Too Worldly Proclivities: Notes on the American College for Girls (in Constantinople), Missionary Suffragettes and the Ottoman-Turkish

Abstract

This article aims to scrutinize the American College for Girls (in Constantinople), which despite being a missionary enterprise, rapidly embarked upon a process of secularization attuned to modern academic objectives as well as local demands. Approaching secularism not as a singular but as a plural and epistemic category, the study attempts to examine the college as an institution that was for-med at the crossroads of American and Ottoman-Turkish secularisms at the turn of the 20th century. The study also traces the ways in which the college emerged as a zone of interaction between American missionary suffragettes and the Ottoman-Turkish women’s movement. Aiming to distance itself from an uncritical discourse of “women’s emancipation”, and an analysis of the college in that context, the article entertains the historiographical idea of considering the encounter between American missionary women and Ottoman-Turkish women on a pluralistic and transnational common ground of womanhood. It emphasizes the innovative possibilities such an approach might bring into Ottoman-Turkish women studies.