ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, the older world of women's popular culture and the new world of reading, writing, books, newspapers, commercialized concert going, opera, fine art and the like, existed side by side, influencing but also competing with one another in ways that cultural historians are still struggling to understand. The sophisticated cultural marketplace one enjoys today first began to form in the early modern period. Many of women's cultural expressions were far less serious, of course, though even witticisms can shade over, at times, into something like social critique. Women's literacy rates remained low in much of the Ottoman Empire until well into the twentieth century, though it was always higher in the cities, in professional families and among Jews. Children's literature would be enormously important for children, of course, but from the first some women used it to show that communication between women, as well as between women and children, could and should happen on an elevated plane.
