ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Women, Science and Evolution in the Late Ottoman Empire

• In Event: Science and Education 2: Practice

English Abstract

Including young women in the modernization of education in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire paved the way for the women’s movement in the Empire, as happened in the other parts of the globe. These developments overlapped the increased interest in scientific inquiry and biological evolution theory. The late Ottoman education policy integrated science courses into the curriculums. In this way, modern science was popularized by supplementing public education with the new courses from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Textbooks for girls were no exception. Acceleration of technological advancements helped women to stay tuned with the rest of the globe, and their interest in education and science intensified. The late 19th century witnessed Ottoman women’s passionate effort to integrate women into higher education and scientific pursuits. The first fruit was the establishment of an Ottoman Women’s University after 1900 despite the opposition of the conservative male elites of the time. While half of the first graduates of this university chose the natural sciences branch, women’s magazines of the time show that educated contemporary women seriously worked for underprivileged women’s access to higher education by offering free courses to pass the entrance exams and general info and debates on scientific developments of the time. This paper explores this marginal and relatively less studied group’s, women’s, engagement in science during the dawn of the Ottoman Empire based on primary sources. It also aims to contextualize their struggle in its global setting by investigating Ottoman women’s dialogue with women in the rest of the world. Furthermore, it investigates the debates around the “scientific housewifery,” which was the product of patriarchal codes in the refined disguise of rationality and modern science, and Ottoman women’s stance towards them.

Author

• Seriyye Akan, Binghamton University SUNY