Hester Donaldson Jenkins (1869-1941), a professor at the American College for Girls in Constantinople from 1900-1909, wrote enthusiastically about the Young Turks, who in 1908 established a constitutional monarchy in the Ottoman Empire. They seemed to Jenkins to promise new freedoms for Ottoman women. In this book Jenkins uses her own observations of Constantinople, her students, and their families to construct an account of a "typical" Turkish Muslim woman's life cycle at this turning point in Ottoman history. She intends her comments on childhood, education, marriage, polygamy, and divorce...