developments as aspects of Westernization (seen as either modernization and development or degenera-tion and decadence, depending on the com-mentator’s political bent), a trend accelerated by the breakdown of traditional society in the face of wars, population movements, and eco-

87. Ahmed Rasim mentions a prostitute named Kay-mak Tabağı; see his Fuhş-I Atik, 1:113.

88. This magazine presents something of a mystery, as two distinct publications appeared at the same time and under the same name. One was printed by Âmedi Matbaası and the other by Orhaniye Matbaası. The former comprised mostly anonymous erotic sto-ries, and the latter, stories credited to well- known authors and not of an erotic nature. Most of the lat-ter stories were translations, whereas most of the former were not. Yet the magazines had not only the same name but also identical calligraphic logos. For more details, see İrvin Cemil Schick, introduction to Bin Bir Buse: 1923 – 24 İstanbul’undan Erotik bir Dergi

(“Bin Bir Buse”: An Erotic Magazine from Istanbul in 1923 – 24), ed. Ömer Türkoğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2005), 9 – 25.

89. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 17, 23. Foucault’s reference is to the early eighteenth century and the rise of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe. Though one should, of course, be weary of facile analogies, it is worth noting that the Young Turk revolution of 1908 – 9 is commonly described as “Turkey’s bourgeois revolu-tion.” That description is inexact, but it is certainly true that capitalism and free enterprise accomplished a certain leap forward during this period.

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nomic crises. While those factors may well ex-plain the why, however, they do not explain the how. In fact, these books and articles were over-whelmingly produced by private publishers and printed on private presses, and though ideologi-cal commitment can never be ruled out entirely, there is good evidence that the profit motive was firmly behind their publication. Thus print capitalism provided the conduit through which newly emerging ideas about gender and sexual-ity were disseminated across Ottoman society. In particular, privately — and sometimes even illicitly — published erotic books contributed significantly to this process.

The idea that sexuality is not a given but a social construct produced and reproduced by discourses and practices is no longer novel. By depicting women as legitimately sexual beings endowed with agency, the material discussed in this article cannot have failed, in the long run, to benefit the emancipation of women in late Ottoman and early republican Turkey. Mehmed Rauf’s oral homage to the “flower of womanhood” (şükûfe- i nisvâniye) in Bir Zanbağın Hikâyesi may not be everyone’s idea of great liter-ature, nor can it be considered a particularly in-novative technique of lovemaking, but his works and others like it broadcast a vision of sexual relations that emphasized symmetry, sharing, and mutuality. Produced and marketed by com-peting, profit- seeking businesses, often for the sole purpose of realizing material gain, these books reached a broad audience and succeeded in being transformative of society in a wide vari-ety of ways, some of which were unquestionably favorable to women.