4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
4.4 Gender and Women's Dress in the Late Ottoman Empire
Women of the Ottoman elite altered their dress significantly with modernization under the system of Western fashions.148 Different approaches to transcultural exchange between Ottoman and British women become apparent according to Reina Lewis' study on the biographies of several women, British and Ottoman citizens, who engaged in practices of cultural cross-dressing. She stresses the great extent to which boundaries between imaginations of Orient and Occident were blurred by these practices or had already been blurred, as they never really existed as rigid boundaries, while at the same times these women reaffirmed binary constructions of East and West.149
While Ottoman male styles basically adopted European clothing items, with some exceptions such as the istanbulin and the fez, the modernization of Ottoman women's dress implied the “invention” of completely new items of dress or a reinterpretation of already existing ones. Nora Şeni depicts how the çarşaf appeared next to the ferace as an outer coat.150 It was a two-piece item that consisted of skirt and cape, and thus,induced the transition to the wearing of a skirt, in contrast to the common wearing of baggy pants. And the entari/antari, a long blouse, was altered and became like its European counterpart thereby radically transforming Ottoman women's dress as it enabled the use of a corset, an item of extensive controversy for its encroachment on the female body and morality.151 Women's headdress was also affected by these changes. Among the upper and middle classes the hat become quite common; it was combined with a veil attached to it.152 Women's wearing of the fez gave way to the new fashions, and ceased completely in favour of more fashionable headpieces. It appears that in women's fashion the fez became
148 Despite the sartorial differentiation of religious communities Ottoman on legal grounds it is assumed that Christian, Jewish and Muslim women dressed similar, see Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Introduction, or Why and How One Might Want to Study Ottoman Clothes’, in Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K Neumann (Istanbul: Eren, 2004), 24.
149 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism.
150 The ferace itself had a quite recent appearance. A fact that cautions to be careful about the view on the stable character of preindustrial styles, the changes that brought about not neglected. On the appearance of the ferace in the eighteenth century see Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Female Costumes in the Late Fifteenth Century’, in Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K Neumann (Istanbul: Eren, 2004), 87.
151 See Nora Şeni, ‘Fashion and Women’s Clothing in the Satirical Press of İstanbul at the End of the 19th Century’, in Women in Modern Turkish Society, ed. Şirin Tekeli (London und New York: Zed Books Ltd., 1991), 29; on the replacement of the ferace see Ibid., 31; On these kind of developments concerning Ottoman women's dress in the nineteenth century see also Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism.
152 See Şeni, ‘Fashion and Women’s Clothing in the Satirical Press of İstanbul at the End of the 19th Century,’ 35.
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
obsolete earlier then it did for men’s fashion, having never really acquired the meaning of an explicit marker of Ottoman modernity.153
Lewis attributes specific significance to the wearing of the hat for both Ottoman men and women in the politics of dress and the appropriation of Western dress. While indoor dress had been Europeanized to a great extent, as several authors demonstrated, the wearing of the hat marked a different level since it came along with the gendered construction of space. While women's Western dress in public was mostly covered by some sort of overcoat, such as the ferace or carşaf, and even though these were already altered or even invented to accommodate the new styles underneath, the hat secured a different level of visibility, as Lewis asserts.154 She attributes a “synecdochial function” to the hat, for both the male and the female version. Thus, even though Ottoman men's and women's dress both had been Westernized to a great extent, in public space it was staged differently. While women's dress was equipped with a “Ottoman cover,” men's dress, even though it had some specificity, such as the İstanbulin, was fully Westernized in the streets as well as at home.155
Because of this altering and accustoming of modern dress to Ottoman practices and styles, as Reina Lewis suggests, it might be more proper to talk of adaptation rather than adoption. Therefore, while European dress could be a vehicle to induce modernity, it is uncertain and parochial modernity that is produced. Lewis points out that European clothes, though adopted widely by both elite Ottoman men and women, “were already indigenized into the specialized protocols of Ottoman dress.” Thus the adaptation of European dress took place within connections between imperial European power and local powers, which encompassed patriarchies as well as class systems. Within these dynamics class positions were secured and established through “association with colonizing powers.”156
153 See Ayşe Zeren Enis, Everyday Lives of Ottoman Muslim Women: Hanımlara Mahsûs Gazete (Newspaper for Ladies) (1895 - 1908), 1st ed., Tarih Dizisi, Libra Kitap. - İstanbul 60 (İstanbul: Libra Kitap, 2013).
154 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 228.
155 Actually that is a question that needs further research, i.e. from autobiographies to see what kind of dress was sported for which occasions.
156 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 6; that has been elaborated extensively regarding the Indian male elites by Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress 4.4.1 Urban Jungles and Bourgeois Homes
The concept of borderland discussed in the previous chapter has been used in the field of women's dress by Onur Inal, who draws on the example of port cities to reveal a mutual exchange of cultural goods between British and Ottoman women that transgressed the Westernization paradigm.157 Ottoman women adopted European fashions increasingly from mid nineteenth century on, and even before that styles had been altered due to contact. The adoption of Western dress occurred in a much more informal manner, contrary to men's dress introduced by imperial decrees. And (upper and middle class) women used to wear hybrid styles with varying combinations of Ottoman and European pieces of dress in contrast to the almost complete Western style men. Notwithstanding, Ottoman dress was completely abandoned by the 1860s/1870s in certain social classes.158
The change of consumption patterns in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire came along with a transformation of gendered spaces and gender relations.159 These transformations were triggered significantly during the Hamidian period. Elisabeth Frierson analyses the gendered meaning of these patterns and how they developed. She regards the 1890s as crucial in this respect because the main factors conditioning socio-economic transformations, the print sector, the education system and commerce, expanded exponentially during that period.160 These factors led to changing state-society relations in which basic terms of social interactions, such as the meaning of religion and its
157 See Onur Inal, ‘Women’s Fashions in Transition: Ottoman Borderlands and the Anglo-Ottoman Exchange of Costumes’, Journal of World History: Official Journal of the World History Association 22, no. 2 (2011): 243–72.
158 See Anastasia Falierou, ‘Ottoman Turkish Women’s Clothing between Trade, Tradition and Modernity’, in From Traditional Attire to Modern Dress: Modes of Identification, Modes of Recognition in the Balkans (XVIth - XXth Centuries), ed. Constanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publ., 2011), 175–93. On the global spread of the newest styles, in this case designed for females, and with it bourgeois identity from the fashion center Paris, where designers took their inspirations from local styles on a global scale see Kristin Hoganson, ‘The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress’, in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and threw the Nation, ed. Antoinette M. Burton (Durham, NC [u.a.]: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 260–78.
159 The interrelation of modernization of dress and the reorganization of gendered spaces needs further study. Christine Ruane already remarked for the dress reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century that these brought about a change in gender relations through a transformation of gendered spaces. In that case it meant the common socializing of men and women on certain occasions, that did not exist before. See Ruane, ‘Subjects into Citizens: The Politics of Clothing in Imperial Russia’.
160 Frierson concentrates on developments in Istanbul as example par excellence for these tendencies. See Elisabeth B. Frierson, ‘Gender, Consumption, and Patriotism : The Emergence of an Ottoman Public Sphere’, in Public Islam and the Common Good, ed. Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East. - Leiden : Brill, 1971- 95 (Leiden [u.a.]: Brill, 2004), 99–125.
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
implications to determine social relations, became redefined. Unlike many accounts which stress the rigidity of Hamidian censorship and the conservative traits of Abdülhamid's regime Frierson pointed out that the print sector developed to a much greater extent then usually acknowledged, as did its readership, due to growing literacy rates.161
Concerning gender identities, in this case women's identities, the education system made its contributions to change, too. Women on the one hand became better educated and were on the other trained for professional careers within the education system and beyond. In terms of consumption they became visible as consumers while they also took part in production through the professionalising of female skills, such as sewing and weaving, as well as in newly found factories and workshops. These women appeared in and shaped public spaces due to their employment in wage labor, and they represented transformed consumption patterns with their changing styles of dress. This new culture of display, promoted by new departments stores, which sold Western fashion, thus was a crucial part of the transformation of a gendered political economy. While men's fashion was characterized by a call to uniformity and drabness, the regulating emphasis on women's dress was put on modesty. Even though especially Muslim women did not openly display their latest Western fashions, their outerware was not untouched by these trends and it became distinctively embroidered, ornamented and colored. These were regarded by some forces and actors in society as transgressions of accepted boundaries, but interestingly Frierson shows that repressive interventions were mostly unsuccessful and women continued these clothing practices undeterred.162
New styles of women's dress and the Westernization of dress in general had several economic effects that were also linked to gender relations. Female workforces and migrant workers provided a cheap workforce for the Hamidian regime to support and establish Ottoman textile enterprises to counter European dominance of the market. The textile sector also had close ties to the growing print market, especially illustrated by women's magazines, which promoted the newest fashions as well as the purchase of local products.
Within the domain of the home the modernization of dress and other items also shaped gender relations. With reorganization of space inside the house towards
161 See Ibid., 105.
162 Frierson objects the assumption that these modernized practices, such as dress, were restricted to a few elite women, but encompassed at least the middle classes. See Ibid., 116.
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
functionality and the spread of Western furniture the former selamlik, the space where men met with other men, was transformed into a living room where men and women of the house received their guest and appeared both “to present the best formal image available” braking partially with former gender segregation.163 Thus, the home could be both a public space for the presentation of the newest fashions and a private sphere where different dress codes might find expression.164
In her comparison of Ottoman and Japanese adaptation of Western culture, Selçuk Esenbel especially focuses on dress and related codes of conduct and the home. According to Esenbel, in contrast to the Ottoman Empire, Japan in the Meiji period had an explicit program of encompassing Westernization to prove that the country was 'civilized' enough to obtain a revision of unequal trade treaties and thus restore sovereignty.165
Nevertheless, similar to the Ottoman Empire, a critique of this approach to Westernization existed. Similar to the Young Ottoman's critique of the Tanzimat politics as imposed by the West, the rising middle class in Japan criticized the Meiji bureaucracy for embracing standards set by the West. In Japan, another famous example from the nineteenth century, an edict issued 1872 had made Western clothing compulsory for government officials. Additionally, in 1876, the frock coat became a must for business men.166 The critique expressed by the Japanese middle class was especially directed towards the official Western garb of Meiji elite. This critique emerged after the Japanese-Russian War in which Japan regained national sovereignty, including the revision of the trade treaties with the West. One intellectual explicitly linked Western dress to emasculation by stating “we the Japanese can dispense with wearing the Western morning coat and its trappings and proudly wear our manly hakama167 again.”168
In this quote it is striking that Fukuzawa Yukichi refers to dress worn in private
163 Selçuk Esenbel, ‘The Anguish of Civilized Behavior: The Use of Western Cultural Forms in the Everyday Lives of the Meiji Japanese and the Ottoman Turks During the Nineteenth Century’, Japan Review, no. 5 (1 January 1994), 156.
164 On a critical review of the public/privat dichotomy, the production of gendered spaces, bourgeois homes and the harem, see also İrvin Cemil Schick, ‘The Harem as Gendered Space and the Spatial Reproduction of Gender’, in Harem Histories : Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham [u.a.]:
Duke Univ. Press, 2010), 69–86.
165 Esenbel, ‘The Anguish of Civilized Behavior,’, 159 and 169.
166 See Ross, Clothing, 109.
167 A traditional kind of trousers worn over the Kimono.
168 From the autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi Yukichi Fukuzawa, The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, ed. Eiichi Kiyooka, The Library of Japan (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 2007) as quoted by Esenbel, ‘The Anguish of Civilized Behavior,’ 162.
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
spaces, the morning coat, and he touches thereby one of the main difference between Ottoman and Japanese adoption/appropriation of Western dress. While Ottoman elites accomplished an almost full shift to Western dress inside the home for both men and women, in Japan it became widespread practice to wear fully Westernized dress outside the home and change into Japanese dress at home.
Nevertheless, if we return to the case of Orman katibi Mehmed Efendi, presented in Chapter Four who showed up in his entari combined with, allegedly, a hat, this hypothesis might be questioned. Either the entari here was a European morning coat, labelled as entari because of the resemblance and similar function of both, or he combined it within a mixture of private and public space because he was in his (temporary) home, where a public event took place, the theater play. I suggest that he felt very comfortable because it seems he just donned what he liked and what he would not have displayed in a different (public) space, that is, a morning coat, of whatever origin or belonging, along with a Western hat. Both items he would have usually not displayed in public, but as he felt himself at home at the hostel and display himself wearing these garments, he was undoubtedly surprised by the ensuing criminal prosecution of his dress.
Discourses about the dandy were closely related to a gendered perception of the city. While urban centres were often perceived as the centre of civilization, they were also the home of the laboring classes, which represented, in a racialized manner, the limits of the civilizing process. Hence, Christopher Forth argues, was the city racialized as the Other and gendered female, a “jungle” to be conquered by bourgeois men when strolling at night. Forth compares the nocturnal conquering of the towns by these men with the exploration of forbidden realms of their bodies.169 The dandy became the other side of the “public face of bourgeois masculinity.”170 Elif Bilgin, too, regards the interrelation of masculinity and modernity as crucial to the analysis of transformations in the realm of the public sphere. For her the modern notion of public space was constructed as a masculine space. Through the reorganization of space the public man became established through the figure of the flâneur and the stranger. Bilgin considers the Ottoman dandy a more precarious figure then his central European counterpart. The
169 Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West, 61.
170 Ibid., 59.
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
flâneur generally walked on the edge of what was permissible and most of the time beyond. Even though the dandy was regarded as deviant from the norm in Western metropolis, too, she concludes that the Ottoman dandy's perceived effeminate appearance had a different and greater political significance.171
In Britain, the new plain style that began to spread in the late eighteenth century became a demarcation line against women and foreigners, particularly the French.172 The new style meant in spatial terms also the exclusion of women from public space. Thus it was a style that symbolized male dominance with a new livery: “It was, of course, a style in which the distinction between the sexes, and between the spheres which the sexes should inhabit, was maximized. The men were drab, understated and powerful: the women fluffy, decorative and without a place in the public world. Men were fully covered, except for the head and the hands; at various periods, and on suitable occasions, women might display their shoulders and parts of the upper chest. […].”173 For Ross these divergent principles of male and female dress signified the exclusion of women from the world of business.
4.4.2 Sexuality
The gendered discourse on fashion not only reinforced binary gender categories but also produced perceptions of sexual deviance and the construction of the homosexual as an ontological category. Men's preoccupation with dress became associated with male same- sex relations and passions. This discourse on sexuality contributed to the normalizing tendencies of the hegemonic discourse on masculinity of that period.174 Already with the dawn of the modern age luxury consumption had been linked also very closely to sexuality. Male consumers of luxury were imputed to exercise same-sex relations or other sexual acts regarded as deviant. Before the establishment of a notion of homosexuality men were accused of sodomy, which could comprise a variety more acts besides same-sex relations i.e. masturbation.
As Dror Ze'evi demonstrates the nineteenth century Ottoman discourse can be
171 See Bilgin, ‘An Analysis of Turkish Modernity through Discourses of Masculinities’.
172 Ross, Clothing, 32.
173 Ibid., 37.
174 See i.e. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, Reprint [der Ausg.] New York 1985. (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
4 The Gender of Modernity and Ottoman Dress
characterized by a silencing of sexually explicit utterances and same-sex practices.175 Thus even though sexuality is not explicitly mentioned in the discussions around headgear I suggest that what was engendered by that silencing was the production of a heterosexual masculine subjectivity in the course of nation-building via headgear.
Therefore while talking about the construction of citizenship and belonging, interdependent relations of gender, sexuality and class were under negotiation. They can
Therefore while talking about the construction of citizenship and belonging, interdependent relations of gender, sexuality and class were under negotiation. They can