van Os, Nicole A.N.M.

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    Pera-Blätter  Orient-Institut Istanbul  Heft 36  2022      Once upon a Time …: A Personal Narrative of my Research into Ottoman Women’s Lives and Activities  Nicole A. N. M. van Os  S. 68-73  https://perspectivia.net/publikationen/pera-blaetter/36/os_personal              Copyright   Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online-Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat urheberrechtlich geschützt ist. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit  die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Eine darüber hinausgehende unerlaubte Verwendung, Reproduktion oder Weitergabe einzelner Inhalte oder Bilder können sowohl zivil- als auch strafrechtlich verfolgt werden.   68 Pera-Blätter 36Nicole A. N. M. van OsLeiden University Once upon a Time …: A Personal Narrative  of my Research into Ottoman Women’s Lives  and ActivitiesThis paper will be a look back rather than into the future of women’s studies / gender studies. The reason is that I think it is important also for new generations of researchers to realize what the field was like and how it got to the point where we are now and will go from in the future. More than an official historiography of the field of Ottoman women’s history, the latter being my field of expertise, this is a rather personal story.Bir Varmış, Bir Yokmuş …  Of Old Libraries, Brittle Newspaper and Wood StovesMy venture into Ottoman women’s history started back in 1985. That year I took a course on Middle Eastern History without any reference to women. I asked the instructor, at that time still a jun-ior university lecturer, if I could write a paper on women in the Ottoman Empire instead of doing an exam. He agreed and thus I wrote my first paper on this topic based on a very limited num-ber of, mostly secondary, sources. This tiny paper did not quench my thirst for more knowledge on these hidden (or veiled?) figures within Ottoman history and I decided to continue my quest in my graduation thesis. This time not simply »Women in the Ottoman Empire« (imagine this as the topic for a paper of only 15 pages!), but with a somewhat narrower focus: women in the Ottoman Empire, 1838 – 1935. Slowly diving ever deeper into the topic, my Ph. D. the-sis was originally planned to cover the period 1908 – 1935, but ended up being about the, undoubtedly fascinating, period of 1908 – 1918, only. Moreover, I decided to focus my research on women’s organ-izations.Mapping Gender 69The reason behind this gradual narrowing down of my research topic was that an ever-increasing body of primary sources came to light. Although I did not expect to find many sources initially, over the years I was proved completely wrong. Firstly, we (Serpil Çakır, Elisabeth Frierson and me), as pioneers in the field (re)discovered the women’s periodicals of which some had been published by men, but even more by women during Ottoman times. Especially the old Hakkı Tarik Us library (HTUL) at Beyazit with its stove and the leaking roof – the horror of any librarian – proved to be a treasury in this respect. Its collection also contained many Ottoman (Turk-ish) newspapers of the time, which, to my surprise, also proved to be a rich source on Ottoman women’s lives and activities. For a full set of the daily Tanin, however, I had to resort to the Millet Library in Fatih, another old and charming library. The Atatürk Municipal Library at Gezi and the Beyazit State Library were two other rich libraries I frequented.In most cases, it was possible to get photocopies of the women’s pe-riodicals; the librarian at the HTUL was very cooperative on that point. For newspapers this was not possible due to their size. Two options were left in that case: copying by hand or getting micro-films. Eventually, a third option occurred when researchers from Ja-pan brought hand copiers which made it possible to photocopy one newspaper column at the time. The thermic paper strips used for this were approximately 6 centimeters wide and we paid for them by the meter. At home, we had to cut the long strips in parts to glue them onto A4 paper sheets, to have them photocopied again as the charac-ters on the thermic paper would fade eventually.Only in the 2000s, it became possible to make digital photographs of relevant articles. Luckily, most newspaper articles on women and their organizations were not that long and easy to capture in one photograph. Moreover, libraries started to digitize their collections of, often very vulnerable, newspapers.The vulnerability of the newspapers was quite an issue for me as a researcher. Before the age of digitalization, browsing newspapers and periodicals literally meant browsing: turning the pages one by one, 70 Pera-Blätter 36hours long, scanning them for relevant articles. At the end of a day, after going through hundreds of pages taking notes and copying rel-evant parts, my lap and the table were not seldom covered in tiny pieces of the brittle paper.Vulnerable were also the documents I got to see at the Prime Minis-terial Archives in the 1990s. While the newspapers and periodicals formed the most important sources for my research, those archives certainly could not be ignored. During one of my first visits, howev-er, I was welcomed by one of our respected male colleagues asking me why I had come to the archives since, as he posed »there were no women in the archives«. I am glad to be able to conclude that since that day many scholars have proved him wrong. Ottoman women can be found all over the archives, if you are willing to see them!Becoming a Desk Chair ResearcherWhen I returned to the Netherlands in 2004, after a stay of ten years in Istanbul, my access to those paper sources was cut off. During those ten years, however, I had been able to collect so many mate-rials that I could continue working and publishing on the topic of late Ottoman women’s lives for a while. Incidental visits to Istanbul allowed me to add more materials on Ottoman women’s organiza-tions, the topic I had chosen to concentrate on. So over several visits, I frequented the library of the German Archaeological Institute to go through all the copies of the German / French Osmanischer Lloyd /Lloyd Ottoman, while I also continued going to the other libraries.In the second half of the 2000s, the digitization of newspapers gained momentum. All over the world, and thus also in Turkey, (national) li-braries started to digitize their brittle and vulnerable periodicals and newspapers. Moreover, some of these collections were also OCR’ed which made them searchable. This opened the door to an avalanche of new sources readily available from behind a desk at one’s home. I spent hours at my desk searching through Australian, US, Dutch, French newspapers using terms such as Ottoman or Turkish women /woman, lady / ladies, Harem, and their equivalents in the various lan-Mapping Gender 71guages, or, for example, hanım / hanem / hanim / hanum / hanoum, trying out the possible ways Turkish words could have been spelled. Or, for that matter, the names of Ottoman and Turkish women, women’s organizations or women’s periodicals. This way, I was able to collect most of the materials on the connection between Ottoman women and the international women’s movement, which resulted in an article published in the Journal of Women’s History.1The collections of Ottoman Turkish newspapers and periodicals which were digitized were, however, not OCR’ed, which meant that the old-fashioned browsing was still needed. So, even more hours were spent going page by page through their online accessible ver-sions, which were (and are) not always of high quality. In particular, in the margins near the bindings the quality of the scans was not rarely poor. And that was, where, probably not totally coincidently, many articles on Ottoman women and their organizations could be found.Developments are going fast in this respect, though. Several parties are involved in projects to OCR Ottoman newspapers and period-icals. Soon we will be able to search them too instead of having to browse them.The technical developments at the Prime Ministerial Archives took a similar flight. Instead of having to go through paper versions of original Ottoman registers or typed transcribed catalogues, the be-coming available of the online catalogues with their search func-tions made finding relevant documents much easier. While until quite recently a visit to the archives was still required to obtain (dig-ital) copies of the wanted documents, this is no longer needed any-more either.All this makes that one can now do a large part, if not most, of the research on the lives and activities of Ottoman women from a desk at home. Although this has large advantages for those, like me, who 1 Van Os, Nicole. »›They can breathe freely now‹: The International Council of Women and Ottoman Muslim Women.« Journal of Women’s History, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016, pp. 17 – 40. http://hdl.handle.net/1887/3201815.72 Pera-Blätter 36do not have the opportunity to travel to Istanbul or Turkey and visit the libraries and archives in person on a regular base, it also entails a loss. Apart from the charm of visiting the often old buildings and neighborhoods, the loss of incidental, but inevitable meetings with other researchers, the informal and, at times, heated discussions over a cup of coffee or joint lunch are sorely missed.By Way of Conclusion or, Some Advice to  the Younger GenerationTo start with the last part. Do not do your research in solitude. Make sure you create a network with other researchers. It is extremely val-uable to exchange ideas on your sources, your research, your writing process with your peers. If you do not run into each other automati-cally, because you no longer visit libraries or archives as frequently as we used to do, make sure to create another opportunity to meet each other. Set up an old-fashioned salon (like Nigâr hanım used to have) where you gather once in a while to discuss your work.The vast array of sources within reach from your home entails the danger of getting an overload of materials. While the amount of ma-terial one could collect used to be limited by the access to places and the time needed to go through all those materials one by one, digi-talization and, moreover, OCR will allow for the collecting of much more relevant materials in the same amount of time. This will require researchers to rethink their research question; they may have to limit the topic of their research and narrow it down. Or to look for other ways to digest the materials collected and to venture into exploring the possibilities of digital humanities.Digital humanities also opens the way to pose new questions or, rath-er perhaps, alternative answers or ways to reach answers to both old and new questions. It is important for us as researchers of Ottoman women’s history to explore the digital tools available and to engage with the opportunities offered by them. This way we will be able to reach new insights and get to know the lives and activities of women in the Ottoman Empire.Mapping Gender 73Work CitedVan Os, Nicole »›They can breathe freely now‹: The International Council of Women and Ottoman Muslim Women.« Journal of Women’s  History, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016, pp. 17 – 40. http://hdl.handle.net/ 1887/3201815.

Once upon a Time …: A Personal Narrative of my Research into Ottoman Women’s Lives and Activities

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Once upon a Time …: A Personal Narrative of my Research into Ottoman Women’s Lives and Activities

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