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The modernisation period of the Ottoman Empire started in the late eighteenth century with rapid reformation attempts mainly in the military and educational institutions. Conceded the superiority of the Western military power after defeats and land-losses, the Ottoman state inaugurated first modern public schools in the Empire during this period, including natural and physical sciences as well as Western teaching methods in their curricula (Kenan, 2010, pp. 130-134). Moreover, the late eighteenth century was a turning point for the Ottoman women as well: becoming more visible in the public sphere, they were soon accepted as a social class by the state which resulted in the inauguration of public schooling for girls (Akşit, 2012, pp. 21-56). In the meantime, the Ottoman male intelligentsia, aiming to integrate women into public life and debates on this modernisation process, started publishing women’s magazines in the capital city of Istanbul. Through writing in these magazines and later establishing several associations, there emerged an Ottoman women’s movement (Çakır, 2013, pp. 405-407) closely following western media and keeping in touch with Western women such as British and American suffragists. However, there is still scant research engaging with the Ottoman women’s education with a special focus on women’s opinions and experiences, despite a growing body of literature on the Ottoman women’s history or institutional histories of the empire. Aiming to contribute to the existing literature, this study critically explores the construction of female subjectivities within educational public discourse in the late Ottoman Empire. 

Borrowing from Meltem Ahıska, I use the notion of Occidentalism to explain how female subjectivities are constructed within educational discourse in the Ottoman women’s magazines from the first one published in 1869 until the promulgation of the Second Constitution Period in 1908. Ahıska (2010) identifies Occidentalism as an ideological fantasy in Zizek’s sense, "a performative discourse, which displays a devotion to a Western form of modernity on the surface, yet constantly refers to the imagined threatening Western gaze to produce the intimacy within" (p. 39). In this sense, these magazines are a significant source of information to trace the debates around the modern and Western-style education of the Ottoman women through their ambiguous, even conflicting, relation with an imagined West. The study thus investigates the perception of women’s education in these magazines by focusing on how the Ottoman women imagined the female, educated future-subjects of the Empire. Collected through document review, the selected publications are Terakkî-i Muhadderat (Progress of Women), Vakit yahud Mürebb-i Muhadderat (Time or the Teacher of Women), Âyine (Mirror), Âile (Family), İnsâniyet (Humanity), Parça Bohçası (Bundle of Clothes) and Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (The Ladies’ Own Gazette). 

As the proportion of women writing in the magazines are getting larger in years, it is clear that mostly women discuss about their education. Authors in the magazines see women’s education in the West as the source of the progress. They comment on the curricula of American and European girls’ schools and make suggestions about the newly-emerged curricula for Ottoman girls’ public schools. They are opposed to borrow from the West without a change. While they praise the domestic courses in Europe, they are strongly against taking their courses on morality. For moral education, they suggest returning to religion and history of their own. When it comes to common courses with boy’s schools, they think that such an education causes Western women lose their womanhood and motherhood. On the other hand, the authors suggest the Ottoman state adding science lessons to girls’ schools in the time of a curriculum revision. They think that women should receive such education to provide and preserve "family happiness". However, it is hard to find the line between what is good for family happiness and what destroys it. Sometimes they are certain that Western women’s education would be a perfect model for Ottomans, at other times they avoid modelling the West and turn to Islam and the Ottoman history. Thus I argue that these writings on the education of women construct and reconstruct an Occidentalist fantasy while shaping and reshaping the subjectivities of Ottoman women around such fundamental issues of identifying the responsibilities of women as mothers, wives or individuals; the sources of women’s moral education and morality of women; and defining the limits of women’s progress in a ever-modernizing society.