Living through Wartime: Female War Memoirs and Other Self-narratives of the Great War in the Ottoman Empire

Archival sources, but also self-narratives, newspapers, and periodicals, have been important sources for political and military historians of the last two decades of the Ottoman Empire in general and the First World War in particular. In recent years, an increasing number of historians have become interested in more than the political and military history of the period. The field has been broadened to include social history. Conventional sources have been reread to get a better understanding of the effects of the War on the social domains and everyday life. Self-narratives have proven to be invaluable sources for social historians working on the period. These self-narratives were not only produced by the men in charge, but by people from all walks of life: soldiers and civilians, men and women noted down their wartime experiences in their diaries or letters home and in memoirs and autobiographies. In most cases, the self-narratives used by historians were, however, those written by men in which women were objectified. In this paper, the self-narratives of women living in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War are preliminarily explored to give them a voice and turn them into subjects rather than objects.