Haremlik—Lives of Turkish Women

Born as a Greek Ottoman in Constantinople/Istanbul, Demetra Vaka Brown (1877-1946) moved to America where she became a journalist and novelist, revisiting Turkey to write several books about the twilight of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic. Her first book, Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Oriental Women, published in 1909, was based on experiences from 1901 when modernization had made inroads into Ottoman domestic life and the harem was becoming a thing of the past. Her reflections on life in the harem suggest the conflicted nature of her allegiances. On the one hand Haremlik is nostalgic for the Ottoman life that was rapidly disappearing, and on the other hand, its author enjoys the freedoms of a professional American woman. Tracing the emergence of a modern sensibility among Muslim women, Haremlik also reveals the predicament Vaka Brown faced in constructing an authorial and narrative identity in the interstices between East and West, modernity and tradition.


This book contain collection of 10 Short Stories


1. Coming Home to Turkey
2. Mihirmah
3. Djimlah, The Thinker, Selim Pasha's Fourth Wife
4. Valide Hanoum, the Resigned First Wife
5. The Gift-Wife from the Sultan's Palace
6. Houlme Hanoum, the Discontented
7. Suffragettes of the Harem
8. The Love of Nor-Sembah and Hakif Bey
9. A Day's Entertainment in the Harem
10. A Flight from the Harem