Born as a Greek Ottoman in Constantinople/Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. Her first book, Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Oriental Women, published in 1909, was based on experiences from 1901 when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances. On the...

Bowman Dodd documents changes in Turkey, encouraged by the "embrace" of modernity. She considers Turkish women's rights, harems and marriage, the management of the household, education, slavery, the Sultan's reign, and nationalist movements in the Ottoman Empire.

This book challenges Orientalist stereotypes by exposing the cultural and political agency of Ottoman Muslim women. It also explores engagements between Eastern and Western women at the fin de siecle.

A prominent novelist, social activist, journalist, and nationalist, Halide Adivar Edib (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography, published in 1926, whilst she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. Yn it Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Providing an account of...