When the War Came Home by Akın Yiğit

Author:Akın, Yiğit [Akin, Yiğit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

5

IN THE HOME: WIVES AND MOTHERS

On 31 December 1917, Grand Vizier and Interior Minister Talat Pasha received a telegram signed by ten peasant women from a small, relatively isolated village on the Black Sea coast. They were all the wives and mothers of soldiers who had been called off to military duty. In their telegram, these women complained bitterly about the harsh wartime policies of the Ottoman state and the pervasive poverty and hunger. Due to the lack of seed grain, their fields remained unsown. Their mules, horses, sheep, and cattle had been requisitioned by the military. The elderly and children of the village had been forced to work on the construction of roads and fortifications. Given the high prices of both staple items and consumer goods, these women bemoaned their inability to subsist under these conditions. Since the military had commandeered their houses for various purposes, moreover, people now had to resort to sleeping under trees. To make matters worse, deserters and refugees who were roaming the area had plundered their entire stock of hazelnuts and most of the maize. The remaining grain, the peasants protested, would only be sufficient to feed their children for two months. Despite these harsh conditions, state officials were still pressuring them to provide grain for the army at extremely low prices and even to sell the grain they had set aside to eat themselves. If the gendarmes could not find the grain the peasants had stashed away, they confiscated things like pots, pans, and cauldrons. Emphasizing that this was their third telegram, they demanded that the grand vizier intervene on their behalf. Their tone conveyed the hopelessness and anguish as well as the determination and anger they felt: “Either deport us all to another place or cast us into the sea. We do not accept the law.”1

The misery and destitution these peasant women described in their telegram was clearly not limited to their village. Their experience reflects the empirewide wartime crisis that engulfed Ottoman society as well as the state’s ever-increasing encroachment on women’s lives. But their telegram also suggests a new mode of interaction between women and state authorities based on a perceived understanding of mutual obligations and expectations.

The Ottoman Empire’s involvement in World War I resulted in the emergence of a new, wartime relationship between the state and its citizens. For millions of men, this relationship took the form of conscription and long-term military service. For women, it primarily entailed the withdrawal of men from their households and an increasing intrusion by the state into their daily lives. During the war, women came into much more frequent and closer contact with state officials. Focusing on their perceptions of and reactions to the war and the dramatic changes it brought to Ottoman society, this chapter examines how the war shaped women’s relationships with the state and influenced their understanding of gender roles.

The War and Ottoman Women

Although World War I touched the life of nearly every Ottoman woman, it is almost impossible to produce a coherent story of their war experiences.

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