Books by Gülhan Balsoy
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This book examines the politicization of reproduction in the mid- to late nineteenth century Otto... more This book examines the politicization of reproduction in the mid- to late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. In a period marked by massive demographic changes that made the Ottoman state anxious about the fate of its population, female sexuality was increasingly subjected to medical and legal control. In this book, I investigate the ways this control shaped the female experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion. Through an examination of these three subject matters, I demonstrate that, in the late Ottoman history, reproduction was not a natural experience but a political subject.
In this book, I submit that the population policies of the nineteenth century were predominantly formulated through women’s sexuality and the female body. Although I do not focus on the quantitative aspect of demographic changes, the demographic transformations, and the pronatalist battle fought to compensate the loss of population constitute the immediate historical context of this book. Amidst a period of demographic turbulence brought by territorial losses, migration movements, and epidemics, the Ottoman ruling elites sought ways to hinder the factors that led to the decrease of its population and initiated policies to promote its further increase. In order to achieve these two complementary goals, the Ottoman government focused its attention on the fecundity of women, and sought for ways to lower the high infant mortality rates and control the widespread occurrence of abortion, especially among the Muslim women of the empire.
Ottoman pronatalism was formulated through three registers: The medicalization of childbirth and the professionalization of midwifery, bans on abortion, and thirdly the medicalization of pregnancy and the discipline of the female body. In order to decrease maternal mortality rates, Ottoman medical and bureaucratic elites sought ways to improve the medical standards of childbirth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Transformation and enhancement of the practices of childbirth brought the education and licensing of midwives, who were the prime agents delivering women in the Ottoman society. Male midwives and obstetricians were also educated and trained first in Europe and then on Ottoman lands. The use of new medical technologies such as forceps, and the opening of a maternity hospital were also some of the other means through which the medical standards at childbirths were improved. Moreover, the functions, rights, and responsibilities of the midwives’ and doctors’ as well as the boundaries that demarcated their practices were defined by numerous laws and regulations.
The policies and discourses to ban abortion was the second major venue of Ottoman pronatalism. While the Ottoman authorities were trying to implement policies to improve health standards at childbirth, they also sought ways to decrease abortions, which they saw as the main means of birth control among Muslim women of the empire and hence the main reason of population decrease. However, Ottoman authorities did more than complaining about the practice of abortion and besides criminalizing it by legal measures, the Ottoman authorities developed social policies to discourage abortion, such as offering financial aid to families to raise children. An anti-abortion campaign which stretched over a few decades was carried out on discursive, legal and everyday policy levels. Examination of the anti-abortion campaign reveals that population policies of the nineteenth century were framed through gender and leading to the politicization of female sexuality. The pronatalist policies sometimes held women responsible for the relative low rate of population growth, sometimes asked them to bear and tend children for the wellbeing of the country, but always invoked assumptions about femininity and what the ideal woman was like. Giving birth was seen as a humanitarian and national duty, while abortion was associated with murder.
In the period I investigate, health care during pregnancy also received the attention of medical doctors. They maintained that a healthy pregnancy was the precondition of having a secure childbirth and raising healthy children. In order to draw wider attention to the importance of proper health care during gestation, they expressed their ideas by publishing advice books targeting pregnant women. The prescriptive literature on pregnancy conceptualized this important female experience as a medical event that should be checked and controlled by the experts. The normative sources redefined the female body as a maternal body, and they advocated disciplining it in the light of prescriptions expressed by the medical doctors. Along with the medicalization of pregnancy, the situation of those women who failed to conceive or experience pregnancy was also problematized. Female infertility was the final venue of Ottoman pronatalism. Ottoman intellectuals and medical doctors saw infertility as one final factor hindering their goals to promote population increase and sought ways to cure it through the latest medical innovations and the manipulation of diet and life style changes. Through the examination of transformation of midwifery, bans on abortion, changes in the practices of childbirth, the medicalization of pregnancy as well as infertility, I demonstrate that Ottoman pronatalist battle was fought on medical, institutional, legal, and discursive grounds alike.
The anxieties about the fate of the population were not universal, however. The government authorities were merely worried about the “Muslim” population and overtly showed that they were not concerned about protecting the extant demographic composition. They lamented that while the Muslim population was declining, the non-Muslim, and especially the Christian population, was on the rise. In this sense, I challenge the idea that the Tanzimat ideals were about creating an “Ottoman” identity formulated on the grounds of loyalty toward the Sultan. I, on the contrary, argue that the concerns to create a more homogenous population started in the 1840s, much earlier than usually stated. The very basis of the Ottoman government’s pronatalist assumptions was that the Christian population was enjoying growth and prosperity while the Muslim population was declining and falling into increasing poverty. The documents on abortion overtly express this idea. In this sense, this book significantly contributes to a rethinking of identity politics and the demographic prospects of the Ottoman government in the nineteenth century.
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Papers by Gülhan Balsoy
International Journal of Middle East Studies
In 1914, a Turkish novella depicting a young woman pressing a dagger to the throat of a bearded o... more In 1914, a Turkish novella depicting a young woman pressing a dagger to the throat of a bearded old man on its cover, with the title Bloody Fairy (Kanlı Peri), appeared for sale on bookshelves in the capital of the Ottoman Empire (Fig. 1). This relatively small book of fifty-four pages, with its price as low as 50 paras, was available to almost anybody who wanted to purchase and read it. Bloody Fairy was the first of a popular series of ten murder mysteries, National Collection of Murders (Milli Cinayat Koleksiyonu), written by Süleyman Sudi and Vassaf Kadri. On the back cover of the first book, the publishers promised readers that the series would tell matchless mysterious and murderous stories that “will arouse curiosity and excitement” (merak-aver ve heyecan-amiz ) among readers. This cover image must have been rather curious since popular crime fiction usually featured male protagonists as their central characters. In those books women were almost always the target, not the ones...
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Middle Eastern Studies, 2020
This article presents an analysis of the first recognisably modern-style death registers in the O... more This article presents an analysis of the first recognisably modern-style death registers in the Ottoman Empire. These were produced, in 1838–9, as a result of the state’s reaction to the cholera pandemic of 1831. This article shows how these registers were designed and structured, how they differed to those that preceded and came after them and so occupied a key point in the transition to the medicalisation of death and the import of Western-style statistical analysis. The article demonstrates how these registers offer details that can be used to build a picture of the social, economic and demographic profile of death in Istanbul in these years.
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This article will examine the two foundational campaigns of the feminist movement after 1980s, th... more This article will examine the two foundational campaigns of the feminist movement after 1980s, the Campaign Against Battering of Women and Purple Needle Campaign. While these two campaigns problematized and struggled against “violence against women” and “sexual harassment/sexual assault” respectively, these forms of attacks on women’s bodies did not have proper names in Turkish back then, when the two campaigns were carried out. Rather than “violence against women” terms such as battering, beating, hitting were used in Turkish to refer to this problem. There was no term to cover the terms “sexual harassment” or “sexual assault” in Turkish either, and highly visualized terms such as touching a woman’s body, pinching were some of the most widely used ones to describe the unwanted attacks on female bodies. This article traces the history of the terms, “violence against women” and “sexual harassment/sexual assault”, in Turkish and argues that both terms were coined throughout the proces...
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Middle Eastern Studies, 2018
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Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 2019
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International Review of Social History, 2009
SummaryThis article examines the “mutual distancing” between Ottoman labor history and women’s an... more SummaryThis article examines the “mutual distancing” between Ottoman labor history and women’s and gender history. For this purpose, I first summarize the scholarship produced by each field and scrutinize the ways in which both fields have remained unresponsive toward one another. I then offer a specific way to make women visible to labor history in the particular setting of the Cibali Régie Factory in the early decades of the twentieth century. Using photographic images of the factory and an approach which applies gender as a conceptual tool of historical analysis, I discuss the social conditions of work, the sexual division of labor, and the channels through which power structures were established in the Cibali factory. This study does not claim to present a comprehensive history of labor in the Ottoman Empire; my goal is rather to make women visible to labor history, to remind one that women were present on the shop floor, and to discuss how the available sources can be interpret...
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Toplumsal Tarih, 2020
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This article examines a largely overlooked topic in scholarship on Ottoman history and discusses ... more This article examines a largely overlooked topic in scholarship on Ottoman history and discusses the cases of the murder of infants in Ottoman towns and cities. Based on the archive findings, I ask questions such as what were the motivations behind child murder, who carried out this act, who were the victims, what were the methods used, and how extensive it was in the Ottoman society. The nature of this crime also force us to problematize the available documentation and hence I also discuss the nature of the sources that offer us a glimpse of the infanticide cases. I demonstrate how social status and gendered hierarchies in Ottoman society intermingle in the infanticide cases and the choice to murder babies as a means of birth control. In sum, this article discusses the links between child murder and poverty, illegitimacy, and most important of all, the experience of being a lonely, single and poor woman in the Ottoman society.
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Book Reviews by Gülhan Balsoy
Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 2019
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New Perspectives on Turkey, 2018
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Books by Gülhan Balsoy
In this book, I submit that the population policies of the nineteenth century were predominantly formulated through women’s sexuality and the female body. Although I do not focus on the quantitative aspect of demographic changes, the demographic transformations, and the pronatalist battle fought to compensate the loss of population constitute the immediate historical context of this book. Amidst a period of demographic turbulence brought by territorial losses, migration movements, and epidemics, the Ottoman ruling elites sought ways to hinder the factors that led to the decrease of its population and initiated policies to promote its further increase. In order to achieve these two complementary goals, the Ottoman government focused its attention on the fecundity of women, and sought for ways to lower the high infant mortality rates and control the widespread occurrence of abortion, especially among the Muslim women of the empire.
Ottoman pronatalism was formulated through three registers: The medicalization of childbirth and the professionalization of midwifery, bans on abortion, and thirdly the medicalization of pregnancy and the discipline of the female body. In order to decrease maternal mortality rates, Ottoman medical and bureaucratic elites sought ways to improve the medical standards of childbirth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Transformation and enhancement of the practices of childbirth brought the education and licensing of midwives, who were the prime agents delivering women in the Ottoman society. Male midwives and obstetricians were also educated and trained first in Europe and then on Ottoman lands. The use of new medical technologies such as forceps, and the opening of a maternity hospital were also some of the other means through which the medical standards at childbirths were improved. Moreover, the functions, rights, and responsibilities of the midwives’ and doctors’ as well as the boundaries that demarcated their practices were defined by numerous laws and regulations.
The policies and discourses to ban abortion was the second major venue of Ottoman pronatalism. While the Ottoman authorities were trying to implement policies to improve health standards at childbirth, they also sought ways to decrease abortions, which they saw as the main means of birth control among Muslim women of the empire and hence the main reason of population decrease. However, Ottoman authorities did more than complaining about the practice of abortion and besides criminalizing it by legal measures, the Ottoman authorities developed social policies to discourage abortion, such as offering financial aid to families to raise children. An anti-abortion campaign which stretched over a few decades was carried out on discursive, legal and everyday policy levels. Examination of the anti-abortion campaign reveals that population policies of the nineteenth century were framed through gender and leading to the politicization of female sexuality. The pronatalist policies sometimes held women responsible for the relative low rate of population growth, sometimes asked them to bear and tend children for the wellbeing of the country, but always invoked assumptions about femininity and what the ideal woman was like. Giving birth was seen as a humanitarian and national duty, while abortion was associated with murder.
In the period I investigate, health care during pregnancy also received the attention of medical doctors. They maintained that a healthy pregnancy was the precondition of having a secure childbirth and raising healthy children. In order to draw wider attention to the importance of proper health care during gestation, they expressed their ideas by publishing advice books targeting pregnant women. The prescriptive literature on pregnancy conceptualized this important female experience as a medical event that should be checked and controlled by the experts. The normative sources redefined the female body as a maternal body, and they advocated disciplining it in the light of prescriptions expressed by the medical doctors. Along with the medicalization of pregnancy, the situation of those women who failed to conceive or experience pregnancy was also problematized. Female infertility was the final venue of Ottoman pronatalism. Ottoman intellectuals and medical doctors saw infertility as one final factor hindering their goals to promote population increase and sought ways to cure it through the latest medical innovations and the manipulation of diet and life style changes. Through the examination of transformation of midwifery, bans on abortion, changes in the practices of childbirth, the medicalization of pregnancy as well as infertility, I demonstrate that Ottoman pronatalist battle was fought on medical, institutional, legal, and discursive grounds alike.
The anxieties about the fate of the population were not universal, however. The government authorities were merely worried about the “Muslim” population and overtly showed that they were not concerned about protecting the extant demographic composition. They lamented that while the Muslim population was declining, the non-Muslim, and especially the Christian population, was on the rise. In this sense, I challenge the idea that the Tanzimat ideals were about creating an “Ottoman” identity formulated on the grounds of loyalty toward the Sultan. I, on the contrary, argue that the concerns to create a more homogenous population started in the 1840s, much earlier than usually stated. The very basis of the Ottoman government’s pronatalist assumptions was that the Christian population was enjoying growth and prosperity while the Muslim population was declining and falling into increasing poverty. The documents on abortion overtly express this idea. In this sense, this book significantly contributes to a rethinking of identity politics and the demographic prospects of the Ottoman government in the nineteenth century.
Papers by Gülhan Balsoy
Book Reviews by Gülhan Balsoy
In this book, I submit that the population policies of the nineteenth century were predominantly formulated through women’s sexuality and the female body. Although I do not focus on the quantitative aspect of demographic changes, the demographic transformations, and the pronatalist battle fought to compensate the loss of population constitute the immediate historical context of this book. Amidst a period of demographic turbulence brought by territorial losses, migration movements, and epidemics, the Ottoman ruling elites sought ways to hinder the factors that led to the decrease of its population and initiated policies to promote its further increase. In order to achieve these two complementary goals, the Ottoman government focused its attention on the fecundity of women, and sought for ways to lower the high infant mortality rates and control the widespread occurrence of abortion, especially among the Muslim women of the empire.
Ottoman pronatalism was formulated through three registers: The medicalization of childbirth and the professionalization of midwifery, bans on abortion, and thirdly the medicalization of pregnancy and the discipline of the female body. In order to decrease maternal mortality rates, Ottoman medical and bureaucratic elites sought ways to improve the medical standards of childbirth in the second half of the nineteenth century. Transformation and enhancement of the practices of childbirth brought the education and licensing of midwives, who were the prime agents delivering women in the Ottoman society. Male midwives and obstetricians were also educated and trained first in Europe and then on Ottoman lands. The use of new medical technologies such as forceps, and the opening of a maternity hospital were also some of the other means through which the medical standards at childbirths were improved. Moreover, the functions, rights, and responsibilities of the midwives’ and doctors’ as well as the boundaries that demarcated their practices were defined by numerous laws and regulations.
The policies and discourses to ban abortion was the second major venue of Ottoman pronatalism. While the Ottoman authorities were trying to implement policies to improve health standards at childbirth, they also sought ways to decrease abortions, which they saw as the main means of birth control among Muslim women of the empire and hence the main reason of population decrease. However, Ottoman authorities did more than complaining about the practice of abortion and besides criminalizing it by legal measures, the Ottoman authorities developed social policies to discourage abortion, such as offering financial aid to families to raise children. An anti-abortion campaign which stretched over a few decades was carried out on discursive, legal and everyday policy levels. Examination of the anti-abortion campaign reveals that population policies of the nineteenth century were framed through gender and leading to the politicization of female sexuality. The pronatalist policies sometimes held women responsible for the relative low rate of population growth, sometimes asked them to bear and tend children for the wellbeing of the country, but always invoked assumptions about femininity and what the ideal woman was like. Giving birth was seen as a humanitarian and national duty, while abortion was associated with murder.
In the period I investigate, health care during pregnancy also received the attention of medical doctors. They maintained that a healthy pregnancy was the precondition of having a secure childbirth and raising healthy children. In order to draw wider attention to the importance of proper health care during gestation, they expressed their ideas by publishing advice books targeting pregnant women. The prescriptive literature on pregnancy conceptualized this important female experience as a medical event that should be checked and controlled by the experts. The normative sources redefined the female body as a maternal body, and they advocated disciplining it in the light of prescriptions expressed by the medical doctors. Along with the medicalization of pregnancy, the situation of those women who failed to conceive or experience pregnancy was also problematized. Female infertility was the final venue of Ottoman pronatalism. Ottoman intellectuals and medical doctors saw infertility as one final factor hindering their goals to promote population increase and sought ways to cure it through the latest medical innovations and the manipulation of diet and life style changes. Through the examination of transformation of midwifery, bans on abortion, changes in the practices of childbirth, the medicalization of pregnancy as well as infertility, I demonstrate that Ottoman pronatalist battle was fought on medical, institutional, legal, and discursive grounds alike.
The anxieties about the fate of the population were not universal, however. The government authorities were merely worried about the “Muslim” population and overtly showed that they were not concerned about protecting the extant demographic composition. They lamented that while the Muslim population was declining, the non-Muslim, and especially the Christian population, was on the rise. In this sense, I challenge the idea that the Tanzimat ideals were about creating an “Ottoman” identity formulated on the grounds of loyalty toward the Sultan. I, on the contrary, argue that the concerns to create a more homogenous population started in the 1840s, much earlier than usually stated. The very basis of the Ottoman government’s pronatalist assumptions was that the Christian population was enjoying growth and prosperity while the Muslim population was declining and falling into increasing poverty. The documents on abortion overtly express this idea. In this sense, this book significantly contributes to a rethinking of identity politics and the demographic prospects of the Ottoman government in the nineteenth century.
1 Mayıs’ta, işçinin emekçinin bayramında, hem geçmiş 1 Mayıs’ları, hem de onları yaratanları hatırlamak üzere, Türkiye emek mücadelesinin geçmişine doğru bir yolculuğa çıkacağız. Bu yolculukta, Stefo Benlisoy ve Yaşar Tolga Cora meseleyi farklı toplumsal grupların, bu arada etnik ve dinsel topluluklara mensup işçi ve emekçilerin deneyimleri aracılığıyla aktarırken, Gülhan Balsoy da, bu deneyimlerin toplumsal cinsiyet boyutunu tartışacak. Etkinliği Rober Koptaş yönetecek.