FREE ARTICLE: Ottoman Women in WW1

AKA: Ode to a Turkish Grandmother

This article was inspired in South Carolina, of all places. Visiting last year, I was lucky enough to meet and have a talk with my friend Dr. Carolyn Day’s colleague in the history department at Furman University, Tuğçe Kayaal. She works on gender, sexuality and really interesting things like how the Ottoman state tried to regulate the sexual behaviour of war orphans, including during the First World War. Randomly, the next day, also in Greenville, I found an academic book on Ottoman Women during WW1 by the excellent Elif Mahir Metinsoy. This was my source for the broader facts in this article. So thanks, SC, for randomly filling a huge gap in my knowledge.

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ONE TURKISH WOMAN

I want to boil all of this down to a grandmother. There’s a lot I don’t know about her, because we only have her grandson’s memoir to go on, but I’m going to tell you what I do know, because she brings so much of the suffering encountered by Ottoman women to life in the glimpses that we get of her.

I know that her grandson, Irfan, later estimated that though at five he thought her impossible old, she was in her early forties when the war broke out. She’d had his uncle, her first born, at about fourteen.

I know that she was widowed in the summer of 1914.

I know that people usually bent to her will, that she was an ‘autocrat’ in her family. She was stubborn, a snob perhaps, and most certainly proud, and used to living in sustained comfort, if not luxury.

Irfan’s grandmother. (From his memoir, details below)

Then the war came.

I know that initially, she refused to entertain the idea that it might hurt her, or her family.

I know that she quickly had to come to terms with the fact that she had no control over what was happening to them, but that she didn’t accept it without a fight.

I know that as the quality of their food grew worse, she railed against the decline in her fortunes, and that she insisted on a white tablecloth when soap had all but disappeared.

I know that on the first day that there was no bread to be found in their part of Constantinople, she disappeared within herself. She ‘sat reading the Koran, decorous and pious-looking in her black dress and her face pale.’

I know that when her eldest son was called away at the beginning of the war for the army, on their last meeting before his departure she looked at him ‘as if her eyes could never see enough of him.’

I know she never cried, but that on the day she had to fight with all of the haughty pride she had in her to prevent herself from breaking down.

I know that when rumours began to circulate that he had been killed, those that loved her tried to prolong her not knowing.

I know that somehow, she knew was something wrong, and that their secrecy made her furious.

And then everything happened at once. My grandmother's face crumpled and she began to cry, but not silently… noisily and desperately as though a great well was suddenly finding release. Her tears and her ugly, working face frightened me and I held rightly to my mother's hand, for never had the world seemed so full of tears as latterly. These last weeks had been steeped in tears. The world had become a grim place where people lost their homes and died in unknown places, where women struggled and grew imitable and wept, wept, wept… She only rocked her body to and fro in an extremity of grief for her eldest born, who was dead.

I know that she lost her daughter at about the same time, and that she felt as if she had ‘nobody left in the world’.

I know that when soldiers claimed that her remaining son had died marching towards Gallipoli, she refused to believe their talk.

I know that when it was confirmed, that her hair began to rapidly turn grey and fell out in clumps, that she recited all day from the Koran, so intently focused on mumbling to herself that she forgot to give her grandchildren lunch.

I know that she spent every penny she had, and sold everything she could to keep her family afloat, and that she developed a belligerent resistance, that her temper was foul when food and money began to run out because she could do nothing about it.

I know that she struggled to adapt to the new way of the world as women went out to work. At the end of the war, Irfan’s mother abandoned her veil. No longer restricted to the home, earning a living sewing for the army and perhaps still as young as 23, she embraced the changing times.

I know that the two women never much liked each other, and that over this they fought like cats.

‘…It is not right for you to complain that you have to wear the veil. Why, many women are still behind the kafes and they never see the colour of the sky, excepting from behind their veils… Why, I lived for thirty years with my husband and I never went out without his permission and I had to keep my face covered all the time… I say it is a scandal that women are today revealing their faces. God will punish them! Do not let me hear another word from you, my daughter, for surely the sky will open on you for such impiety.'

Irfan had never heard his grandmother ‘talk at such length or with such obvious passion.’ But his mother was equally passionate.

‘My place is not in the home these days. If I were to sit at home all day, or you either for that matter, who would go to market for us? Do you expect me to stay here all day, reading the Koran and wearing my veil for fear the passers-by should see me from the street?’

‘…They will say you are a prostitute!' wailed my grandmother, genuinely distressed, totally incapable of accepting such a fierce gesture as the opening of the face,’ retorted my mother. ‘Their words will not bring bread to me.’

‘The next morning when my mother went into Beyoglu, with a box of embroidered articles under her arm and her lovely face naked to the world, she was stoned by some children near Bayazit and received a nasty cut on the side of her head. After that she was cautious about going anywhere alone, but was adamant about not reveiling herself… my grandmother steadfastly refusing to be seen with her. The reaction to her in the street was mixed. The older ones were stricken with horror, more especially since they had always recognised my mother as a good woman, and now their faith in her was sadly battered. She was still young and attractive.’

I know that there was a moment when his grandmother was convinced that the end had come.

There was nothing left to be sold or, more correctly, what was left was unsaleable, for though the carpets and furniture were very fine the price they would have brought would have only been sufficient to keep us a matter of months… Even had she been so disposed to sell them, my grandmother's jewels were useless. The people wanted food - not jewellery.

I know that after a number of days on which the family had subsisted on bread covered in heavily diluted olive oil, she disappeared.

I became so weak I was even unable to walk. I remember lying most of the day in the salon, faint with hunger and unable to as much as move a limb… My grandmother did not return until dusk, from some long trek she had made into the hills to God knows where. She gave us bread, fresh, almost white bread and quartered raw onions and butter which was rank but made no difference to our appetite. We ate until we could eat no more

I know that that night Irfan’s grandmother sat by the window crying and talking to herself.

There is no food anywhere, she said. For the first time in years I have money in my pocket and there is nothing to buy with it… I think she sat by the window all the night through for when I awoke the next morning she was still there, her old eyes rimmed and strained from tiredness.

I know that when her family was starving, and all seemed lost in 1918, she remembered that buried somewhere in the house was a golden salver that her grandfather had given her. I know that she went out into the city determined to sell it at a fair price, and that she succeeded.

I know that along the many supplies she bought, she trudged up the hill to her house defiantly carrying a bottle of wine I public, that she had bought for herself. She didn’t care who knew, just that she wanted some wine.

THE WIDER CONTEXT

So where do these experiences fit in as far as all of the women of the Ottoman Empire are concerned? Firstly its important to understand that for Turkey, this is nothing like the British experience of a war declared in 1914 that finished in 1918. Turkey had recently fought multiple wars, and people were already jaded and despondent. Also, though they would not join the central powers until November 1914, millions of men were mobilised straight away in August, so that’s when the experience begins for the Ottoman people.

Women gathered in Constantinople during the First World War (Library of Congress)

The lack of food Irfan talks about: The difference between this war and the others was, of course, the scale. Turkey completely lost access to the Mediterranean because it was controlled by the Allies. Constantinople went hungry quickly, because the city’s flour supplies were reliant on Allied countries. Bitterness also grew against ‘greedy peasants’ who produced food and were accused of keeping it all for themselves.

Irfan’s grandmother had a lot more money squirrelled away than the very poorest women of the empire. Women did work before 1914, but culturally, it was a very different scenario to Western Europe. The women who worked, they generally were non-muslim subjects. When they did go to work, Irfan’s mother working in the army’s sewing department is a great example of the work they went out to find. A breakdown of where women went to work shows a lack of the munitions and heavy industrial work that women in other nations found. There are a lot of clothing and textile workers, and things like soup kitchens. The morality standards put on working women also made their lives difficult. You can see this in the row over Irfan’s mother and her veil, but there is a religious aspect to that. Beyond that, authorities dictated what women wore, how they behaved in the workplace. If you had a female relative that did not meet these standards, you might be forbidden from talking to her. The upshot is, it wasn’t impossible for a woman to find work, but she might not be paid or treated fairly and the emphasis by the state in was very much on supporting women who didn’t have a man or a monied relative to support them.

Also, the Ottoman Empire was TERRIBLE at admin. State infrastructure was incapable of meeting the needs of its people during the war, though of course, they did try. For two million odd men and their dependent women at home, however, their income was now a military salary. Some was paid directly to the soldier, and the rest to his family. The timing of paying these allotments to those at home was woefully unreliable and left women destitute in the interim.

The Ottoman state was completely overwhelmed. Irfan recounted what it was like to go and find information about the fate of a soldier, based on her telling his grandmother about it when she returned:

The records showed that my father had been dead for many months. Timidly, my mother had asked where he died, and the official, dealing with her, had snapped that he could not be expected to know everything. Surely it was enough for her to know that her husband was dead? But are you sure?' my mother had pleaded, impotent against such open, uncaring cruelty. I have received no confirmation from you. Why did you not let me know before this, without my having to come here? The official had broken into her words brutally, saying: 'Your husband is dead, and with so many dead and dying we cannot be expected to notify everyone!'

My mother, remembering, said that he had spoken with great petulance, as though she and all the other unhappy women waiting here were in some way responsible for the deaths of their menfolk, thereby causing this gallant young man a great deal of unnecessary trouble. She had wanted to ask him something else but he had forestalled her, slamming the wooden window-shutter in her face, so that she had been forced to retire. She said that all about her the women were being treated in the same way. Crying, wailing, beseeching for information, old ones and young ones with babies, being unceremoniously pushed back from the enquiry windows. Then one woman, driven beyond endurance, commenced to shout insults whilst she held her startled baby above her head.

‘Dogs!' she had shouted passionately. My husband left five children behind him, and a mother to support. Are you going to support them, you miserable sons of bitches? Did my husband ask to be taken from his work and his family to fight for people like you? Will you give us food to put in our hungry stomachs? Do you care if we go hungry and naked, if strange men insult us in the streets or if our children die of disease and starvation? Our husbands died to save their country and then bastards like you shut the windows in our faces, because we ask for news.’

She had been roughly handled by the police and dragged, screaming further abuse, from the building. My mother, retelling her story, became heated for the injustice done to that woman and to all the women of Turkey.

'She was right, right! she insisted passionately to my grandmother's disdainful face. 'And she was no street-woman either and she would never have said what she did say without provocation. We didn’t ask for this war.’

Welfare funds existed. Muinsiz asker aileleri maast was a pension created as a result of the Balkan Wars paid to the families of soldiers with nobody to support them financially. See above for the consequences of not being able to administer it properly. In 1917-18 an estimated 1.5 million were claiming these pensions, mostly women and children, when they could get their hands on the money they were owed. Irfan’s mother was one of the 1.5 million. ‘A pension is money you receive from the Government if you have lost your husband in the war,’ she explained to his grandmother.

‘They have decided to give me 99 kurus because that is all Hüsni was worth to them. I have lost my home because we are at war. Ahmet [the eldest son killed in Mesopotamia] is dead… My children grow and must be fed and you and I cling to life because sometimes it is easier to live than to die. Bread is 50 kurus a kilo and lasts us one day, two if we go hungry, and a man at the Treasury today congratulated me because I gave a man to the war. “God has blessed you,” he said, “your husband died for his country and his place is in heaven - and now, if you will just sign here please,’ and he gave me the paper which said I was willing to accept 99 kurus for my husband.”’

The first time his mother went to collect this pension, Irfan was with her.

Everywhere was crowded with pushing, shouting women and the queues reached far down the street. But they were not the orderly, disciplined queues that I came to know so well in wartime England during the Second World War. No indeed! These queues could scarcely be called queues at all, since they consisted for the most part of women shrieking insults and imprecations at each other, pushing each other out of the way and arguing spiritedly with the police who, for a time, tried to instil some sense of decorum into the crowds. But the women, en masse, were too much for the police, so they left them to fight out their battles. My mother and I awaited our turn, she with considerable asperity, and if anyone attempted to take her place, she rounded on them so venomous, that the attacker was forced to retire. Her sharp, uncompromising attitude brooked no interference and I admired her for being able to defend herself against these rough women.

Soon, Irfan’s family stopped going to claim the money. She would not go, and after an incident where a man tried to molest him, Irfan would not go either. Note what his mother said about how little it was worth, too. Inflation went berserk in Constantinople during the war.  From July 1914, to December 1918, the cost of living in Constantinople rose by 2,205%. Rents were going up by as much as 300% every year. For some apartments, at one stage, the rent doubled from month to month. The situation beyond the capital was no picnic either.

My interpretation was that although they had to downsize, and then move in with his grandmother, his family continued to own a home, but he painted a grim picture of Constantinople in the midst of war:

The world seemed suddenly full of the word and the noise of women weeping. All down the street news had begun to arrive of sons and brothers and fathers who had been killed at the front. There were no heated arguments now with the street sellers. The women wearily bought what they could afford, the young boys went off to join their fathers in the fighting and the street was given over to the dribbling babies and the dogs and the ever-ravenous cats. Each waking day brought fresh news from the front, of the appalling casualties we were suffering, and the Red Crescent trains came faster and thicker than ever, bringing the wounded and dying to Istanbul. There was not a woman in the little street but had someone at the front, even the widow downstairs, whose only son was away. Food was scarcer than ever, even if one had the money to buy it, and the Bourse Noir flourished unchecked and people dropped in the streets for lack of nourishment... My mother would make soups for us from a handful of lentils or dried peas, or serve plain, boiled haricot beans, conserving such precious items as rice and flour or olive oil for the leaner times just around the corner. Still she spent weary hours at the baker's, sometimes returning with bread, more often empty-handed. And we were always hungry, always longing for fresh, crusty slices of the bread we could not get.

THE POOREST IN SOCIETY

In many ways, despite his hunger and his decline in fortunes, Irfan’s family were lucky. There was money to eke out. His mother eventually went away to work for the army, leaving the children with their grandmother. For many thousands of women, much less fortunate than this family of carpet exporters, life grew progressively worse. As well as remarrying out of sheer necessity, Ottoman women the length and breadth of the empire did literally anything to survive, at the expense of their health, and their pride.

A young mother on the streets of Constantinople in 1919 (Library of Congress)

A woman named Sakire attempted to feed four children after the loss of her husband by illegally chopping firewood and selling it. Ayse, whose husband had been killed, worked as both a midwife and at bathing corpses. Another woman built a house with her own bare hands after hers burnt to the ground, whilst employed variously as a washerwoman, a quilt-maker and serving in Red Crescent soup kitchens. She even worked as a plasterer. A grandmother named Asiye took on her orphaned grandchildren and foraged for herbs in the mountains to feed them. Theft by women was rife throughout the Ottoman Empire, they stole food, money, anything to survive. In Constantinople the authorities even discovered an organised gang operating in 1917.

Women also resorted to prostitution in large numbers, both during and after the Armistice of 1918. Because even then, Turkey was still at war. In Constantinople, post WW1 figures reveal 2,171 registered prostitutes in the city, but that doesn’t include all of the women keeping their profession a secret, which was especially the case with Muslim women. I say women, but many of those acting as sex-workers were under the age of eighteen. Some were as young as thirteen, but there are also accounts of an orphan boy as young as seven offering himself in a park with a twelve year old friend.

The Ottoman state was not dead to the suffering of its people. In the case of prostitution, despite public outcry, whether out of pragmatism or sheer inability to control the problem, brothels were left to operate. In Izmir, women were even sent to a new district to operate so that prostitution was contained to one area. The local governor was dubbed the ‘big pimp’.  In one 1921 case, police claimed that they had left brothels to operate in order to contain the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Because this was the inevitable outcome of such a boom in the sex trade. Everything from syphilis and gonorrhoea, to crabs, and genital warts spread. In a 1922 book, Ahmet Rasim wrote that before the war, in Constantinople STDs were confined to non-muslims in certain areas, but that they were so prevalent through the whole of society after the war that talking about them in public was normal.

The problem was not just confined to the capital. According to one set of statistics, a third of all deaths in Izmir were as a result of STDs by 1919, and a local doctor claimed that 80% of the population was infected with something in this vein. It was the same in some rural areas. In Giresun, the local doctor claimed that syphilis was present in 20% of the population. Women did not have to actually be sex workers to become part of this broad epidemic. For many, they contracted STDs when their husbands brought them home from brothels.

No women in Irfan Orga’s family had to resort to prostitution. Neither were they ever refugees, a fate that found tens of thousands of women and girls like Fatma, who was four years old when her family left Erzurum in 1914. She fell from an ox cart at a crossroads as her family fled the Russians. She would not find them again until 1975.

Because of Turkey’s constant wars, the state had already tried to address problems like mass homelessness. Already during the Balkan Wars, efforts to settle refugees had been outsourced to private contractors because the state could not cope. These contractors were alive to the fact that the less they did for the refugees, the more money they banked. Then the First World War obliterated the Balkan conflicts in scale. The state did try to care for them. The budget for settling refugees had multiplied sixteen times by 1916, workshops for widows were founded to train them for employment, but the sheer volume of people needing assistance limited help in all of these fields to a minority.

Irfan’s family managed to keep a roof over their heads. Aside from homeless refugees, other women could not keep pace with astronomical inflation and lost everything. The numbers of homeless women and their children throughout the Ottoman Empire rose significantly during the war. A 1920 survey found that destitute war widows and refugees in Constantinople were crammed into mosques, or poorhouses, and that widows who had spare rooms were renting them out to as many people as possible to try and make ends meet. Rooms reportedly had an average of four people living in each one. Half naked, malnourished people wandered the empire. This article focuses on women, but orphaned children were a constant sight, as they starved to death on the streets. Child mortality was rampant during the war. One witness, Muzaffer Lermioglu, claimed that on one night in 1917, he watched the authorities collect 23 dead children for burial in a mass grave.

The Ottoman state went out of their way to protect women faced with homelessness during the war, but it was a losing battle. In September 1914, a law was introduced that looked at housing those whose homes had been destroyed by acts of war. In certain areas, refugees were allowed, once, to go out and take the wood they needed from state forests at no cost so that they might construct a house. By 1915, the government were also giving away empty houses and vacant land to war widows. Demolishing empty buildings was made illegal to some extent. They also passed a law that year that made it illegal to evict soldiers’ families if they could not make their rent.

Refugee women in Marsovan wait for work. They are believed to be a combination of Turkish and Armenian (Library of Congress)

With a brutal inevitability, some women were forced to accept that they could not look after their children, and considered giving them up. One solution that Irfan’s mother turned to was to send the children to boarding school. These were a free byproduct of the Balkan Wars, for those whose fathers had been killed and whose mothers could not make ends meet, and all through 1914-1918 demand for this measure massively outstripped what was available. At least then, there was hope that your child would return to you in better times. If women could not get their children into a boarding school, some of them turned instead to state orphanages. In the most harrowing of circumstances, some women deserted their children, willingly. Abandonment and even infanticide was prevalent, among women who were absolutely destitute, and among those who had had to resort to prostitution and had been caught out.

I’ve gone on a bit, sorry. It’s not a competition, I know, but I’ve only skimmed the surface. In many ways I feel like cultural differences, state inadequacies in bureaucracy/potential corruption unique to Turkey and of course, the matter of defeat, conspired to make the First World War a particularly heinous experience for the women of the Ottoman Empire, and I just wanted to talk about it.

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Elif Mahir Metinsoy’s book is the source for much of this article. She’s done an amazing job, and there is so much more to it. It’s called, Ottoman Women in the First World War and it was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press.

Irfan Orga’s memoir is called Portrait of a Turkish Family. Thanks to my friend Tuncay Yilmazer for recommending it to me as a source for the book I’ve got coming out with Nicolai Eberholst about 1914. You can see more of his story next year when that comes out, and his grandmother’s, but the book is available in English, and is a poignant read. I highly recommend it.