2024/09/01 by Nazan Maksudyan · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #European history and politics #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/19475020.2025.2488284
openalex publication_date 2024/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
In contrast to their male counterparts in apprenticeships, secondary education and technical training, there is a gap in scholarship on the education of (Muslim, unmarried) Ottoman women in Germany during the First World War as part of an educational collaboration between two empires. This article presents a wealth of new insights into the lives of this group of young women, based on research into official documentation from the Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives, the Political Archive of the Foreign Office, the Federal Archives in Berlin and the Secret State Archives, supplemented by personal documents and biographical sources. In particular, I focus on the Heidelberg diary of Şaziye Hayri (1899–1994), held from 20 February 1918 to 26 January 1919. The diary offers insights into the experiences of young women in German cities and educational institutions during wartime, thereby enriching our understanding of the interplay of gender dynamics in such exceptional conditions. Furthermore, the diary provides valuable insights into women’s experiences and explorations into gender, body, and sexuality. I argue that these women arrived in Germany with high hopes of achieving emancipation, independence, self-sufficiency, and individualisation. Their emancipated lifestyles during and after the war led them to seek a similar space of freedom in their later lives and helped them develop a more grounded sense of agency and self-respect. Nevertheless, in the context of the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s, the anti-intellectual, anti-liberal, and anti-feminist attitudes of these regimes marginalised the contributions and experiences of these women in historical scholarship.