ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the rise of Muslim women conducting waged labor in Ottoman working life together with the approach of the state to this situation, and analyzes the efficiency of state administrators in finding–or not finding–a response to their religious sensibility in economic life. The nineteenth century, which is considered the most eventful century of the Ottoman Empire, was a period when the conditions of the state and society changed and became harder. It thought that women’s work must be prevented as it did not properly comply with Islam; the state administration was aware of the interventions and reactions that would not result if the poverty problem could not be solved. Ottoman society and its economy experienced a period of inertia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without any significant changes in traditional structures. In the Ottoman Empire, a patriarchal society, very few records were kept about women for social and economic purposes.