(15692086 - Hawwa) SERVANTS, SLAVES, AND THE DOMESTIC ORDER IN THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST PDF

SERVANTS, SLAVES, AND THE DOMESTIC ORDER IN
THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST
MADELINE C. ZILFI
University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract
To an appreciable degree, female domestic work in the Ottoman Middle
East was shaped by organizational and valuative premises that were also
common to women outside the Ottoman and Islamic worlds. Ambiguity
such as between women’s duties and socially recognized “work”, or between
kin and servant—was a keynote of women’s condition regardless of cul-
tural setting. However, in the Middle East, the persistence of slavery into
the late nineteenth century as a predominantly female and domestic-labor
institution added a distinctive element to the nature of domestic labor and
women’s role within it.
Introduction
The present study explores the nature of domestic employment in
Ottoman Istanbul and related urban centers during the Middle
East’s early modern era—roughly the late sixteenth century through
the early nineteenth century. With women’s labor as a framing con-
text, the study is concerned with the ideologies and historical con-
ditions that shaped domestic work and worker recruitment, especially
as they aVected ordinary—non-elite—women, in the culturally sta-
ble period before the Ottoman reform era that took eVect in the
mid-nineteenth century. The study secondarily considers the ques-
tion of comparability in women’s work across cultures. Housework
is a universal phenomenon, but as DavidoV points out, its context
and meaning are enormously variable.1 It remains to be seen how
much its content diVers as well. In any case, we are concerned
1
Leonore DavidoV, “The Rationalisation of Housework,” in Diana Leonard
Barker and Sheila Allen, eds., Dependence and Exploitation in Work and Marriage
(London, 1976), 123; cited in Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s
Work, 1700 to the Present (London, 1998), 91.
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2 madeline c. zilfi
here with the extent to which women’s experience of domestic work

in this era and in these locales reXects distinctive labor patterns or
features in common with contemporaneous societies.
Domestic work or domestic labor can be deWned as maintenance
activities, care-giving, and non-wage production carried out in the
service, and for the consumption, of the co-residents of a family
domicile. The deWnition is in some respects arbitrary, particularly
when it comes to “domestic” production. As scholars of women
have observed, products made in and for the home could from one
day to the next be turned into marketable goods when cash or
exchange value was required.2 As for “family households”, the term
is used here to accord with practice in the Middle East, as an open
designation allowing for kin and non-kin housing arrangements that
functioned as co-operative social and economic aggregations.3 With
these provisos in mind, the two terms serve as a point of entry for
the exploratory purposes of this study.
Sourcing the Domestic

The study of domestic sector employment, particularly as performed
by women, and particularly in the early modern era, poses special
obstacles for historians of the Middle East. First, and foremost, his-
torical sources, which are inevitably in short supply, are especially
slight for pre-modern studies. Although the problem holds for other
world areas as well, for the Middle East the problem is one of vari-
ety and genre as well as quantity. Like Mediterranean Europe and
Russia, the eastern Mediterranean lacks the Wrst-person narratives
that enliven northern European—especially British—discussions of
the domestic milieu. And, epistolary literature, which has added
Xesh and bone to the history of women in the Atlantic world and
in Western Europe, is not to be found, or not yet to be found,
2
For a discussion of these issues, see Louise A. Tilley and Joan W. Scott,
Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1987 [1978]), 5–6; Simonton, A History, 1–4,
91–98, 165–66; and Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century
(Oxford, 1996), passim.
3
Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility,
1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1991), 48–86; Philippe Fargues, “Family and Household
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cairo,” in Beshara Doumani, ed., Family History in the
Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany, 2003), 37–39.
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servants, slaves, and the domestic order 3
among the hundreds of thousands of documents that otherwise

make the Ottoman historical record a pre-modern rarity.4
Travel accounts are indispensable for social detail that indige-
nous accounts leave unsaid, but foreign observers were blind to the
laboring classes during most of the period. Europeans always paid
attention to the subject of female slaves, but at least until the later
nineteenth century they were more curious about sexuality and
polygamy than domestic labor. Indigenous discussions of women’s
domestic role, apart from the abolition debate, emerged only in
the later nineteenth century, in consequence of the “new order-
ings” of the reformist Tanzimat years (1839–1876) and, indeed, in
consequence of the slavery question.
For the social history of the Middle East in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the fullest and most accessible primary sources
are published and unpublished chronicles, juristic opinions ( fetvas),
and related commentaries. These are relatively plentiful for the cen-
tral Ottoman provinces of Istanbul, Anatolia, Greater Syria, and
Cairo, although less so for Safavi and post-Safavi Iran, the Ottoman
Maghrib, and non-Ottoman Morocco. It is by now a cliché that
most such narratives reXect the preoccupations of male elites. Apart
from odd bits about ordinary lives, they seldom gave space to the
non-governmental worker or workday.5
Archival materials, including testamentary documents (A., waqWyya;
T., vakWye), inheritance registers (tereke), shari"ah court daybooks (sicils),
and regulatory codes and decrees, especially when used collectively,
oVer invaluable documentation about the organization and travails
of the (overwhelmingly male) artisanal orders.6 Perspectives on the
4
On this problem, see Cemal Kafadar, “Self and Others: The Diary of a
Dervish in Seventeenth Century Istanbul and First-Person Narratives in Ottoman
Literature,” Studia Islamica 69 (1989), 121–50; Virginia Aksan, “The Question of
Writing Premodern Biographies of the Middle East,” in Mary Ann Fay, ed.,
Auto/Biography and the Construction of Identity and Community in the Middle East (New
York, 2002), 191–200.
5
Chronicles, commentaries, and religious texts by members of the religious
minorities, however, often give unusual detail on street life, social relations, and
sources of intercommunal tension; see Bruce Masters, “The View from the Province:
Syrian Chronicles of the Eighteenth Century,” JAOS 114 (1994), 353–62; and
Ruth Lamdan, A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt in the
Sixteenth Century (Leiden, 2000).
6
See e.g., Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts

4 madeline c. zilfi
household as a work site or on women’s work within the house-

hold seldom rose to subject position in the early modern narrative.
Most of what is now understood about Middle Eastern women’s
work, including domestic work prior to the nineteenth century, has
emerged from serendipitous Wnds, principally from the shari"ah reg-
isters of civil and criminal cases processed in the religious courts.
Considering the magnitude of extant documentation, those investi-
gations are still in their early stages.
The historical narratives are especially reticent about the impov-
erished classes and the middle orders, although in reports of ban-
ditry and urban mayhem, women sometimes appear as victims or
mischief-makers. Wealthy women and members of the imperial fam-
ily received mention in connection with their philanthropies (vak’f ).
Vak’f foundations, however, were recorded as testaments of piety
and character rather than work, even when the women in ques-
tion managed the vak’f ’s operations.7 Imperial women’s interven-
tions in dynastic politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
also drew chroniclers’ attention. However, women’s eVorts to ensure
and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge, 1984); Donald

Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge,
1993); Engin Deniz Akarli, “The Uses of Law among Istanbul Artisans and
Tradesmen: The Story of Gedik as Implements, Mastership, Shop Usufruct and
Monopoly, 1750–1850,” paper presented at a conference on “Legalism and Political
Legitimation in the Ottoman Empire” (Bochum, [West] Germany, Ruhr-Universität,
December, 1988); Amnon Cohen, Guilds in Ottoman Jerusalem (Leiden, 2000); Lynne
M. }a{mazer, “Policing Bread Price and Production in Ottoman Istanbul,” Turkish
Studies Association Bulletin 24/1 (2000), 21–40; Thomas Berchtold, “Organisation
und Socioökonomische Strategien von Handwerken im späten Osmanischen Reich”
(M.A. thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2001); and Eunjeong Yi, “The Istanbul
Guilds in the Seventeenth Century: Leverage in Changing Times” (Ph.D. diss.,
Harvard University, 2000).
7
I owe this observation to Randi Deguilhem, “This Is Also Women’s Work:
Creation and Management of Waqf, [and] Rental of Waqf Property in the Ottoman
Empire,” paper presented at a conference on “Women in the Labor Market: The
Islamic World, Past and Present” (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, May
2002); and to the work of Mary Ann Fay, particularly, “Women and Waqf:
Property, Power, and the Domain of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Egypt,” in
Madeline C. ZilW, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the
Early Modern Era (Leiden/New York, 1997), 28–47, and “From Concubines to
Capitalists: Women, Property, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Cairo,” Journal
of Women’s History 10/3 (1998), 118–40.

their sons’ or consorts’ survival and their own well-being were

excluded from legitimate vocational or status categories.
It can be argued that the early modern record is bursting with
discussions in which women are a staple theme. Indeed, moralist
tracts—catechisms and ethical manuals, didactic verse, and dedi-
cated treatises—testify to women’s prominence in the prescriptive
literary mind. However, women in these writings are timeless,
generic, familial “woman”—wife, daughter, mother—not individual
women or even associational groups among them, but women locked
into family identities.8 The history of women as workers and ordi-
nary women’s actual experience of domestic work is recoverable,
though only in part, through combinations of documents and com-
mentaries, however imperfect or scattered we know them to be.
The Working Woman and Social Disorder

The presumptive relationship between wage-earning women work-
ers and social disorder accounted for the most frequent exceptions
to narrative exclusion. Disapproval attached to three areas of female
wage-making endeavor. First—and repeatedly in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries—women workers were reproached for
trespassing on male or guild prerogatives. Often goods made by
women—chieXy items of apparel—were condemned for infringing
on guild markets and, because of the goods’ alleged inferior qual-
ity, debasing established standards.9
Most women’s goods were literally “home-made”, produced at
home in putting-out arrangements for guild and non-guild jobbers.
Protectionist complaints on the part of guild monopolists and their
allies were an everyday occurrence in the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. They were aimed not just at women, but at count-
less varieties of non-guild competitors, male and female, real and
imagined. Non-Muslims, whether foreign or resident, and foreigners,
8
Madeline C. ZilW, “Problems and Patterns in the History of Women in the
Ottoman Empire,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey (forthcoming), typescript, 1–10.
9
Akarl’, “The Uses of Law,” typescript, 23–28; Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, “The
Role of Women in the Urban Economy of Istanbul, 1700–1850,” International Labor
and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 145–47; and Suraiya Faroqhi, “Women’s Work,
Poverty and the Privileges of Guildsmen,” in Suraiya Faroqhi, Stories of Ottoman
Men and Women (Istanbul, 2002), 171 and passim.

6 madeline c. zilfi
whether Europeans or simply non-Istanbulites, were recurring tar-

gets.10 If social marginals could conceivably be implicated in pro-
hibitory decrees, they were. Most competition in these times, like
the dominant population itself, was male and Muslim. International
and internal challenges to guild monopolies were becoming impos-
sible to combat in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies. The guilds could nonetheless summon at least rhetorical
support from the regime.
Women were a minor agent in all of these processes. The cen-
sure of women in imperial texts fed on misogynist currents as well
as on the reXexive popular view of women’s necessary subordina-
tion to men and men’s interests. The specter of misbehaving women
armed the artisanal orders with an appeal that cut across class lines.
The appeal resonated with ulema conservatives, whose lower ranks
especially had ties to the artisanal orders and identiWed with the
urban laboring classes. Despite the fact that poverty drove women
to work in support of their families, complainants often succeeded
in linking their own occupational concerns to popular moral anx-
ieties. Women’s allegedly deleterious inXuence, as consumers and
producers, had been a keynote of regulatory discourse at various
times in the past, but it became increasingly so during the later
eighteenth century’s time of troubles for guild production and
Ottoman trade.
Women also came into disrepute while employed in licensed
trades. Perhaps most famously, female slave dealers in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries earned oYcial rebuke for hiring
out slave women for prostitution. Female dealers were also singled
out among those employing make-up and other artiWces to disguise
advanced years or debilities in slaves they were selling.11 Male and
female dealers, especially those having little girls or nubile women
10
Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire,
1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997), 403–25; Madeline
C. ZilW, “Goods in the Mahalle: Distributional Encounters in Eighteenth-Century
Istanbul,” in Donald Quataert, ed., Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman
Empire 1550–1922: An Introduction (Albany, 2000). Suraiya Faroqhi, “Women’s Work,
Poverty and the Privileges of Guildsmen,” in Suraiya Faroqhi, Stories of Ottoman
Men and Women (Istanbul, 2002), 171 and passim.
11
Mübahat S. Kütüko<lu, ed., Osmanl’larda Narh Müessesesi ve 1640 Tarihli Narh
Defteri (Istanbul, 1983), 257–58.

to sell, tended to lodge this more valuable merchandise in their

own households. Hoping for elite patronage, they were concerned
to keep their human property sheltered, as much as possible like
freeborn Ottoman females. Little girl slaves often became playmate-
gifts for daughters of the wealthy, or daughter-attendants for the
lady of the house. Others would be the wives or concubines of
Ottoman grandees. Most slaves, however, were not destined for the
easy life. Istanbul’s thousands of “small mansions” and middle-class
dwellings, along with its many vast palaces, created lasting demand
for healthy domestic workers.12
Before foreign girls from hardscrabble villages could be sold into
elite households—every slave dealer’s dream, if not every slave
girl’s—they were instructed in the reWnements of the Muslim wealthy.
Females of the dealer’s household had an indispensable role in the
slaving trade, training new arrivals so as to add value to the fam-
ily’s investment. In any case, it was in the conjugal interests of the
wife or slave consort of the house to facilitate the sale of young
female lodgers.13 Actual sales, if guild-regulated, were supposed to
take place in government-monitored venues. In later centuries, trans-
actions connected with the sale of young white women, including
customers’ inspections, were increasingly reserved for private resi-
dences. African females were also sold privately, but their main
points of sale tended to be the central market and other commer-
cial buildings (hans).14
In Istanbul, the central slave market in the period from the mid-
seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth was the Esir Bazar’,
literally “Slave Market”. The courtyarded structure was located a
few steps from the famous and still extant center of old Istanbul,
Kapal’ Çar{’, the Covered Bazaar. The seat of the slave guild in the
heart of the city points up the commercial and cultural signiWcance
of the slave institution in these times. Still, it was private homes
and private dealings that sustained the Middle Eastern slave trade
and shaped the norms and byways of servile employment.
12
Sedad Hakk’ Eldem, Türk Evi, Osmanl’ Dönemi/Turkish Houses, Ottoman Period,
3 vols. (Istanbul, 1984–87), 2:17.
13
ZilW, “Goods in the Mahalle,” 294–95, for the murder of a slave dealer’s wife
by a slave girl lodged in the household.
14
Dünden Bugüne Istanbul Ans’klopedisi, s.v. “Esir Ticareti,” by N. Sakao<lu.

8 madeline c. zilfi
The privatized dimensions of supply, demand, and owners’ author-

ity inXuenced the nature of slavery and the domestic order. The
Ottoman regime exerted itself to control the import and sale of
slaves in order to maximize state revenues and contain social dis-
order. However, private sales and resales, the sexual uses of cap-
tives, and the complicity of some oYcials, added immeasurably to
the seamy, but largely invisible, urban underworld. For their part,
the households of the governing elites, the prime beneWciaries of
slave labor, projected an enlightened model of master-servant rela-
tions. Despite obvious diVerences, the two models expose the vul-
nerabilities of captives even into freedom. The two are also a
reminder that Islamic society’s manumission ethic, albeit deservedly
touted for its humanity, helped guarantee a supply of cheap labor
in the form of ex-slaves. While Western Europe’s cities counted on
girls from the countryside to clean its houses, Istanbul was also able
to draw from its foreign slave and ex-slave population. There was
no strong or permanent bias against former slaves or the children
of former slaves. However, their lack of Xuency in Turkish and
their domestic occupations while enslaved paved the way for employ-
ment in the domestic sector.15
The third type of notoriety associated with working women
involved those engaged in illicit occupations, usually prostitution or
procurement. Female prostitution was endemic to large cities and
not unknown to smaller ones.16 It was periodically suppressed in
15
See Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909
(New York, 1996), ch. 7, for the diYculties of manumitted slaves in the transi-
tion to free status.
16
Male prostitution was almost certainly more pervasive, if contemporaneous
poetry is any indicator. There were few virtue campaigns like those that targeted
women’s sexuality, although individual males were often punished. On illegal sex-
ual activities, see Lamdan, A Separate People, 123, 132–37; Heath W. Lowry, Ottoman
Bursa in Travel Accounts (Bloomington, 2003), 100, with its discussion of unpub-
lished portions of the seventeenth-century travels of Evliya Çelebi; Haim Gerber,
“Social and Economic Position of Women in an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600–1700,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980), 239; Abraham Marcus, The
Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1989),
30, 54, 304, 328; Abdul Kerim Rafeq, “Public Morality in 18th Century Damascus,”
Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Méditerrané 55/56 (1990); Eyal Ginio, “The Admin-
istration of Criminal Justice in Ottoman Selânik (Salonica) during the Eighteenth
Century, Turcica 30 (1998), 197; Dina Rizk Khoury, “Slippers at the Entrance or
Behind Closed Doors: Domestic and Public Spaces for Mosuli Women,” in ZilW,

showcase raids, but as with most regulatory measures in these cen-

turies, the regime lacked the necessary commitment, and the required
male cooperation, to stamp it out. In an age before the institution
of a civil police force, military corpsmen functioned as the Ottomans’
policemen on the beat and vice detectives. Not surprisingly, the
sexual misdeeds of soldiers met with less oYcial outcry than did
the escapades of outsiders and transients, although prostitution in
all its permutations was a recurring reality around military barracks
as well as male rooming houses (bekâr odalar’) and dockside locales.
Prostitution also cropped up in purely residential neighborhoods.
The entertaining of males outside of shari"ah-stipulated (mahrem) family
members entailed risks under any circumstances in Islamic society.
Christian and Jewish customs were less restrictive in these regards,
but all communities took care of the reputations and security of
their unmarried daughters. When neighbors became aware of a dis-
orderly house in their midst, they took their cause to the nearest
court. In the mid-eighteenth century, a delegation of more than
thirty-Wve residents of the Bosphorus suburb of Be{ikta{ demanded
that the kadi punish the proprietors of a bawdy house. At a mini-
mum, the guilty and their families, including children and neglect-
ful or complicit spouses, were banished from the neighborhood or
from the city itself.17 When the sultan or grand vezir involved him-
self directly in anti-vice campaigns, Werce exemplary punishments
became the order of the day. Death and mutilation were not the
norm, but they occurred on more than one occasion.18
Women in the Ottoman Empire, 119–20; and Elyse Semerdjian, “Sinful Professions:
Illegal Occupations of Women in Ottoman Aleppo, Syria,” Hawwa 1/1 (2003),
60–85.
17
Istanbul Müftülü<ü (hereafter as IstM) 1/25, fol.66b, IstM 6/403, fol.4b, and
IstM Be{ikta{ 23/115, fol.2b; Selami Pulaha and Ya{ar Yücel, “I. Selim Kanunnamesi
(1512–20) ve XVI. Yüzy’l’n Ikinci Yar’s’n’n Kimi Kanunlar’,” Belgeler 12/16 (1987),
31, 71, and Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law (Oxford, 1973), 93,
130. See also in Gavin R. G. Hambly, ed., Women in the Medieval Islamic World
(New York, 1998), Yvonne Seng, “Invisible Women: Residents of Early Sixteenth-
Century Istanbul,” 248, and Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Women in the Public Eye
in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul,” 316–18.
18
Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
(New York/Oxford, 1993), 201–202; Ahmed Ras’m, Osmanl’ Tarihi, 2 vols. (Istanbul:
1326–30/1908–12), vol. 1, 896.

10 madeline c. zilfi
Even though the overwhelming majority of slave handlers, non-

guild manufacturers, and sexual transgressors were men, female
misbehavior was represented as singular and egregious. Men’s trans-
gressions were gender-neutral, lamentable acts committed by occu-
pational, ascriptive, or associational groups within normatively male
identities. Women, their actions inevitably gendered, functioned as
a “unique caste in a male world”.19 Female wrongdoing reinforced
the pervasive sense that women were inherently trouble-making
creatures who required close male supervision. Their mere associ-
ation with a perceived evil rendered it the more reprehensible and
universally endangering.
Women who came to public notice for anything other than acts of
orthodox piety gave social conservatives an opportunity to press for
more rigorous controls on women’s public presence. Guild-initiated
eVorts to curtail women’s access to the marketplace—as entrepre-
neurs and producers, as novelty-seeking consumers, or as interested
onlookers—appreciated that public consensus was more readily built
on moral claims than self-interested economics. The texts of many
sumptuary decrees in the period incorporated the admonition to
the Prophet Muhammad’s wives that they remain in their houses
and not draw attention to themselves.20 As set forth in sumptuary
decrees, and presumably in common parlance, the much-repeated
extract was a warning to women to dress and comport themselves
in line with “traditional” practice. It also prescribed—and some-
times dictated—sequestration as ideal behavior for Muslim women,
if not all Ottoman women regardless of religion.
The Domesticity of Labor

The misogynist dynamic in urban gender relations underscores the
diYculty of identifying the parameters of the domestic sector.
The female occupations just noted, regardless of their impact on
the larger society, were “domestic” in the context of the family-
19
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York, 1985), 42.
20
Qur"an 33:33; see A. Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur"an (Washington, D.C., n.d.),
1115; and Mehmed Hakim, “Hakim Tarihi,” Istanbul, Topkap’ Saray’ Müzesi.
Bagdat #231, fol.234b.

economy system.21 DeWnitions of “domestic work” or “domestic

occupations”, however, tend to exclude illicit sexual activity and
home activities directed outside the physical residence. Even so, the
income in both cases usually supported family survival.
Domestic work is nominally bounded by the spatial limits of the
domicile, including its functional extensions into outdoor space—
sheds, coops, latrines, garden plots. The domestic life of the rural
woman was obviously more oriented to the out-of-doors than the
urban woman’s, although in many provinces, outside and inside
spaces were barely diVerentiable. Tending to animals, for example,
might take a woman to an attached room of the dwelling or to a
lower story that served as stabling. Among urban women, those of
the lower classes, especially if heads of household or otherwise
responsible for their own subsistence, had to interact with the out-
side more than did their wealthier sisters, for whom servants and
slaves mediated.
Even if we do not consider within whose home such labors as
cooking, laundering, slopping, scrubbing, and charring were per-
formed in the name of house “keeping”, the nature of domestic
work is still rife with uncertainties. The problem for the most part
lay in the organization and dynamics of the family. In the early
modern Middle East, most domestic work was kin-based, a pattern
that mirrored historical practice worldwide. Within the set of kin,
domestic work was also overwhelmingly the province of its female
members. Domestic labor recruitment was at bottom a function of
family organization. Wives, mothers, daughters, nieces, in-laws, and
other resident relatives and adoptive kin made up the domestic
household’s core labor force. Daughters served their apprenticeship
to mothers and other senior women, who taught them the partic-
ular domestic modes of their class and environment. Upon mar-
riage, women brought a daughter-in-law’s hands to the marital
household, to the particular beneWt of mothers-in-law in a multiple-
family household, or directly to husbands in a simple conjugal home.
21
In the family economy, family members and/or surrogate members pooled
their labor and resources as a cooperative economic unit (Simonton, A History,
17–18). Women forced into prostitution are excluded from this calculation, since
their earnings were not theirs to spend, and they were unlikely to have been part
of a household arrangement within recognized deWnitions.

Marriage and childbirth deWned womanhood in all classes and

status groups regardless of religion, with the uncommon exception
of celibate religious within some Christian sects. For the most part,
diVerences in wealth and status produced greater distinctions in
domestic styles than did diVerences in religion. Cooking, cleaning,
and childcare awaited lower-class daughters beginning in early child-
hood. Some girls were sent out as young children—as were even
greater numbers of boys—to live and work in another household,
to do housework, and to act as surrogate family members. Overseeing
cooks and maidservants and/or tending to household superiors were
on the agenda for daughters of the privileged. Wealthy Muslim
families kept their women strictly sequestered and had, preferably,
male and female slaves as well as free servants for the running of
the household. Daughters of the wealthy of all faiths, however, were
schooled in the special reWnements prized in upper-class females.
Early marriage, or at least early betrothal, awaited all girls. Pre-
pubescent girls of Muslim families might be sent to live with their
betrothed’s family, to be brought up from an early age, even as
toddlers, and domesticized by the future husband’s family. Such
arrangements oVered advantages to both families, especially if the
girl was old enough to contribute labor to the patrilocal family.
Among Muslims, the girl’s family could hold a portion of her dower
(T., mehr; A., mahr) for her until she came of age to marry. In fact,
many pre-adolescent marriages were contracted for girls precisely
because of the family’s expectations of money or goods. The dowry
in its entirety nonetheless belonged solely to the bride. Her natal
family might use the advance for its own purposes, but by law they
had to return it upon the girl’s marriage. Her husband would be
especially keen on his wife’s receiving her due, since wives often
used the money to support the marital household.
“Ambiguity”, as Jean Quataert has noted, “was a general character-
istic of women’s work”. The determination of where women’s domes-
tic work ended and production for exchange began was fundamentally
a gendered issue.22 Among other ambiguities of domestic work,
women’s housework, regardless of how arduous, time-consuming,
22
Jean H. Quataert, “The Shaping of Women’s Work in Manufacturing: Guilds,
Households, and the State in Central Europe, 1648–1879,” AHR 90/5 (1985),
1124.

or gainful, was not traditionally classiWed as work.23 The literature

of practical ethics (A. ahlaq; T. ahlak), like moralist catalogues from
other societies, assures us that women’s domestic work was insep-
arable from wifely and womanly duty. The fusion between wifely
duty and domestic work is as apparent in the much-quoted Muslim
“Tarikat-i Muhammediye” [ The Way of Muhammad] as it is in
the Russian “Domostroi”, and Western Christian homiletics. Duty
was a moral undertaking, not a wage-earning enterprise.24
Women’s daily activities belonged to the contractual exchange of
marriage: husbands provided for their wives’ upkeep, and wives
“kept” house and were sexually available. Each’s responsibility was
“service” or “duty”, hizmet, to the other. The word hizmet also con-
notes “work”, but less as impersonal paid labor than in the patri-
monial sense of personal attachment and mutuality between servant
and employer.25 Housekeepers and maids of all work then and now
are called hizmetçis, “doers of service”, “servants”, by extension (usu-
ally female), household workers. The ultimate worldly hizmet—work
as loyalty-laced service—was that performed for the sultan or sim-
ilar patrimonial householder, for whom even paramilitary guards-
men were employees “in (his) service” (hizmetinde).
Women’s production for the market, when carried out in domes-
tic space, did not rise to oYcial or public recognition as work. The
twentieth-century query of whether or not a woman “works” has
in recent years been amended by the phrase “outside the home”.
“Do you work outside the home?” Despite the addendum, the ques-
tion highlights the old divide between household work on the one
hand, and wage-earning, market-oriented production, “true” work,
as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, among others, pronounced it, on
the other hand.
In the family-economy model that prevailed in early modern soci-
ety, women’s artisanal output was not tabulated separately from
23
Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993),
84–85.
24
Birgivi [Birgili] Mehmed, Tarikat-í Muhammediyye Tercümesi, trans. Celâl Y’ld’r’m
(Istanbul, 1981), 478–79; Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, ed. and trans., The Domostroi:
Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 124–25;
Wiesner, Women and Gender, 84; and ZilW, “Problems and Patterns,” typescript, 2–3.
25
Cf. Sarah Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth Century France (Princeton,
1983), 13, 16–17, on the notion of Wdélité.

that of male relatives or of the household as a whole.26 Their pro-

duction was nonetheless an inescapable feature of cities possessing
an active trade in yarns, woven cloth, or fabric embellishment (hand-
painting, lace, embroidery). Domenico Sestini, visiting the long-
established textile center of Bursa in 1779, had no doubt of the
vital link between women’s crafts and the family economy:
It was a curious thing to see, while passing by the [market], women
of all nations [religions], a large muslin veil on their heads, rushing
en masse and obstructing the avenues. For today is market day. The
women of the countryside come down from their villages to sell their
silk or wool, the proceeds of which are used to buy necessary things
for the household for the entire week. 27
The sixteenth-century English envoy John Sanderson observed that

the Avret Pazar’ in Istanbul, literally the “Women’s Market”, aVorded
space for women to “ ‘come to sell their works and wares,’” some-
thing they were still doing during the eighteenth century.28
Whether or not women’s products translated into marketed goods,
their non-market exchanges were the lifeblood of social network-
ing among kin and non-kin. Handcrafted goods and food items
were the stuV of gift exchange, which in these centuries was as crit-
ical to family survival as cash. The circulation of goods invigorated
the kin and patronage connections that promoted the social and
material well-being of giver and recipient. As labor theorists note,
the line between commodities and use items was never a clear one.
Women’s production for the market replicated products made for
home consumption. Whatever the items, however, market produc-
tion by women was a fact of life only in some districts and only
some of the time.29 Gift exchange was regular and universal; social
obligations entailed costs, and the costs could run high in a soci-
ety in which personalism reigned.
26
Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, 5, 77; Donald Quataert, ed., Manufacturing in
the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950 (Albany, 1994), 96; Simonton, A History,
171.
27
Domenico [Dominique] Sestini, cited in Lowry, Ottoman Bursa, 57.
28
Peirce, The Imperial Harem, 329; and P. . Inciciyan, XVIII. As’rda Istanbul,
H. G. Andreasyan trans. (Istanbul, 1956), 27.
29
Suraiya Faroqhi, “Part II: Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,” in Halil Inalc’k
with Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire,
1300–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), 596.

The relationship between the residential home and “domus”

domestic activities was complicated by the multiple activities and
products that women could claim as theirs. Sometimes the outside
merged with the household’s interior other than through cash receipts
and gift exchange. Tasks done by women for lodgers or renters in
women’s own homes—cleaning, cooking, mending, and carrying
water—were another variation on the theme of domestic work.
Tending to rents on rental properties, in which many women had
investments,30 could also entail housekeeping tasks. Wealthy women
used agents, but owners of modest space—a room or two in a
shared dwelling, a simple house—often relied on family members,
including children, to run errands and lend a hand. Similar help-
ing networks enabled women to operate from home to transact
other business, including moneylending, a favorite activity of enter-
prising women of property.31
Family Connections
The distinction between family members and paid help was both
unmarked and unstable. Household servants—compensated in any
number of ways—were often relatives or (im)migrant compatriots
(hem{ehri ) of the eVective householder. Urban migrants had a bet-
ter chance of surviving in the city if compatriots or relatives could
show the way. Live-in servants, whether kin or not, were often
treated as family members, less advantaged and harder-working,
and sometimes abused perhaps, but intimates of the household
30
Women’s ownership of real property is well-attested in the legal literature;
see Ronald C. Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean
World, 1571–1640 (New York, 1993), 21, and “Women in Early 17th-Century
Ottoman Judicial Records—the Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 18 (1975), 114; and Suraiya Faroqhi, Men
of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara and
Kayseri (Cambridge, 1987), 159.
31
Marcus, The Middle East, 168–69; Yvonne J. Seng, “Standing at the Gates
of Justice: Women in the Law Courts of Early Sixteenth-Century Üsküdar, Istanbul,”
in M. Lazarus-Black, and S. F. Hirsch, eds., Contested States: Law, Hegemony and
Resistance (New York, 1994), 200–201; Zarinebaf-Shahr, “The Role of Women,”
148–49; and Ronald C. Jennings, “Loans and Credit in Early 17th-Century Judicial
Records—The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri,” Studies on Ottoman Social History
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Istanbul, 1999), 224–26.

nonetheless. Intimacy was precarious, however, because unrelated

servants were not, in fact, family, and even relatives could be sent
packing if problems arose.
While the working woman in the market place courted disfavor
in elite narratives, domestic servants were invisible to them, espe-
cially if they performed the less glamorous work of the house. But
housewives and servants did not escape the historical record alto-
gether. They are everywhere in the court records, claiming and
defending debts, injuries, contracts, legacies, and entitlements.
Domestic labor contracts that were registered with the courts are
a reminder of how the legal system put into place support mech-
anisms that family, for whatever reason, could not. The example
of Hadice, a servant-employee, and Raziye, her employer, appear-
ing in court in the mid-eighteenth century, suggests that, notwith-
standing the informality of the domestic work site, legal assurances
were available and desirable. The servant, Hadice bint Islam (Hadice
the daughter of a man named “Islam”), who had reached puberty
(bulû<’n’ rüyet-i hay’z) and thus come of age, gave testimony regard-
ing her domestic contract. In the presence of her employer, Raziye
bint el-Hacc Abdullah (Raziye the daughter of Haji Abdullah),
Hadice declared that while still a minor, she had worked for Raziye
for two years (hal-i s’gar’mda iki sene hizmet etmemle) and had now
received all wages due her. Payment at the end of the service term
was usual practice. Debt acquittals of all sorts are plentiful in the
records, since few people, presumably Raziye among them, wanted
to risk future false claims. At the time of the hearing, Hadice and
Raziye agreed to another domestic contract, this time at Wve guru{
per year, with employment to start from the date of the court
record, 27 February 1742.32
Five guru{, or piastres, as they were known to Europeans, was a
paltry sum, but it was about what a young female domestic could
expect to earn. Female servants, especially maids-of-all-work, were
at the bottom of the wage scale, although ordinary watchmen and
other unskilled male laborers did not earn substantially more.33 In
the cities and towns, Wve guru{ was a respectable amount for a
dower among the modest-income classes, but depending on the
32
IstM 2/178, 8a (Zilhicce 21, 1154).
33
Marcus, The Middle East, 162; Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen, 279–80.

exchange rate, Wve guru{ could barely meet the court-stipulated min-
imum for the upkeep of an orphan child.34 It was not an insigniWcant
sum when room, board, and items of clothing were also included,
which was no doubt Hadice’s situation. Servants and slaves did not
wear uniforms, or clothing much diVerent from that of their employ-
ers, but were customarily provided with cast-oV items from the fam-
ily. In a court case from Istanbul’s Asian-side suburb of Üsküdar,
an unmarried adult servant, Ay{e bint Abdullah, received all of her
wages in the form of goods. Ay{e (T. for Aisha) testiWed that with
the end of her Wve-year contract with Havva Hatun bint Ali (the
lady Havva or Hawwa, daughter of Ali), she had received in lieu
of wages (mezbura Havva Hatuna be{ sene hizmet edip ücret-i mislim olmak
üzere) a mattress, two bolster pillows, a saucepan and copper dish,
a Damascene silk and cotton striped robe, and three smocks with
gold and silver embroidery.35 With her trousseau, Ay{e may well
have been heading for marriage. Live-in service was a young sin-
gle girl’s profession, but it was usually a stopgap calling. Girls
expected to move on to marriage, and many did so, often with the
help of their employer.36 Marriage may not have been Ay{e’s next
step, but if not, her handsome clothing was like coin of the realm
in the meantime.
In terms of the substance and structure of domestic work, the
sharing of tasks was a necessity in one-servant households as it was
in servantless families. In households with only one servant, mis-
tress and servant often had to work cooperatively. In more pros-
perous households employing several servants, division of labor and
hierarchization were common. Although with multiple servants, sta-
tus distinctions were more likely to arise between employer and ser-
vant, the division of labor among servants had the eVect of reinforcing
family intimacy for some while distancing others. Personal atten-
dants, nannies, and the like, were likely to enjoy more pronounced
“upstairs” perquisites. Cooks, scullery maids, and laundresses were
physically and psychologically more removed, and their access to
family members subject to mediation by other servants. In the case
34
At two akçes per day, with a guru{ worth from 80 to 120 akçes; Faroqhi, Towns
and Townsmen, 280.
35
IstM, 6/404, fol.62b.
36
Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 67.

of day laborers, their associational prospects depended on the size

of the house’s workforce. Non-residential laborers had less access
to employers and leisure-time interaction than did live-in help, but
part-time status enabled them to hold on to a measure of auton-
omy in their personal lives.
Patriarchal controls were woven into the fabric of domestic ser-
vice as they were in the pre-modern family, and they persisted in
both long after they had been withdrawn from other areas of social
interaction.37 Needless to say, ambiguities and elisions operated in
this realm as well. Live-in domestics suVered disadvantages along
with the advantages of proximity and access. Most of all, live-in’s
were potentially on call twenty-four hours a day, and they had to
rely on employers, as on parents, for food, shelter, and protections.
If they were migrants or freed slaves, as many domestics were, the
compensations probably outweighed the drawbacks, at least until
they settled into families of their own. Nonetheless, live-in’s were
apt to be treated as minors regardless of their age, and were prob-
ably more subject to physical correction than were non-residential
employees. The fact that so many domestics entering household
employment were minors reinforced and justiWed corrective pater-
nalism for all servants.
Arguably the most taxing domestic work for women lay in the
realm of personal care, one of whose forms, attending to children,
was “central and relentless”, in Simonton’s apt phrasing.38 Waiting
on adults—husbands, male relatives, and seniors—was another not
inconsiderable assignment of wives and junior women. When the
provider-protector-guardian male was absent, women had to take
up his burdens, either directly or by Wnding someone else to do
the work. The added responsibilities could be signiWcant, depend-
ing upon the class and vocation of husband or father.
Where long-term childcare was concerned, complications arose
upon divorce, or on the death or prolonged absence of the father.
Under Sunni Islamic law, divorced or widowed mothers were enti-
tled to custody of their children until the age of seven if boys, and
about nine if girls. At that point, children moved to their father’s
37
Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, eds., A History of Their Own: Women
in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, 2 vols. (London, 1988), vol. 2, 253.
38
Simonton, A History, 96.

or other paternal-side male custody. The daily care and feeding of

dependents, however, mostly fell on the women in the family. Court
records reveal innumerable examples of legally recognized female
guardianship, with widows and divorcees serving as guardians of
their own oVspring, and paternal and maternal grandmothers act-
ing as their sons’ or daughters’ surrogates. All kinds of arrange-
ments were possible.39 In a case from 1742, a woman petitioned
the court for a childcare stipend on the grounds that her husband
had abandoned her and left her with his minor son by another
woman. As the closest relative or the closest willing to take the
child, the plaintiV-stepmother had a claim on the court’s resources
while the boy was in her care and was still a minor.40 Men also
personally fed, comforted, and watched over their children, but
society’s expectations held that childcare was women’s duty and
privilege. Women, for the most part, treated it as such. For status,
fulWllment, and moral and material support, it was in women’s best
interests to do so.
Children of the time were highly mobile. If divorce, parental
demise, or the vagaries of guardianship, did not displace them from
their natal homes, poverty and the summons of child labor would.
According to Fargues, in 1848, 19 per cent of boys between Wve
and nine years old in Cairo were not living in a parental home;
while among boys aged ten to 14, fully 70 per cent were not. Of
the latter group, 58 per cent were not living with a relative of any
sort.41 K’rl’’s study of the laboring population of Istanbul in the
early nineteenth century found that 56 per cent of workers (mas-
ters and employees) in important coastal neighborhoods lived in
their workplace.42 We know little about women’s role in these
39
Judith E. Tucker, “The Fullness of AVection: Mothering in the Islamic Law
of Ottoman Syria and Palestine,” in ZilW, Women in the Ottoman Empire, 232–52;
Margaret L. Meriwether, “The Rights of Children and the Responsibilities of
Women: Women as Wasis in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840,” in Amira El Azhary
Sonbol, Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse, 1996),
219–35; and Madeline C. ZilW, “ ‘We Don’t Get Along’: Women and Hul Divorce
in the Eighteenth Century,” in ZilW, Women in the Ottoman Empire, 285–91.
40
IstM 6/404, fol.89b.
41
Fargues, “Family and Household,” 36–37, and 48, n. 36.
42
Cengiz K’rl’, “A ProWle of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century
Istanbul,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001), 133–34.

arrangements, but it must be the case that women’s labor in the

form of domestic tasks was attached to a good many. Children,
whether unrelated or oVspring, and whether apprenticed to an out-
side trade or not, would have been quasi-domestic workers as well,
so long as they had a part in the residence.
Many boys, or their parents for them, sought and obtained domes-
tic employment, with an eye toward eventual positions as watch-
men, gardeners, cooks, stewards, or janitors. Given the high premium
placed on sex segregation, minor boys were especially versatile com-
municants. They could circulate in male environments, doing chores
for the residents of rooming houses, hostels, and medreses.43 Boys still
young enough to be permitted in the company of unrelated women
were useful in female environments. As messengers between house-
holds, they fetched and carried and did sundry errands that women
were unable or unwilling to do for themselves. Child labor, espe-
cially that of young boys, was the lower classes’ partial answer to
the eunuchs and female slaves who ensured female seclusion for
the upper classes.
Plague, famine, chronic illness, Wre, and earthquakes made per-
sonal caretaking an elastic mode of interaction. The Ottomans were
at war on a semi-permanent and lethal scale in the period. Surrogate
caretaking expanded and contracted, often precipitously. Households
oYcially headed by women were a distinct minority, but in decades
for which data are available, the percentages were signiWcant. In
1848, women were 16 per cent of all recognized heads of household
in Cairo.44 In Istanbul in 1885, they were 20 per cent. In Cairo,
and presumably in Istanbul as well, widows, divorcees, and con-
cubines rather than spinsters made up the unmarried female house-
hold contingent in these very married and re-married societies.45
43
A common employment for indigent male students was service as a kind of
houseboy ( çömez) for senior medrese students; Mehmet Zeki Pakal’n, Osmanl’ Tarih
Deyimleri ve Terimleri, 3 vols. (Istanbul, 1946–54), vol. 1, 381.
44
Fargues, “Family and Household,” 39.
45
Fargues, “Family and Household,” 39; Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households,
60; ZilW, Women in the Ottoman Empire, 290–91; Marcus, The Middle East, 196.

The startling Wnding from 1885 Istanbul is thought to have been

anomalous, a result of the refugee crisis sparked by the Russo-
Ottoman War seven years earlier.46 Although Istanbul had experi-
enced demographic catastrophes in earlier decades, women are not
likely to have accounted for anything like 20 per cent of formal
heads of household. UnoYcial numbers are quite another matter.
Under normal circumstances, Ottoman women did not migrate on
their own, whereas European women left home for outside domes-
tic work with such frequency that they outnumbered males in the
pre-industrial European city.47 For Ottoman women, ideals of seg-
regation and seclusion became dead letters when crisis struck.
Families had to seek safety with or without the appropriate mahrem
male to lead the way. Wives of the unemployed rural males who
poured into Istanbul in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
constituted another set of temporary householders. And in Istanbul,
the dependents of males connected with the military or its support
systems periodically had to fend for themselves.48 The Middle East’s
propensity to male migration—a reality still today—produced a kind
of phantom male phenomenon, with absentee male householders
legally “fronting” for the all-but-in-name female heads of house-
hold. Many, perhaps most, women had to compensate for male
absenteeism of varying durations at some point in their lives.
Although Ottoman society seems to have had remarkable welfare
networks in place, some elements of the population were more vul-
nerable to social isolation than others. In the late sixteenth century,
for example, perhaps as many as 20 per cent of Istanbul’s 500,000
men and women were slaves or former slaves.49 Ottoman slaves
were by deWnition foreign captives, thus a fair number of freed-
men and women lacked the family security net that one associates
46
The high level of 1885 was not repeated in the census of 1907, which recorded
a drop to 14 per cent female household heads; Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households,
60.
47
Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe
(London, 1996), 80.
48
Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 125–29, re late marital ages in Istanbul.
49
Most in the sixteenth century were male military or former military slaves
(kul ); Halil Inalcik, “Slave Labor and Slave Trade in the Ottoman Empire,” paper
presented at the University of Chicago, Slavery Workshop, December 1975, 9.

with the era.50 The simple conjugal family may well have been the
dominant form of Istanbul household already in the seventeenth
century.51 If so, even the freeborn had to look outside their house-
holds for moral and material support.
Elite Exceptions
Male absenteeism had diVerent and damaging consequences for
politically connected households. In Istanbul, the large compound
family, typically comprising multiple generations and marital pairs,
was associated with the wealthiest families. In the later nineteenth
century, compound families represented Wve to six per cent of all
city households, but made up 37 per cent of families of elite stand-
ing.52 Although denizens of aZuent harems, like wealthy women in
Jewish and Christian households, hired and Wred, invested in prop-
erties, arranged marriages, purchased slaves if they could, and kept
an eye on local politics,53 their chief responsibilities revolved around
maintaining the good order of the female quarters and its person-
nel. In grand establishments, the selâml’k—the male and public
reception areas of the house—was left to male management.
50
Slaves were not native Ottoman subjects except for the small proportion of
native Christian boys trained as elite slaves (kul ) destined for military or admin-
istrative service. After the late sixteenth century, kul slaves were permitted to marry.
With or without proximate family networks, there is considerable evidence of eth-
nic and regional solidarities among slaves and the freed as well as among the
freeborn.
51
Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 75, 48–86, passim, and 243; Marcus,
The Middle East, 197; Haim Gerber, “Social and Economic Position of Women in
an Ottoman City, Bursa, 1600–1700,” IJMES 12 (1980), 241; and Margaret L.
Meriwether, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840
(Austin, 1999), 69–82. For compound and extended households, see Maria Todorova,
Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman
Bulgaria (Washington, D.C., 1993), 110–15, 121, 124; Irini Renieri, “Household
Formation in 19th-Century Anatolia: The Case Study of a Turkish-Speaking
Christian Community,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34/3 (2002), 498;
and Tal Shuval, “Households in Ottoman Algeria,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin
24/1 (2000), 41–64.
52
Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 60–61.
53
See especially Peirce, The Imperial Harem; also Jane Hathaway, “Marriage
Alliances among the Military Households of Ottoman Egypt,” Annales Islamologiques
29 (1995), 133–49; and Mary Ann Fay, “The Ties that Bound: Women and
Households in Eighteenth-Century Egypt,” in Sonbol, Women, the Family, and Fay,
“From Concubines to Capitalists.”
Since the Qur"an enjoins women to safeguard their husbands’

wealth when husbands cannot do so themselves,54 the relatively
undemanding work load of privileged women could be sharply
altered during male absences. The harem, literally an “inviolable”
space, was oV-limits to all but close relatives and designated ser-
vants, and thus promised a secure hiding place for family valuables.
The women of the harem were in eVect the last line of defense
against intruders. Of course, given slavery laws, concubines and
slave servants were themselves valuable property. Not just venge-
ful Habsburg and Russian armies in war zones, but mutineers in
Istanbul, Damascus, and Aleppo, and Mamluk factions in Cairo,
not to mention the state’s own conWscatory practices, had a share
in episodes of violation. In the eighteenth century, the wife of a
Mamluk oYcer in Cairo achieved lasting, although nameless, fame
for taking up arms to defend her husband,55 but many other “women
of the harem” were in no position to defend themselves, much less
the family jewels.56
A diVerent object lesson, and the wider possibilities of house-
holding among the elites, are revealed in the career of Rahime bint
Abdullah. The female slave (cariye) and probably concubine of an
Ottoman district commander (sancak beyi ) on Cyprus, Rahime had
served as her master’s treasurer (hazinedar) until his death. In fact,
she and a confederate tried to abscond with a good part of her
deceased master’s estate.57 Rahime’s position of trust is not sur-
prising given the empowering functions that domestic slaves in the
Islamic world were routinely assigned.58 Female slaves and servants
in wealthy households had an especially wide range of such oppor-
tunities, but for the most part, the greater the level of responsibil-
ity, the more likely that the trustee was a slave rather than a free
servant.
54
Qur"an, IV:34.
55
Recounted in Fay, “The Ties that Bound,” 167, and her “Women and Waqf,”
44.
56
See, for example, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte des Osmanischen
Reiches, 10 vols. (Pest, 1827–35), vol. 6, 470.
57
Ronald C. Jennings, Christians and Muslims, 241–42.
58
See Peirce, The Imperial Harem, passim, for this observation regarding the func-
tions and organization of harem residents and personnel in Topkap’ Palace, the
residence of the Ottoman sultans until the mid-nineteenth century.
Elite slavery in the Islamic world was founded on the notion that
absolute dependency fostered absolute loyalty. Upper-class slave
owners could pride themselves on the successful incorporation and
familization of numerous slave favorites. Similarly close relation-
ships could develop with hired help, but slaves possessed more social
and economic value, the more so if they were of decorative qual-
ity. In the eighteenth century, a female slave could be bought for
about 200 guru{, not counting food, clothing, and upkeep, versus
about 60 guru{ per year in wages for a fairly well-paid servant. In
fact, at 200 guru{, a slave was forty times more expensive in terms
of cash outlay than was the young live-in Hadice bint Islam, men-
tioned above, who earned Wve guru{ for a year’s domestic work.59
A very young slave girl, a prize as a purchase or gift, was an ongo-
ing investment quite unlike the freeborn servant, who could leave
at will. As any number of rags-to-riches stories make clear, a young
slave girl could be remade in the family image to become the wife
of her owner or the son of the house, or she might be given as a
wife, concubine, or surrogate daughter to some other family mem-
ber or valued friend. Many of the most upwardly mobile female
slaves, including consorts of the sultans, entered the household as
gifts rather than purchases.
The grim demographics of early modern Europe and the Middle
East give pause to people nowadays who envision sixty- or seventy-
plus years of good health. Despite—and often because of—the
depredations of hunger, disease, and violence, some households
expanded when others dissolved. A deWning characteristic of pre-
modern urban living was the elastic, odd-lot character of house-
holds over time. Not only kin in the broadest sense, but neighbors,
associates, and compatriots, might lodge temporarily, or at least
have to be fed and seen to. Hospitality entailed additional work
for all, but cleaning, laundering, cooking, and serving every day
fell particularly on the family’s female members.
59
See above, 16–17; Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen, 278–80; Marcus, The Middle
East, 49.

The Female as Servant

The congruence of domestic activities with family members and
household economy characterizes both European Christian and
Ottoman Muslim domestic life, at least up to a point. The orga-
nization, recruitment, and valuation of domestic labor in the pre-
modern Middle East accords with the general European pattern.
However, relative levels of women’s labor force participation, that
is, the proportion of women engaged in compensated domestic ser-
vice in the period, are less amenable to comparison given the dearth
of quantiWable data for the Middle East.
In Europe—albeit with variations between north and south—
domestic service was women’s principal source of employment from
the early modern era at least to the end of the First World War.60
Domestic work in Europe in fact witnessed a decisive gender shift
during the early modern centuries. The precise chronology is in
dispute, but perhaps as early as the mid-seventeenth century, espe-
cially in Germany, the Netherlands, northern France, and Britain,
domestic service became increasingly feminized, as men moved to
other kinds of employment, including jobs overseas. By the late
nineteenth century, female servants “north of the Loire”—the area
of most rapid social and economic change—outnumbered males by
as much as eight to one.61 The process was slower to take hold in
Mediterranean—predominantly Catholic—Europe, where, except
for Florence, males generally remained the majority until the late
nineteenth century.62
Feminizing trends are also observable in Ottoman slavery in the
seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, particularly in the
northern and eastern Mediterranean provinces. Although females
have been assumed always to have been the slaves of the Ottoman
East, Inalcik has shown that until 1600 or so, the demand for “war-
rior slaves” by the state and grandee householders not only created
60
Anderson and Zinsser, A History of Their Own, vol. 2, 248; and Hufton, The
Prospect Before Her, 80.
61
Janet Henshall Momsen, ed., Gender, Migration and Domestic Service (London,
1999), 2–3; Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, 80; and Hill, Servants, 41–42.
62
Maza, Servants and Masters, 62; Hill, Servants, 37–39; Hufton, The Prospect Before
Her, 80, 82.

a heavy slave and freed slave presence in major urban centers, but
also impelled the ruling class toward the acquisition of more male
than female slaves.63 Thereafter, throughout the later Ottoman cen-
turies, female slaves became an ever higher proportion of slaves
taken into household employment. In the nineteenth century, fur-
ther decline in the use of male slaves, many of whose duties in
aZuent households had included heavy work along with personal
and paramilitary service, reinforced the association of household
work, and slavery itself, with women.64
The transition to a nearly all-female, free servant class in Ottoman
Istanbul occurred during roughly the same period, accelerated by
speciWc events and many of the same long-term trends aVecting
western Europe. Although we cannot be certain of the onset of the
process, according to Duben and Behar’s Wndings, in 1885, 85 per
cent of the servants identiWed in the Istanbul census that year were
female.65 The restructuring of the professional Ottoman military in
the nineteenth century along with the earlier decline of slave sol-
diery and the demilitarization of grandee households were among
the most important factors behind the trend. In England, a new tax
imposed on male servants after 1777 increased the costs associated
with male retainers relative to females.66 Industrialization opened
up new employment options for men at both ends of the Mediter-
ranean, although more dramatically in western Europe. The fact
that women could be hired more cheaply than men—which was
true in the new economy as much as the old—meant that the ris-
ing demand for household help among middle class urbanites could
be accommodated at less expense.67 As Hufton points out for Europe,
maids were usually the Wrst indulgence that families with a bit of
wealth allowed themselves. 68 It was apparently true of Syria in the
63
Halil Inalc’k, “Servile Labor in the Ottoman Empire,” in Abraham Ascher,
et al., eds., The Mutual EVects of the Islamic and Judeo-Christian Worlds: The East European
Pattern (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1979), 26–27.
64
See ZilW, “Problems and Patterns,” typescript, 10–15. Slave-servant connec-
tions are the theme of a study in progress by the present author.
65
Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 67. However, the precise meaning of
“servant” is unclear.
66
Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, 82; Hill, Servants, 38–39.
67
Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen, 279–80.
68
Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, 81.

eighteenth century, when maids were fairly ubiquitous even among

the moderately well-oV classes.69 In wealthier and more status-con-
scious administrative centers like Cairo and Istanbul, servant-served
households were common, and the proportion employing multiple
servants and retainers presumably higher.70
For women, domestic employment oVered more security and
respectability than occupations that might expose them to the rough
and tumble of urban streets. In many of the domestic work cases
that reached the courts, female employees were responsible to female
employers, which aVorded both of them a respectable, legal arrange-
ment. Such contracts met the letter of the law regarding respectabil-
ity, but they could not guarantee it. Perhaps the female employers
here were the widows or divorcees noted earlier as heads of house-
hold, living without adult male guardianship. It is also possible that
the female employer did not head the household. Unlike women
in most of Western Europe, adult Muslim women were autonomous
persons with regard to making contracts and holding property in
their own name, whether married or not. Thus, there may well
have been male family members of various ages residing in a female
employer’s house. Respectability would have to be guaranteed by
the behavior of the residents, by legal protections, and neighbor-
hood vigilance.71
Where improper mixing of the sexes was suspected, court author-
ities intervened in some domestic arrangements. In one such case
on Cyprus in the early seventeenth century, charges were brought
against two men, each of whom had employed an unrelated woman
in his house as a servant. The defendants, all of whom were
Christians, had broken community rules of propriety in not seeking
69
Marcus, The Middle East, 160; see also Margaret L. Meriwether, “Women
and Economic Change in Nineteenth-Century Syria,” in Judith Tucker, ed., Arab
Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, 75–76.
70
Although the percentage of households employing live-in help may have been
relatively small; see Meriwether, The Kin, 95–96; Duben and Behar, Istanbul
Households, 50, note that of Istanbul’s households in 1907, only about eight per
cent, representing the upper crust of society, had live-in servants.
71
On the stigma regarding service in others’ homes in the modern era, see
Andrea B. Rugh, “Women and Work: Strategies and Choices in a Lower-Class
Quarter of Cairo,” in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, ed., Women and the Family in the
Middle East: New Voices of Change (Austin, 1985), 283; Gul Ozyegin, Untidy Gender:
Domestic Service in Turkey (Philadelphia, 2001).

permission for their morally questionable housekeeping. If the men

had had wives, the presence of a female servant would not have
drawn attention, unless the women themselves had complained or
some kind of disorder had occurred. If the unrelated female ser-
vants had been slaves rather than free subjects, the court could not
have interfered with owners’ rights to their female slaves’ services,
of whatever kind.72 Nor, under ordinary circumstances, could the
female slaves have complained about their employment even if it
involved sexual relations. In one of the cases, the defendant Luyi
gave an intriguing though hardly defensible explanation of the ser-
vant Mariya’s arrival in his house: “ ‘Her brothers gave her to me
as a servant (hidmetkar), but I did not get permission of the court’”
for the arrangement. Mariya’s brothers conWrmed that they had,
indeed, brought their sister to serve (hidmet or hizmet) Luyi. “Giving”
one’s sister into the service of an adult man was perhaps not a
common phenomenon, but the incident here, as well as many others
involving kidnapped women, indicate something of the vulnerabil-
ities of females.73 This is not to say that females and not males
were exploited or sexually misused. Boy servants grew out of their
most vulnerable stage. For females, sexual vulnerability was a mat-
ter of gender rather than age.
Conclusion
The symmetry between women’s domestic work in the early mod-
ern era in the Ottoman East and in Europe grows out of the role
of women in both regions in deWning the domestic. Commonalities
begin with the amorphous character of domestic service, the invis-
ibility of female workers and female work, the permeability of ser-
vant-kin boundaries, the sexual vulnerability of female domestics,
the identity between women and household labor, and the pater-
nalistic modalities of domestic organization. In both regions, too,
paid domestic work was the vocation of young women, usually those
under thirty-years-old; the domestic workforce was for many young
females a pre-marital condition, a place for single women from
72
Periodically non-Muslims were prevented from owning slaves, but the ban
was never systematic.
73
See also Hill, Servants, 44–63.

impoverished homes to earn their keep and build their future, until
they could be married. Some of the data also suggest early roots
for the well-known pattern of lower-class women performing domes-
tic duties for more aZuent female employers. Other similarities can
be cited, but there were important, and in many ways, deWning
diVerences as well.
By the end of the nineteenth century, women generally eclipsed
men in domestic occupations in both regions. Ottoman household-
ing, however, was uniquely inXected by the institution of slavery.
Domestic slavery, increasingly a female-identiWed institution, per-
sisted in Ottoman lands north and south long after it had become
an oddity in metropolitan Europe.74 One can argue that slavery,
like polygamy, which hovered around Wve per cent of the Ottoman
population, was the practice of a small, privileged minority and as
such scarcely reXected the experience of the majority.75 In fact,
most families and households operated without slaves or servants
of any kind. Most families were monogamous, and the upkeep of
most households was organized around the labor of their female
members. Nonetheless, because slavery was endorsed by the Empire’s
governing eminences, including provincial notables, its social and
cultural reach far surpassed its demographic presence.76
The stability of the conjugal household, already fragile because
of the frequency of divorce and the potential for polygamy, was
subject to other destabilizing tensions when slaves became con-
sorts—usually concubines rather than legal wives—of the master-
owner. Such possibilities aroused jealousies and insecurity among
women, but the very Xuidity of the conjugal domain encouraged
women to insure against its worst eVects by investing in friendships
and alliances with other women, including subordinates. These kinds
of observations, however, can only be speculative at this point.
Slavery as a labor system and as a component of trade in the early
modern era has received a fair amount of attention, as has slavery
74
Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and
Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York/Oxford, 1996).
75
ZilW, “ ‘We Don’t Get Along,’” 268–69.
76
On Ottoman slavery and abolitionism, see Ehud Toledano, The Ottoman Slave
Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 (Princeton, 1982), and his Slavery and Abolition
in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle, 1998), and Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

in the medieval literary context. However, the impact of historical

slavery on women and the domestic has eluded close study. Female
slaves as models of servitude, servility, and sexual availability were
a historical reality in the immediate pre-modern past. The
identiWcation of female slaves with domesticity and sexuality on the
one hand, and of marital duty with domestic work and sexual avail-
ability on the other, signals an ideological proximity with porten-
tous resonance beyond the early modern era.
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SERVANTS, SLAVES, AND THE DOMESTIC ORDER IN

THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 HAWWA

here with the extent to which women’s experience of domestic work

Sourcing the Domestic

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among the hundreds of thousands of documents that otherwise

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household as a work site or on women’s work within the house-

and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge, 1984); Donald

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their sons’ or consorts’ survival and their own well-being were

The Working Woman and Social Disorder

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whether Europeans or simply non-Istanbulites, were recurring tar-

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to sell, tended to lodge this more valuable merchandise in their

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The privatized dimensions of supply, demand, and owners’ author-

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showcase raids, but as with most regulatory measures in these cen-

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Even though the overwhelming majority of slave handlers, non-

The Domesticity of Labor

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economy system.21 DeWnitions of “domestic work” or “domestic

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Marriage and childbirth deWned womanhood in all classes and

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or gainful, was not traditionally classiWed as work.23 The literature

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that of male relatives or of the household as a whole.26 Their pro-

The sixteenth-century English envoy John Sanderson observed that

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The relationship between the residential home and “domus”

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nonetheless. Intimacy was precarious, however, because unrelated

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of day laborers, their associational prospects depended on the size

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or other paternal-side male custody. The daily care and feeding of

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arrangements, but it must be the case that women’s labor in the

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The startling Wnding from 1885 Istanbul is thought to have been

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Since the Qur"an enjoins women to safeguard their husbands’

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The Female as Servant

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eighteenth century, when maids were fairly ubiquitous even among

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permission for their morally questionable housekeeping. If the men

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in the medieval literary context. However, the impact of historical

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K’rl’, Cengiz. “A ProWle of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul.”

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Semerdjian, Elyse. “Sinful Professions: Illegal Occupations of Women in Ottoman