This article was downloaded by: [University College London]

On: 18 March 2013, At: 03:42

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Mediterranean Historical Review

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmhr20

Desexualizing the orient: The harem

in English travel writing by Women,
1763–1914
a
Billie Melman
a
Lecturer at the Department of History, Tel Aviv University
Version of record first published: 03 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Billie Melman (1989): Desexualizing the orient: The harem in English
travel writing by Women, 1763–1914, Mediterranean Historical Review, 4:2, 301-339

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518968908569575

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-

conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any
representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The
accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently
verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions,
claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever
caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of
this material.
 Desexualizing the Orient:
The Harem in English Travel Writing
by Women, 1763-1914

BILLIE MELMAN
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

As to their Morality or good Conduct, I can say like Arlequin,1

'tis just as 'tis with you, and the Turkish Ladys [sic] don't
commit one Sin the less for not being Christians.' Now I am a
little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring
either the exemplary discretion or extreme Stupidity of all
writers that have given accounts of them. 'Tis very easy to see
they have more Liberty than we have. ... the manners of
Mankind doe not differ so widely as our voyage Writers would
make us believe.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar, Adrianople,
1 April 1717.2

Europe's perception of sexuality in Islam is presented as monolithic. In

the European's imagination, it is argued, the Orient3 has always been
associated with sensuality.4 From the first encounter with Islam one of
the most enduring topoi of the Orient has been that of a locus of
lasciviousness. Islam has been misconceived and misrepresented as an
apostasy, promoting a promiscuity which only befits its believers;
Mohammed is depicted as a satanic profligate and Islam's concept of
paradise is distorted to one of an earthly, sensual harem. For occidental
men, the argument runs, oriental women and the harem have held a
special fascination. If the landscape of the imaginary Orient was
sexually charged, the haremlik, or women's quarters, was the ultimate
abode of lasciviousness and vice. The advent of modern imperialism
enhanced old, established attitudes, yet gave them new meaning.
Political and economic domination developed together with an
academic discipline and cultural make-up famously described by
Edward W. Said as 'orientalism'.5 Among other aspects, 'orientalism'
spelled out the trend towards the feminization and sexualization of the
Middle East.6 The oriental woman, sensual, muted, subjugated, was to
apotheosize all that (to occidental men) seemed oriental. And her
 302 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

image, so runs the argument, dominates nineteenth-century writings

on Muslim societies, and particularly travel writing.
I would argue that attitudes to Europe's 'other' were not monolithic
but varied widely and were influenced by gender. I am concerned with
the evolution of another, different, and rather more complex image of
the Middle Eastern woman and Middle Eastern female sexuality,
which developed alongside the 'orientalist' one. This image emerged
towards the end of the eighteenth century in descriptions of Turkish
harems in travel books by Englishwomen, and developed and was
modulated in works by Victorian women travellers to, and residents in,
the Middle East. The writings which, so far, have received very little
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

attention are important for at least two reasons. First, they constitute a
substantial body of evidence, the first of its kind, on those areas in
Middle Eastern life which were closed to the Western male travellers
and which, consequently, became the subject of misconception and
misrepresentation. Secondly, the descriptions, by eye-witnesses, of
women's life and labour in different parts of the Turkish empire, over a
span of a little more than 150 years, present an image, or rather images,
which are radically different from those commonly associated with
nineteenth-century travel accounts. The Middle Eastern woman as
seen and described by women travellers is not 'the physical woman'
(Richard Francis Burton's well-known epithet). And the descriptions
are not - as both Rana Kabbani and Byron Farewell argue - merely the
reflection of the patriarchal attitudes of Victorian society towards
women and non-European peoples. Nor are these descriptions merely
footnotes to an orientalist, imperialist discourse.7 They, as I hope to
show, constitute a body of writings with its own distinct features. The
travellers' encounter with polygamy and the segregation of females in a
society traditionally identified as Europe's cultural and religious
'other' offered them an insight into their own, monogamous culture.
With observation came analogy. And the travellers came to reassess
the position and roles of Englishwomen and question monogamous
marriage and the monogamous household. Most important, contact
with, and knowledge of, life in the real (as opposed to the imaginary)
haremlik, brought about a re-evaluation of Victorian attitudes to
sexuality, particularly of the notion of a double sexual standard and the
middle-class ethos of separate masculine and feminine spheres.
For evidence I draw mainly on the rhetorical, non-descriptive parts
of the narratives of travel, those parts of the writings which approach
the question in a general manner and offer information, or statements
directly addressed to the reader by an authoritative T or an impersonal
voice. In the last section of the article I use descriptions as well as non-
descriptive narrative. The direct and overtly rhetorical address is never
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 303
value-free. Rather, it reflects the informer's own views, prejudices,
and his/her cultural make-up.8
By arguing against a 'monolithic' view of Europe's concept of the
Orient, I wish to emphasize not only changes according to gender, but
also changes over time. The eighteenth-century women writers did not
operate in a cultural and informational vacuum, but responded to
common views and prejudices which they modulated.9 Victorian and
Edwardian attitudes to sexuality also differed in significant ways from
the Augustan ones. To trace the mutations and shifts in the sensibilities
of the group of writers discussed, the article is arranged chronologically
and according to theme: sections 1-2 introduce the sample of travel
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

writers, and go onto discuss the 'inheritance' of the eighteenth-century

travellers. Section 3 comprises a discussion of the Augustan model of
writing on harems, and especially the development by Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu of a new concept of 'sexual liberty' which was the
basis for a cultural relativism and tolerance towards the sexual mores of
the 'other'. The bulk of the article (sections 4-8) is devoted to the
changes in the Augustan model in the writings of both Victorian and
Edwardian travellers. The major shift, from an emphasis on 'sexual
freedom' towards 'freedom from' sex and the Victorians' desexualiza-
tion of the oriental female and the harem, reflect mutations in middle-
class sensibilities about sex. Desexualization enabled an interpretation
of the harem in historical terms, as a phenomenon that varies according
to class, place, and time. The women's 'reinterpretation' is examined
in the treatment of marriage, divorce, polygamy, and concubinage
(section 5) and the presentation of the harem as a self-ruling female
community, rather than a patriarchal construct (section 6). Finally, the
emergence of a solidarity of gender that cuts across cultural, religious,
and racial differences is discussed.

1. THE SAMPLE: TRAVEL AND PROFESSIONAL WRITING

The 89 items which make up my sample are by 39 authors and fall into
two large categories.10 The first category, which I call harem literature,
includes books concerned wholly, or mainly, with material conditions
in the Turkish empire, and especially with the situation of women.
These books may have been written by travellers but are not travel
books proper, they do not narrate a journey, but depict customs and
manners. And, characteristically, they focus on a feminized urban
landscape and the domestic scene. In the second category I include all
those narratives of journeys in which descriptions of the haremlik and
the harem-system are part of a travelogue and are, ipso facto, of an
anecdotal nature. The length and depth of those descriptions vary.
 304 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Travellers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) expanded on

all topics related to harem life. Others treated the matter only cursorily:
Emily Beaufort (died 1887), Harriet Martineau (1802-70), Amelia
Edwards (1831-92), and Lady Anne Blunt (1837-1917) are the best-
known examples. I draw on examples of both the first and the second
categories, but naturally special attention is given to those writers who
knew the harem particularly well.
Some of the writers in my sample produced only one travel book:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, author of Letters (1763); her disciple,
the now forgotten playwright, translator, and essayist Elisabeth
Craven, Marchioness of Anspach (1750-1828), author of A Journey
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789); Georgina Anna Dawson-

Damer, author of Diary of a Tour in Greece, Turkey, Egypt and the
Holy Land (1841); Frances Vane (later Marchioness of Londonderry)
- A Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Vienna, Constantinople, Athens
and Naples (1844); Judith Montefiore - Notes from a Private Journal of
a Visit to Egypt and Palestine (1855); Emily Anne Beaufort - Egyptian
Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines (1861); Mary Mackintosh - Damascus
and its People (1883); and Mrs W.M. Ramsay, who wrote Every-day
Life in Turkey (1897). Later examples include Demetra (Vaka) Brown
- Haremlik, and Grace Ellison — An Englishwoman in a Turkish
Harem.
More typically, however, travellers and long-term residents in the
Middle East produced more than one work. Isabel Burton, Richard
Francis Burton's wife, produced two. Elisabeth Ann Finn, missionary,
philanthropist, and polyglot, co-founder of the Jerusalem Literary
Society and wife of Britain's consul to Jerusalem (1846-63), produced
five publications; Marianne Postans (no biographical details known)
produced four, Anne Noel Blunt, linguist and traveller, wife of Wilfred
Scawen Blunt, produced two; Mary Lucy Garnett, anthropologist
and traveller and an avowed Turkophile, and Mary Louisa Whatley,
missionary in Egypt between 1860 and 1883, produced eight books
each. In fact, eight, namely just over one-fifth, of the writers were
professionals already enjoying various degrees of fame before their
Middle Eastern journey. An interesting and regrettably neglected
early Victorian source on Constantinople is Julia Sophia Pardoe
(1806-62), whose career can be reconstructed from her self-laudatory
autobiographical note in the Bentley Papers (at the British Library).11
In 1835 Pardoe spend a prolific year in Constantinople which she
described in The City of the Sultan and the Domestic Manners of the
Turks, published in two volumes in 1837 and reprinted in the three-
decker format popular among library subscribers (1838, 1845, and
1859). Two factional works, The Beauties of the Bosphorus and The
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 305
Romance of the Harem followed in 1839. Also in 1839 appeared a
collection of Oriental Tales, Thousand and One Days: A Companion to
the 'Arabian Nights', a bowdlerized family edition of the famous
Persian collection.
Lucy Duff-Gordon presents a typical mid-century example. Duff-
Gordon, daughter of the Radical literary couple John and Sarah Austin
and a disciple of the philosophical Radicals, was a talented essayist and
a translator of Ranke, Feurbach, and Léon de Wailly. In 1861 she went
to Egypt for her health, and lived and died in Luxor among the local
fellahin. Her posthumous Letters from Egypt (1865) had three editions
in its year of publication and was followed in 1875 by Last Letters from
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

Egypt. They both are realistic accounts of life and labour on the upper
Nile during the period of Ismail's disastrous experiment in Westerniza-
tion and modernization. Parts of the Letters constitute a disparaging
criticism of British attitudes to Egypt and Britain's penetration into
that country. Duff-Gordon's experience of life in rural upper Egypt
overlaps with Maria Louisa Whatley's career as missionary in the
Greater Cairo area. Whatley, daughter of the archbishop of Dublin
(Church of England) was herself an Evangelical and was involved in the
Ragged School movement and in the Irish Church Mission before
coming to Egypt, where she initiated the first British day-schools
in Cairo. Her frankly proselytizing bent and her intolerance towards
anything Muslim are both revealing contrasts to Duff-Gordon's Radical
liberalism and religious tolerance. Whatley is particularly useful on
Cairo's poor whom she depicted in a succession of books published and
circulated by the CMS (Church Missionary Society) and the RTS
(Religious Tract Society). Her titles are emblematic: More About
Ragged Life in Egypt (1864); Among the Huts in Egypt: Scenes from
Real Life (1871); Behind the Curtain: Scenes from Life in Cairo (1883),
and so on.
The Victorian pattern of travel and professional writing is perhaps
best exemplified in the career of Amelia Blandford Edwards (1831-
92). A precocious writer, even by Victorian standards (she began to
publish at the age of seven), the extraordinarily proliferous Edwards
wrote nine novels and contributed over 1,500 essays to Dickens's
Household Words, the Saturday Review, Chambers' Journal, and the
Morning Post. Then, in 1873, she embarked on her voyage up the Nile
described in her famous 7000 Miles up the Nile and Pharoahs and
Fellahs (1876 and 1891). In 1882 she founded, and until her death
practically ran, the Egypt Exploration Fund.
Other professional writers are: Elizabeth Charles (1828-96) author
of best-selling historical and religious novels and of Wanderings
over Bible Lands and Seas (1862); Harriet Martineau (see pp.316-17
 306 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

below), and Isabel Burton. The proportion of women-of-letters cannot

be taken as representative of their proportion among travellers who
recorded and published their Middle Eastern experiences, certainly
not of the proportion of the former amongst travellers in general. Yet
the number of women-of-letters in my sample seems to indicate a more
general trend. Well over half of the women I dealt with pursued a career
literary, scientific, academic, or artistic (Mary Broderick, Amelia
Edwards, Mary Lucy Gamett, Mary Eliza Rogers, Frances E. Minto),
or engaged in unpaid vocational work like nursing (Emily Beaufort,
and Lady Alicia Blackwood who left us a book on the military hospitals
of Scutari), philanthropy and, less typically, missionary work. It is
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

important to note that those writers who in the first place reached the
Middle East as the wives of diplomats, missionaries, and professional
soldiers (Montagu, Finn, Burton, Rogers) later engaged in vocational
or in literary/artistic work. The number of publications of some of the
writers perhaps proves that they wrote with an eye to the expanding
reading public. In general, the trend reflects the gradual yet marked
improvement in women's opportunities in the field of writing and
in voluntary work. In this context the encounter with women of a
traditionalist society, less dynamic than their own, was of special
significance.

2. THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE ON HAREMS: THE SOURCES

OF INFORMATION

The eighteenth-century travel writers who chose to describe harem life

could draw on three confluent traditions. First, and most powerful, was
the tradition of the Thousand and One Nights, commonly known as the
Arabian Nights' Entertainment. The reading public became acquainted
with the tales through Antoine Galland's famous transcription of the
Arabic manuscripts. His Le Mille et une nuits saw publication between
1707 and 1717, the very last volume appearing in the same year that
Mary Wortley Montagu set out on her eastern journey. Galland's
immense influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth- century travel
writing and fiction weakened only with the appearance of Edward
William Lane's translation of the Nights (1838-41).12 Adjacent to the
Nights and to a large extent shaped by their inheritance was the
'oriental tale' (Martha Pike Conant's term).13 Suffice it to say here that
the 'oriental tale' is a story with oriental subject-matter, an oriental
setting adapting the structure of the Nights, particularly the form of a
frame-story, connecting loosely related anecdotal tales.
A somewhat different model of the harem could be found in earlier
travellers' accounts, but these were second-hand and extremely unreli-
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 307
able. Most travellers were ignorant about the most basic details
regarding the harem system and harem life,14 and only a few admitted to
their ignorance. Thomas Dallam in his Constantinople Ancient and
Modern (1797) frankly states that he obtained information on Turkish
harems from the wives of 'Frank' merchants, who had access to them:
'From such opportunities all accurate information concerning the
interior of the palaces must be collected, and to such I am at present
indebted.'15 A few years later William Hunter Crane admits that 'with
regard to the women, you must depend on the accounts of others, as no
man, but to whom they belong, is ever permitted to see them.'16 And,
more significant, Edward William Lane, the acknowledged authority
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

on nineteenth-century Egyptian society, who devoted a whole chapter

of his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians to the 'Hareem'
(i/c),'is silent on intimate life in the haremlik. In a rather convoluted
passage he argues:
For a person who has become familiar with male Muslim society in
Cairo, without marrying, it is not so difficult as might be imagined
by a stranger to obtain, directly and indirectly, correct and ample
information respecting the conditions and habits of women.
Many husbands of the middle classes, and some of the higher
orders, freely talk of the affairs of the hareem with one who
professes to agree with them in their general moral sentiments, if
they have not to converse through the medium of interpreter.17
What becomes evident from Lane's protracted apologia is that the
information did not come from female sources. And, in point of fact,
Lane himself was aware of the inadequacy of available travellers' and
others' reports on the harem, including his own. He advised his sister,
Sophia Lane Poole, who resided in his Cairene harem, to write an
inside account of women and domestic life in contemporary Egypt.
Lane Poole's preface to her Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from
Cairo Written during a Residence there in 1842,3,&4 [sic] (1844) reads:
"The fact that I could see things accessible only to a lady suggested to
him [Lane] the idea that I might both gratify my curiosity and collect
much information of a novel and interesting nature.'18 Lane Poole
was defining her own field of observation and writing vis-à-vis the
acknowledged authority of a famous brother. But she was, in addition,
writing according to the convention set by Lady Montagu in the latter's
disparaging remarks on European travellers. Westerners were ignorant
about the Orient, particularly about oriental women and oriental
sexual morals and behaviour.19
The woman traveller's task was, therefore, to gather material from
female sources, arrange and structure it and demythicize the imaginary
 308 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

harem. As Julia Pardoe put it in 1838 in her The City of the Sultan and
the Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836: "There is no intimate
knowledge of domestic life and hence the cause of the tissue of fables
which, like those of Scheherazade, have created genii and enchanters
ab ovo usque ad male in every account of the East. The European mind
has become so imbued with ideas of Oreintal [sic] mysteriousness,
mysticism, and magnificence, and it has been so long accustomed to
pillow its faith on the marvels and metaphors of tourists, that it is to be
doubted whether it will willingly cast off its associations, and suffer
itself to be undeceived.'20 Exorcising Scheherazade was to become the
purpose, and sometimes the achievement of the women travellers, and
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

notably Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose descriptions of Turkish

high harems were to become a model, copied and emulated by scores of
travellers.

3. THE AUGUSTAN ATTITUDE: ANALOGY, RELATIVISM,

AND TOLERANCE

Lady Montagu and Lady Elisabeth Craven were women of letters,

but, unlike their Victorian successors, these two eighteenth-century
aristocrats were not professional writers. Montagu explicitly proscribed
writing for profit. And the famous 'Embassy Letters' were not intended
for publication but — like many of her other works - circulated in
London's literary and political circles (in privately printed and piratical
editions) and reached the illuminés on the continent.21 The title is
immensely revealing: Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y
M—e; Written during her Travels to Europe, Asia and Africa to Persons
of Distinction, Men of Letters, ... in Different Parts of Europe, which
Contain Among Other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and
Manners of the Turks, Drawn from Sources that have been Inaccessible
to Other Travellers, in Three Volumes. Craven's work, which appeared
72 years after this first private edition of the Letters and 26 years after
the posthumous edition for the general public bears a more succinct,
though similarly telling title: A Journey through the Crimea to Con-
stantinople, in a Series of Letters from the Right Honourable Elisabeth
Lady Craven to his Serene Highness the Margravene of Brandenburg,
Anspach and Bayreuth. She travelled to Turkey without the pomp and
circumstance enjoyed by Montagu as wife of the ambassador of St
James' court to the Great Porte. Craven travelled with a small retinue,
crossing revolutionary Belgium and France and risking the overland
route to Russia avoided by eighteenth-century travellers. On Turkey in
general and harems in particular she drew heavily on her privileged
predecessor, who had gained access to several households.
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 309
The idea behind Mary Montagu's writings on the harem, and on
Turkish society in general, an idea which would be taken on by Craven
and modified and reworked, by most of the Victorian writers, is that
manners and morals are not universal but relative, and change in time
and from one place to another. This particularly applies to sexual
behaviour. Polygamy, concubinage, and the seclusion of females are in
no way inferior to monogamous marriage. Far from it, for monogamy
does not prevent vice. Nor does the mixing between the sexes outside
the domestic sphere in any way imply freedom for the woman.
Montagu carries her argument further, developing the theme intro-
duced in her letter of 12 February 1717 to Alexander Pope. It is the well-
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

known theme of the Turkish women's freedom. Turkish females are

freer than Turkish males, freer, indeed, than the Sultan himself. And,
what is more important, they are freer than their English sisters.
'Tis easy to see they have more liberty than we have, no woman of
what rank so ever being permitted to go in the streets without two
Muslims ... you may guess how effectually this disguises them,
that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave, and
'tis possible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he
meets her... This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty
of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery ...22
Indeed, Montague, as noted by her biographer and editor Robert
Halsband, carries the idea of liberty-in-bondage ad absurdum, on
occasions hammering her argument ad captandumP Significantly, she
uses the veil not in a conventional manner, as a symbol of, and
metaphor for subjection, but as a sign of the Turkish women's liberty.
... as many [women], if not more than men are to be seen in the
streets - but they look like walking mummies - a large loose robe
of dark green cloth covers them from the neck to the ground, over
that a large piece of muslin which wraps the shoulders and the
arms, another which goes over the head and eyes; judge, Sir, if all
these coverings do not confound all shape or air so much, that men
or women, princesses and slaves, may be concealed under them. I
think I never saw a country where women may enjoy so much
liberty, and be free from all reproach as in Turkey.24
Craven then introduces a detail which none of the nineteenth-century
travellers fails to mention: the custom of putting slippers on the
threshold of the harendik, to signify the wish for privacy: 'A Turkish
husband that has a pair of slippers at the door of his harem must not
enter, his respect for the sex prevents him from intruding when a
stranger is upon a visit.'25
 310 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Montagu was not entirely original. Men travellers before her had
asserted that though adultery was a crime, Turkish women could follow
their inclinations with impunity. Robert Withers (in his Description of
the Grand Signor's Seraglio or Turkish Emperour's [sic] Court, 1651),
Du Loir (Voyages du Siueur Du Lole; ensemble de ce qui se passe à la
mort du feu sultan Mourat..., 1659), and Joseph de Journefort
(Relation d'un voyage du Levant, 1717) are but a few examples. And
the motif of freedom in the haremlik was to be taken up by nineteenth-
century men travellers. A typical example is found in James Silk
Buckingham who, in a chapter on daily life in Mosul in his Travels in
Mesopotamia (1827), expands on the license of women in the empire's
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

bigger cities. 'It is said' he states, 'that women of the highest conditions
sometimes grant assignations at ... houses [brothels] and this, indeed
cannot be denied, the facility of clandestine meetings is much greater in
Turkish cities ... than in any Metropolis'.26 Despite his allusions
to the Turkish women's propensity for vice Buckingham is, un-
characteristically, cautious. Note the reservations in the passage
quoted above ('It is said' ... 'cannot be denied', et cetera). Unlike
Buckingham and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers,
who revelled in speculations on the haremlik, Montagu actually visited
the women's quarters. Montagu's originality lies in her usage of
'liberty', which is quite different from theirs.
For both Montague and Craven 'liberty' signifies women's sexual
freedom which, as in the passage from the latter writer, has two distinct
meanings. The first is 'freedom for', in this context the ability of women
to practise extra-marital sex, and is symbolized in the veil, the symbol of
female chastity which Montagu uses in an inverted way. The second
freedom is 'freedom from' sex, exemplified in the metaphor of slippers.
This last metaphor had great attraction for the Victorian travellers who
were to mention the custom constantly and emphasize the Turkish
married woman's right to privacy - implying the freedom from
cohabitation in marriage. In Britain the husband's marital rights were
enforceable by common law, and there is evidence that the rights were
practised even as late as the 1860s. Victorian polemic literature,
especially feminist political writing from the 1860s onwards stressed
both the unmarried woman's right to elective celibacy and the married
woman's right to freedom from sex and unregulated child-bearing.
Montagu and Craven's attitudes are within the tradition of tolerance
of English rationalism and the English Enlightenment. It is significant
that Montagu's tolerance of several sexual codes of behaviour is
inseparable from her religious tolerance. She dissociates the Turk's
sexual behaviour from Islam. It is precisely this dissociation which
enables her to discard the topos of the lustful Turk/sensual Turkish
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 311
odalisque, accepted even by some of the most enlightened writers of
her time (I have in mind, of course, Alexander Pope's notorious
remarks on the lewdness in Turkish harems 'where the very cucumbers
are brought to them [the women] cutt'.27 Even more significantly,
Montagu's Whig tolerance stopped short of Catholicism. Her letters
from Catholic states lampoon both the national Catholic churches,
Catholic rituals, and liturgy and are critical of sexual mores and the
treatment of women. Montagu came from a Whig family, and married a
prominent Whig who served the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty.
More important, she contributed - anonymously of course - to the
Whig political press, and in 1737 and 1738 was to support Walpole's
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

administration in The Nonsense of Common Sense, a periodical with a

feminist stance in which she combined politics with a discussion on the
position of women.28
During the reign of George I (and at least until the demise of
Jacobitism in 1745), anti-Popism was central to the Whig interpreta-
tion of the English constitution and the Whig concept of mixed
monarchy. It is hardly surprising to find in Montagu's letters a bias in
favour of Turkish women, which was counterbalanced by vehement
anti-Catholicism which reflects upon her attitude towards the life and
manners of women in the Catholic countries through which she
passed.29
Lady Montagu's attitude to sexuality as such also seems to be within
the mainstream of Enlightenment thinking. As Roy Porter has pointed
out, the Enlightenment made sex a topic for public discussion.
Enlightenment writers dissociated sex from the concept of sin, and
regarded the former as part of the economy of Nature and, there-
fore, recommendable to the 'natural man'. Furthermore, Augustan
Enlightenment writing refined sexuality and made it decorous and
rational.30 And Lady Montagu's famous descriptions of the baths at
Edime (Adrianople) and of naked Turkish women-bathers certainly
reflect the trend towards decorousness. Her baths are permeated with
sensuality, but she is dispassionate, informative, and correct through-
out her detailed descriptions of bathers in Adrianople.31
There is, however, a novel tenor in Lady Montagu's treatment of
female sexuality. For, as both Porter and Susan Müller Okin have
stressed, the eighteenth-century concept of freedom excluded women.
Liberty was habitually applied to 'man' in the literal, and not only the
generic sense of this term.32 The prominent Enlightenment thinkers did
not apply universal and absolute criteria to woman, but regarded her in
an ambiguous way. Their concept of personal and sexual freedom of
the individual clashed with the view of women mainly in terms of
gender. Natural woman was subject to her sex, that is her biological,
 312 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

reproductive functions, and, therefore, her purity and chastity was

essential. Montagu, right from the 'Embassy Letters', throughout her
political writings, and till her late feminist pamphlets on women,
argued that women were equal to men in their physical appetites
and instincts as well as in their intellect. In the recently discovered
pamphlet, Women not Inferior to Men (1739), she went as far as to
argue that women's physique made them intellectually superior
to men.33 Her celebration of the Turkish women's freedom and
the indictment of English sexual mores and particularly the double
standard which imposed chastity on women and condoned impurity in
men are, therefore, not merely the idealization of an exotic culture.
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

They are part and parcel of her broader, critical view of marriage and
the position of married women in her own society.

4. CHANGES IN SENSIBILITIES: THE VICTORIAN

DESEXUALIZATION OF THE HAREM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF
A HISTORICAL APPROACH

Montagu's Victorian successors took on the theme of the Turkish

woman's freedom but introduced some significant changes. Take, for
example, Julia Pardoe's choice of words in her laudatory comment on
the harem: 'If, as we are all prone to believe, freedom be happiness,
then are the Turkish women happiest, for they are the freest individuals
in the Empire [a repeat of Montagu's statement]. It is the fashion in
Europe to pity the women of the East; but it is ignorance of their real
position alone which can engender so misplaced an exhibition of
sentiment.'34 Her emphasis on happiness and its identification with
freedom tallies with the contemporary jargon of popular Utilitarianism.
Eight years later Sophia Lane Poole, who deplored the effects of
seclusion on Turkish and Egyptian women, nevertheless approved
whole-heartedly of the seclusion of young women before their mar-
riage, the implication being that too much freedom for women is
dangerous. Lane Poole joined her brother in Cairo in 1842 and lived in
the women's quarters at his house in Cairo (she also affected Egyptian
dress and the veil). She conceded that the high harems allowed women
certain freedom, but emphasized that among the lower classes cruelty
and the degradation of women prevailed.35
The last remark is rather exceptional. Most travellers were impressed
that the condition and status of women was in inverse proportion to
their class: the 'lower' their economic class, the higher their status and
the role they played in the family economy and consequently the
greater their freedom (see pp. 313). Thus Lucy Duff Gordon com-
mented in 1864 that husbands of the fellahin class tolerated infidelities
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 313
on the part of their harem and that they were more liberal-minded
towards their women-folk than the English: ' . . . I believe that very
forgiving husbands are commoner here than everywhere. The whole
idea is founded on the verse of the Koran, incessantly quoted: "The
woman is made of the man, but the man is made for the woman"; ergo,
the obligations of chastity are equal; ergo, as the men find it difficult,
they argue that the women do the same'.36 In other words, according to
Duff Gordon, there was no double, masculine and feminine, standard
for sexual mores in Egyptian peasant society. Late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century writers glorified the condition of Turkish wives
and concubines. Mary Lucy Gamett, responding to a reference in The
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

Academy (14 February 1891) on the harem, quotes Lady Craven's

eulogy and continues: "The harendik, far from meriting the epithet of
"detestable prison" bestowed on it... is as a rule the most commodious
and cheerful division of a house'.37 Elsewhere she is even more lauda-
tory: 'The seclusion of Moslem women, instead of being as is generally
assumed, a result of their "degraded position", is, on the contrary, the
outcome of the great respect and regard entertained for them by the
men'.38
Finally, Mrs Ramsay (wife and fellow-traveller of the archaeologist
and early church historian W.M. Ramsay) remarked in 1897 that
outside the Westernized cities of Constantinople, Smyrna, Mersina,
and Salonika women enjoyed various degrees of freedom. In the inland
small towns and villages seclusion could be as rare as the veil, a
reference specifically to Afyonkarahisar. Even in those households
where seclusion is practised, the inmates of the haremlik are much freer
than their counterparts among the English poorer classes. And, like so
many other travellers, she hinted at the Turkish women's freedom from
physical coercion and the sexual tyranny of their husbands: "The
ordinary Turkish husband does not appear to avail himself oftener of
his legal right to tyrannyse over his better self than the British husband
does - less often in fact. Cases of brutality on the part of a man towards
his wife are a hundred times commoner among the lower classes of this
country than they are in Turkey'.39
The difference between the Augustan and the Victorian usage of
'freedom' is significant. For the Victorians desexualized the haremlik
and the Muslim women, particularly those who were married. They
are significantly silent about the sexual aspects of polygamy and
segregation. Moreover, the haremlik is divested of its sexual attributes
and presented as a 'home'. The middle-class writers projected their
own bourgeois notion of separate, masculine spheres, diametrically
opposite yet complementing each other, onto the Middle Eastern
family and household. They drew the analogy between the organiza-
 314 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

tion of space in the Turkish and Egyptian household - the separation

between haremlik and selamlik, the seclusion of the former from the
outside world - and the Victorian home.
With the desexualization of the home came its depolitization. The
concept of the spheres, as is well known, stressed the total separateness
of the 'private', or female space, from the 'public', male one. The
household and the family were seen by the Victorians as antithetical,
rather than analogous, to society or the polity. Significantly the
nineteenth-century travellers discussed here very seldom compared
patriarchalism and sexual domination within the harem with political
despotism. The comparison between the family and 'government' so
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

pertinent in the eighteenth century is barely hinted at in Victorian

comments on the harem system.
The Middle Eastern house, like the idealized Victorian home, is
depicted as a world apart, cut off from the civic and political sphere and
a competitive market economy. The former is the woman's domain,
reflecting woman's distinct biological, mental and, most important,
moral characteristics. The travellers stress woman's generically moral
superiority and her spirituality. They apply to the haremlik the key
words in the Victorian vocabulary of domesticity: 'sphere'; 'haven';
'woman's sphere'; 'sanctuary', et cetera. The Turkish, or Egyptian
woman is not the 'physical woman' who fulfills her own and men's
sexual appetites, but a morally superior person. Her duty is - or should
be - to morally edify and elevate men. Thus Fanny Blunt, writing on the
imperial harem (which she regarded as an exception in an otherwise
rapidly monogamized society) argued that the women in it, given
the right education, could recover their moral powers: '... woman
elevated to her true sphere, could exercise her influence over high and
noble objects.' She does not argue for the abolition of domestic slavery
and the seclusion of women, merely for a 'reduction in numbers' when
this is necessary.40 John Ruskin's famous definition of the duties of the
sexes and of a 'true home' (1863)41 echoes in travellers' accounts as late
as 1909: '...the term harem simply means a "sacred enclosure'", and
elsewhere: '...the haremlik is consequently the sanctus sanctorum, the
place safe from all intrusion'.42 And six years later, Elisabeth Goodnow
on Egyptian women: 'If woman is the conservator of the home in the
West, guarding it strictly from innovation and change because it
represents to her permanence, and is veritably her throne, the woman
of Egypt is even more completely synonymous with her home life, since
it is her sole kingdom.'43
Such sexuality, or sensuality as there was, or seemed to be, was
typically relegated to outside the home, to the hammam or public bath
at which most Victorians felt ill at ease. They were uneasy, too, with the
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 315
Augustan admiration for oriental nudity and the atmosphere of sensual
leisure which had so delighted Lady Montagu. In fact they regarded her
views as tasteless and improper. Julia Pardoe, who disliked Montagu's
description of the baths at Edirne, emphasized every writer's need to
sift the real from the fantastic: 'I should be unjust did I not declare that I
witnessed none of the unecessary and unwanton exposure described by
Lady M.W. Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a
particular ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate
and fastidious in their ideas of propriety'. The pertinently Victorian
emphases on 'delicacy' and 'propriety' are noteworthy and denote a
change in sensibilities about sexuality. Evidently it is not the Turks who
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

became more 'ladylike', but Pardoe herself.44 Sophia Lane Poole

was more doubtful as to 'propriety': 'I cannot describe the bath as
altogether a beautiful scene; in truth, in some respects it is disgusting',
and, she adds 'the eyes and ears of an Englishwoman must be closed in
the public bath in Egypt before she can fairly enjoy the satisfaction it
affords'.45
In order not to expose their sensibilities to the 'corrupting' atmos-
phere of the hammam the writers reverted to a realism which borders
on the pedestrian. The architecture of the public baths, their history,
the different stages of bathing, cooling, massaging, and hairdressing
are depicted in minute detail. Very little is said about the writers' own
feelings. This reticence is revealing, as is the treatment of Turkish/
Egyptian bathers. The latter are not Montagu's classical goddesses, but
commonplace, ordinary women. Obesity is constantly commented
upon. Interestingly, it is dissociated from sensuality. This is in sharp
contrast to Orientalist painting (Ingres immediately comes to mind)
and writing in which the oriental women's corporality was a symbol of
their 'physicality' and lasciviousness. Frances Vane, Mrs Dawson
Darner, and Fanny Blunt, for example, thought the bathers and
inmates of the haremliks they saw, 'hideous', 'ugly' and 'fat'.46
But the Victorian women travellers went much further than merely
imposing the ethos of separate spheres and their notion of domesticity
on an imaginary harem. It was precisely by desexualizing the Orient
that these travellers were able to reconsider it. Rather than perceiving
the seclusion of women, domestic slavery, concubinage, and multiple
marriage as monolithic constructs of patriarchal despotism, the over-
whelming majority of writers saw them as historical phenomena. The
harem was not a uniform, absolute condition of bondage. It had diverse
forms which reflected a multiplicity of social and economic conditions,
as well as various legal systems. There was very little in common
between the imperial and viceregal harems and the middle-class
abodes in inland Turkey. And the Cairene lower-class household
 316 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

differed widely from the domestic arrangements of the peasantry.

Geographical and class differences were recognized and insisted upon,
even by those writers who deprecated the system.
It is highly significant that the most famous attack on harems
came from the pen of Harriet Martineau, the well-known Radical,
popularizer of the doctrines of the Political Economists, and, from
the late 1840s, Comte's exponent in Britain. In the autumn of 1848
Martineau, who knew neither Turkish nor Arabic, visited one single
harem in Cairo without an interpreter (not that having an interpreter
would have made any difference; she suffered from advanced auto-
sclerosis). In her Eastern Life Present and Past (1849), Martineau,
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

despite her determination to merely observe Egyptian mores and

institutions, vehemently attacks polygamy and the harem system. To
pick up a quotation at random: '... I declare that if we are to look for a
hell upon earth, it is where polygamy exists; and that, as polygamy runs
most in Egypt, Egypt is the lowest depth of this hell— The longer one
studies the subject [Martineau, in fact, did not study it for long: two
examples, one in Cairo and one in Damascus, sufficed] and the deeper
one penetrates into it - the more is one's mind confounded with the
intricacy of its iniquity, and the more does one [sic] heart feel as if it
would break.'47 Martineau's attack can be fully understood only against
the background of her anti-slavery opinions, particularly her well-
known view on North American slavery. During her American travels
(1834-36) she converted to Garrisonianism (the Abolitionist party
demanding immediate and complete abolition of slavery) and was to
maintain life-long contacts with several Boston Abolitionists (she left
the completion of her autobiography to Maria Chapman Weston).48 In
Eastern Life she made the erroneous analogy between the North
American experience of slavery and Egyptian concubinage. And she
applied her scathing criticism of one example to the system as a whole:
The Europeans may see, when startled by the state of Egypt,
that virtual slavery is indispensably required by the practice of
polygamy; virtual proprietorship of the women involved, without
the obligations imposed by actual proprietorship ... the Carolina
planter, who knows as well as any Egyptian that polygamy is a
natural concomitant of slavery, may see in the state of Egypt and
the Egyptians what his country and his children must come to.49
Martineau's analogy - especially her insistence on the 'lack of
obligations' of the Muslim slave-owner towards a slave - is, of course,
baseless (see pp. 321-2). Her views, which constitute an interesting
and informative exception, were condemned by her distant cousin
Lucy Duff Gordon who knew Arabic and who actually lived among
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 317
Egyptians: 'Her attack upon hareems [sic] [is] outrageous; she implies
that they are brothels. I must admit that I have not seen a Turkish
hareem, and she apparently saw no other, and yet she fancies the
morals of Turkey to be superior to those of Egypt... modern travellers
show great ignorance in talking of foreign natives in the lump, as they
nearly all do.' 50 Interestingly, even Mary Louisa Whaüey, whose
vehement attack on domestic slavery can be accounted for by her
Evangelical background and missionary zeal, conceded that slavery in
Egypt was incomparable 'with [the] American gang-slave or field-
slavery'.51
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

The majority of writers constantly referred to the evolution in time of

the twin systems of seclusion and domestic slavery, as well as to their
variations according to place and class. The preoccupation with the
origins of the seclusion of women is of particular interest. In traditional
orientalist epistemology the Middle East had been seen as the embodi-
ment of Islam and the Islamic spirit, and in that tradition, as already
mentioned, sexuality and lasciviousness had been described as deriva-
tives of Islam. The women travellers emphasized that sexual segre-
gation, although it was characteristic of Muslim, Middle East society,
was by no means a generically Muslim phenomenon. It also existed in
non-Muslim countries. And, more important, the seclusion of women,
as well as the employment of eunuchs actually originated in the
Byzantine imperial household. It was from the Byzantine rulers that
the Sultans copied the haremlik. The Byzantine 'connection' is stressed
by the art historian Bamett-Miller in her Beyond the Sublime Port
(1931), a work based on her authorized survey of Seraglio Point during
the First World War.52
Grace Ellison comments in her Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem
that: 'From that permission to marry [four wives] we have totally
misinterpreted the words of the Great Prophet of the Desert. We have
classed Islam as a religion destined to encourage sensuality, a religion
devoid of spirituality, a religion which has degraded womanhood.'
Ellison's book was serialized in the Daily Telegraph and reached a wide
readership. Her statement is of particular interest to us because of her
sympathy with the Suffragist movement in Britain and her contacts
among the Young Turks and Turkey's struggling feminist circles.53 And
Ellen Chennels, writing on the khédive Ismail's harem, argues that: 'It
is no part of the Mohametan [sic] religion to ordain polygamy and the
shutting up of women. Such things existed before Mohamet, who
attempted to set some bound to the universal license which prevailed in
his time.'54 In other words 'oriental' sensuality is not the by-product
of Islamic doctrine (or the prophet's own marital biography), but
antedated them. Moreover, Islam rather than promoting licentious-
 318 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

ness, mitigated it by controlling sexuality in a well regularized system

combining multiple marriage with the seclusion of women. Even within
the classical imperial model, and its 'degenerate' (the term is the
writer's) viceregal variation, there were noted developments from an
older, stricter hierarchy and discipline to a less disciplined, Westernized
construct. Julia Pardoe distinguishes between traditional 'high' and
'modem' harems in Constantinople of the mid 1830s.55 Lane-Pool
makes a similar distinction, regarding the harems of the official Cairene
elite.56 The changes within an apparently monolithic structure, which
many Western observers thought was immune to the social and
political upheavals outside it, particularly impressed those writers who
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

had a close look at Egyptian harems.

Fortunately we have evidence from two such writers on the reign of
Khedive Ismail, both of them governesses to his children, who lived in
his various houses. Emmeline Lott was hired as instructress (her term)
to Ibrahim, Ismail's heir presumptive, and was probably employed for
one year only. She may have been forced to leave her post and did not
enjoy any real influence on her pupil. Her memoirs, which appeared in
1866 are a long, overwritten jeremiad, relating her sufferings - real
and imagined - over the year of service. Despite all these obvious
limitations, Lott's writing is rich in detail and informative. Ellen
Chennels was instructress to Princess Zeynep, Ismail's daughter from
his second wife, from 1871 to 1875. Zeynep was the first inmate of a
royal harem to be educated outside until the age of 13, when Chennels
took over her education which was then continued in the palace. She
left the khedive's service after Zeynep's death. Both Lott and Chennels
witnessed a process of modernization and the unprecedented exposure
of the harem to Western influences.
The Egyptian women of the higher classes in the 1860s and 1870s
were far more advanced than their Turkish sisters described by Pardoe
in the 1830s. The reading-list of the royal princesses and the members of
their entourage included Scott's classics, Edmond About, La Motte-
Fouqué, Hugo, Flamarion and unspecified items which Chennels,
typically, brackets 'French trash novels'.57 Yet Western ideas mingled
with the rigid discipline imposed by the eunuchs who, the writers point
out, were directly responsible to the khédive himself and not to the
Valide Pa§a (queen-mother), who was not as powerful as the Sultan's
own mother and who fell from grace and resided outside the viceregal
harem. The mixture of 'freedom' and discipline is vividly illustrated in
Chennel's hilarious pictures of everyday life in the palaces. The royal
retinue watches the performance of Aida from a latticed opera-box
guarded by black eunuchs. Lessons are rudely interrupted by the
hostile Dada (royal wet-nurse) and her 'reactionary' acolytes. Photo-
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 319
graphs of the younger inmates of the harem are taken under the
suspicious eye of the chief Black Eunuch. More significant, Chennels
saw the viceregal model as a degenerate form of the imperial one, and
she predicted an evolution from a system based on seclusion and
concubinage to monogamy based on seniority. She observed that
Ismail took four wives, but that each of his male children was married to
a free-born woman and that 'with a monogamous household in view.'58
Chennels, like other nineteenth-century women and men travellers,
marked out polygamy as a class phenomenon, typical of the higher
echelons of society, particularly the Turkish or Turkish-influenced
official and military elites. Throughout the empire the majority of rural
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

and urban society was monogamous, and the economic burden of

multiple marriage is often cited as the reason. Even the urban well-to-
do preferred concubinage to the strains of polygamy.

5. MARRIAGE, DIVORCE, AND CONCUBINAGE

Characteristically the Victorian travellers paid great attention to the

position of the married woman and the mother. The main reason for
this is that, throughout the nineteenth century but particularly during
its first half, discussion in the West about the 'women's question' and
agitation for emancipation concentrated on the position of the married
woman. The married woman's legal and economic disabilities, in
particular her treatment under Common Law (see p. 320) were seen as
the main reasons for her low status. Comparison with Muslim law and
custom was, to the travellers, very revealing and contributed to the
critique on their own society. Admittedly, in the East, monogamy
was counterbalanced, to the great disadvantage of the Middle Eastern
woman, by easy divorce.59 Naturally enough, writers emphasized the
ease with which unilateral, male-initiated divorce could be obtained,
outside the courts of law, in the form of the lalâq. They were, however,
aware that the divorced woman kept the property she had brought into
the marriage plus the balance of her mahr, as well as support during
the 'idda, or waiting period before remarriage. In other words, the
Victorian travellers made much of the fact that even unilateral divorce
did not necessarily mean destitution, or even eviction from the family
home. Moreover, quite a few commentators were aware of the exis-
tence of two other forms of divorce, which were bilateral and had to be
ratified by the courts of law; the faskh (or a judicial decree of separa-
tion) and the khul' (or divorce by mutual consent).60 To argue now that
women did not usually make use of the last two options, and that the
first, unilateral, form of divorce was abused, is beside the point and
seemed so to some nineteenth-century observers (and, as Judith
 320 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Tucker's recent study of the records of the Sharî'a courts in Egypt

shows, women of all classes, and notably peasant women, did make use
of their legal rights and played an extensive part in litigations).61 The
writers took the view that Muslim marriages were dissoluble and that
they could be dissolved on the woman's initiative or by mutual consent.
Another important point, and a related one, is that Muslim women
were considered freer than their Western sisters because the former
(according to our travellers), had legal rights and could hold property
and appear before the law-courts.
The analogy with the legal status of married women in Britain, was,
to the writers, highly revealing. By common-law the married woman
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

was a femme couverte.61 Having entered into a contract with the other
party in marriage she, to repeat Blackstone's famous and immensely
influential eighteenth-century formula, had legally ceased to exist and
forfeited her right to sue or be sued, sign a legal document, be liable for
debts incurred by her (or her partner) and, most significantly, hold or
discharge of property in her own right and perform a transaction
independently and not as her husband's 'agent'. Underlying the
concept of couverture is the idea of the personal unity in marriage,
inherited from the feudal hierarchical construct of 'baron et ferne'.63 To
be sure, equity law and courts did enable wives to hold property
and discharge of it, and pre-nuptial agreements and trusteeship
supplemented common-law. But, as most students of the legal status of
women in Britain agree, equity was accessible to a tiny privileged
minority. Only after the passage of the Married Women's Property Law
of 1882 were wives able to hold separate property. Moreover, as
virtually all of the travellers noted, Muslim marriages were civil
marriages. In Britain, on the contrary, marriage, though perceived as a
civil contract, had still retained its spiritual aspect and was indissoluble.
And even after the 1857 Divorce Law which made divorce civil, the
spirit and letter of the legislation reflected the 'double-standard'. A
husband could sue for a divorce on the grounds of adultery alone
whereas a wife - until 1923 - had to prove adultery, as well as cruelty or
desertion, as adequate grounds. Divorce by mutual consent did not
exist before 1936.64
It is not surprising that Turkish and Egyptian women seemed to have
fared relatively better, and that because, notwithstanding their
position within the marriage and the threat of unilateral divorce, they
could, by law, hold property. That right was the palliative to polygamy
and, to the Victorians, was important. As Fanny Blunt put it in 1878:
'Should a lady possess any property the husband cannot assume any
right over it, nor over any of the rest of her belongings. The wisdom
and generosity of this law cannot be too highly commended.'65
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 321
What seemed equally important was the accessibility - albeit merely
theoretical - of the law and the law-courts to women of all classes,
married and unmarried, provided they had reached majority. A
Turkish married woman, it was pointed out, could inherit without
trustees; she could sue or be sued independently of her husband
(which, for certain offences, did not apply to women in Britain before
1923) and she could plead on her own cause personally because 'no
doctrine of couverture exists for her'.66 What is astonishing is that
the last remark postdates the reform in wives' property law, when
couverture was all but eliminated. It seems that the travellers' notion of
the legally and economically deprived middle-class Englishwoman
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

persisted well into the twentieth century, and that this notion led them
to idealize the position of the married Muslim woman.
Attitudes to concubinage were even more ambivalent. Of course it
was degrading to both women and men, but it could be advantageous.
Far from being a condition of bondage concubinage encouraged
mobility. Enslavement and seclusion were sought after by the really
ambitious. Slavery meant an escape from a semi-barbarous life in
(Christian) Circassia, or Georgia. Esmé Scott-Stevenson, who in 1880
interviewed expatriate Circassians in Konya and Cilicia, reported the
following:
I asked him [her Circassian interviewee] which he would prefer,
his child to be the servant of a Russian, or a slave in a Turkish
harem. He declared emphatically that all their women would
prefer the latter; for with the Turks they are more kindly treated;
and [even if] their masters were tired of them, they were never
turned out to die of hunger.
Scott-Stevenson (wife of the civil commissioner of Kyrenia, Cyprus),
was, however, violently anti-Russian, and 'interviews' such as this
could be fabricated, or simply trimmed to suit the writer's purpose, the
interview being held to confirm the traveller's view on the harem. The
same point is made by the reliable Fanny Blunt: 'Their first position is
one of extreme ignorance and barbarism.'67
Most significantly for Victorian women travellers, the harem system
regularized and controlled sexual relations between women and men.
The issue of marital and extra-marital liaisons was provided for
and integrated into the social structure. The issue of a concubine
was recognized, could be, and often was, legitimized and - what
particularly impressed observers, could inherit. The mother could
eventually marry the father of her child — as often happened — or be
married outside the harem.68 The integration of female slaves and their
children into society was appreciated partly for its social and economic
 322 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

rationale, but mainly on humanitarian grounds. Again Turkish and

Arab societies were seen as far more humane than the travellers' own.
In nineteenth-century Britain pre- or extra-marital sex meant social
and economic destruction for the middle-class woman. Her 'fall'
was interpreted in moral terms with notable evangelical tones. The
moralistic tenor of the Victorian double standard and the emphasis on
female chastity before and outside marriage was reflected in the legal
status of illegitimate children and unmarried mothers. In sharp
contrast to Muslim law, the law in Britain did not recognize a child bom
outside marriage even after the parents married. He/she was a 'filius
nulius' (who, of course, could not inherit). Furthermore, Victorian
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

legislation concerning illegitimacy and guardianship (particularly

the Bastardy Laws) as well as the relief system purposely made the
unmarried mother the main bearer of the economic and moral burden
of her 'sin'.69

6. AUTONOMY, DISCIPLINE, AND WORK IN THE MUSLIM

HOUSEHOLD

The desexualization of the haremlik and the analogy with the Victorian
monogamous household made it possible for the writers to perceive the
former as an autonomous 'society within society'. The harem was not
merely the offshoot of patriarchal tyranny: its raison d'être was not
merely to perpetuate male domination. It was a female community
based on a division of labour - distinguishing between reproduction
and productive, manual labour, a peculiar code of civility, and an
elaborate and rigid etiquette. And, most notably, the harem was self-
ruling. In imitation of the imperial household, high- and middle-class
harems were presided over by the mother-in-law. In the imperial model
the Valide Sultan (Sultan's mother) ruled a rigidly structured female
hierarchy. Odalisques (from Odalik) were divided into four groups:
kadines (mothers of the Sultan's offspring); ikbals (favourites); gözdes
('the noticed ones') and those inmates as yet unnoticed by the sultan.
These were catered for by an army of female manual labourers and the
entire household was run by the functionaries holding specific offices
and answerable to the Valide Sultan: the Kethiidâ or Kâhya (deputy
head of the household); Hazinedar Usta (treasurer); keepers of the
robes, baths, jewels, and show rooms; the reader of the Koran; the
manageress of the table-service, et cetera. All of them, of course, were
female.70 Running a middle-class, or, for that matter even a high-class
harem, was a much simpler affair. But, it was often observed, the same
principles of hierarchy and discipline on the one hand, and self-rule on
the other, were imitated throughout the empire, particularly in the big
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 323
urban centres. To many an Englishwoman the inmates of the haremlik
seemed an autonomous sorority of common fate and interests, immune
to the outside world. Within this sorority mothers - whose role and
position were epitomized in the person of the husband's mother - had a
particular place. Mistakenly, mothers were thought to be secure.71
They seemed less threatened by divorce than the other women. They
enjoyed their much deserved social and economic rights. Moreover,
they were valued and often idolized by male society. Middle East
societies in general, but particularly Turkish society, are described as
family- and not male-centred. The harem is conceived to have a
feminizing and domesticating affect on society at large. Leisure is
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

centred on the home and this applies to both female and male leisure.
Tribute is paid to the Turk's dedication to his family; his devotion to his
parents; his consideration and great respect for the mother of his
children and, last, but by no means least, his dedication to his children.
There are quite a few descriptions of bereaved fathers in mourning,
which are as touching as the parallel descriptions of bereaved mothers.
(The best examples are Mary Eliza Rogers' descriptions of bereaved
fathers.)72 On the whole the Muslim man is shown as being far more
domestic than his English counterpart.
In their idealization of the position of the wife and domestic slave
travellers tended to play down, even ignore, the patriarchal aspects of
the Middle East household. A few went so far as to imply that
the married woman's control over the household and the privileged
position of the mother-in-law were relics of an archaic matriarchal
order. I should like to emphasize that references to matriarchy are few
and far between and characterize the last quarter of the period in
discussion. Mary Lucy Gamett, for instance, included a special section
on matriarchy in most editions of her work on Turkish women.
Mrs Ramsay often connects the position of the mother-in-law to a
matriarchal heritage. For example:
How far the patriarchal system prevails I don't know, but ...
married sons [are] living with their parents or their widowed
mothers. In such cases the mother is 'boss' of the whole concern.
The young wife, or each wife ... has her own private apartment in
the establishment, where she is mistress ...; but over-all the
mother-in-law presides, often with an iron rule.73
Harem life, as depicted by Lady Montagu and Lady Craven, is
sumptuous, sensous, and lucrative. Indeed, Montagu herself was
aware of possible analogies between her letters and Galland's Nights.7*
Middle-class nineteenth-century travellers attributed the Augustan
writer's 'impropriety' and her propensity for the exotic and sensual to
 324 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

her aristocratic background. Montagu did have access to the abodes of

Turkish grandees but she did not penetrate the veneered surface. Life
behind the elegant facade remained terra incognita to her, and, it was
argued, she was ignorant of the odalisque's real life.75 And, for the
Victorians, real life in the harem meant work, for they tended to see the
harem as an economic unit, ideally a self-sufficient and well-regulated
one. Idleness and ostentatious living there was, but these were
marginal and typified a tiny minority. In the more representative
harem a woman was first a house-keeper, secondly a mother and, only
then a concubine. Significantly the odalisque is characterized as a
mother and the producer of goods rather than their consumer. Life
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

is neither exotic, nor mysterious, but industrious and rather mono-

tonous. As Mary Lucy Gamett remarked:
Home life in a harem is monotonous ... it is quite erroneous to
suppose that an Osmanli woman of the better class has no duties
or occupations beyond a certain amount of servile attendance
on her blue-beard of a husband, and that she passes her days
reclining on a divan, eating sweets and playing with jewels'; ...
the harem is very domesticated and no accomplishments are so
very much appreciated in a marriageable maiden as proficiency in
the domestic arts.76
Emphasis on domesticity and housewifery is characteristic. In harem
literature much space is devoted to women's work (and to women's
leisure, as distinct from 'idleness'). Nursing and the tending of small
children, infants' diets, the various rituals and feasts connected with
birth, weaning, et cetera, are described in the minutest details. Middle
Eastern women were considered overindulgent towards their children,
especially the boys. A boy's (and in particular a prince's) life in
the harems of the Turkish elite in a wholly female environment
had dangerous effects, according to most commentators, and was
considered effeminating and mentally (and even sexually) corrupting.
The typical middle- or lower-class harem was a different matter. The
mother's role in her children's education, especially her role in the
education of sons was appreciated. An analogy with British society
was, again, inevitable: the Turkish mother — according to some travel-
lers - had a considerably greater influence on the education and life of
the male children than her European counterpart.77
To child-care may be added an impressive list of household chores:
washing, ironing, and mending; curding and tallowing; cooking,
baking, and pickling; sewing, stitching, and embroidery or 'fancy-
sewing' (typical of the high-class harem), gardening, and the tending of
livestock, are but a few examples. Mary Mackintosh expands on the
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 325
division of labour during harvesting and grape-harvesting, naming
seven different kinds of work which were done by women only, or by
women and men (the gathering of the reaped harvest into bundles,
threshing, winnowing, to name a few).78 The following, taken from
Emmeline Lott, is a detailed illustration of wash-day in one of Khedive
Ismail's harems:
On the floor a square piece of matting was laid down, and a large
piece of calico as big as two ordinary sheets was placed over it.
Kneeling down on it were eight slaves with two rolling-pins,
similar in length and thickness, not an inch larger than those used
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

by cooks for making pastry. After having first damped the pieces
of washing, they folded them, then rolled them right round of the
rolling-pins, which they laid down upon the sheet, and with the
other rolling-pin in their hands, they kept rolling the end of it. For
they held it straight up in their hands like a stick against the other
one round which they twisted the linen. This process, which they
called mangling, being finished, the German maid began ironing
H.H. the Viceroy's and the Grand-Pacha's body-linen. At eleven
o'clock the Lady Paramount (H.H. the first wife), [sic] under
whose superintendence the whole of the household arrangements
were carried on, entered the laundry.... She was both sleeveless
and stockingless; but her feet were encased in a pair of polished
wooden clogs, standing as it were upon two wooden bridges, like
the strings of a fiddle. The parts on which she rested her feet were
lined in real velvet, the ties were of the same materials, and the
clogs were studded with silver headed nails. Her hair hanging
loosely about, was tucked under the handkerchief round her
head.79
Woman's work in the khédive 's household is slave labour. The 'Lady
Paramount' is there to supervise, not unlike the middle-class English-
women, or the bourgeoise. And the scene is extremely rich in domestic
detail which is valuable if bordering on the pedestrian: I have in mind
the paragraph on the clogs because it has no parallel in travel books
by men. Even Lane's detailed descriptions of parts of the house-
hold outside the selamlik are second-hand and lack Lott's intimate
knowledge, and he is reticent on every-day life and work within the
haremlik. Moreover, the association of female work with the viceregal
harem, which is conventionally presented as the epitome of an idle and
sumptuous life, rather than for instance, with the middle-class house-
hold, is revealing. Lott herself was 'quite astonished to find that their
highnesses were about and stirring as early as four o'clock in the
morning, which was indeed matinal'.80 Like other observers, she
 326 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

noticed and recorded not only the spatial arrangement of the house, but
the regulation of the inmates' time. Day-time in the well-organized
harem was punctuated by meals and the rituals accompanying them,
work, visits, prayers, and (among Lott's examples) contemplatioa
During meals and other common activities the rule of silence was
observed (as in the imperial harem). The comparison with the convent
is, again, almost inevitable. In point of fact, Lott herself makes the
analogy at least twice.81
How can the domestication of the high harem and the idealization of
the Muslim woman's work be accounted for? The writers came from an
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

industrial society in which home and the work-place had become

separate. This separation, which particularly applied to the writers'
own middle-class milieu, was both real and symbolic. The decline of the
household as productive unit in which both sexes played distinct
economic roles antedated, rather than resulted from, England's
industrial take-off. By the 1850s the middle-class household had no
strictly productive functions.82 The travellers of the 1880s and 1890s
came from a society which was increasingly becoming mass-producing.
Even more significant in this socio-economic context are the ideo-
logical aspects of the separation between the symbolic 'home' and
the work-place. The Victorian ethos of separate spheres precisely
identified the spatial dichotomy of the household and work-place with
the dichotomized system of relations between the sexes. As indicated
before, the middle-class woman was the diametrical opposite of the
'homo economicus', who was also, a 'homo sensualis' (Peter Cominos 's
well-known terms).83 It is, perhaps, because of this that the Victorian
travellers tended to exaggerate the economic role of the high-harem
odalisque and overlook her other functions. Looking at societies which
were not industrial or (as is the case with Ismail's Egypt) undergoing
modernization, the travellers tended to idealize these societies. The
apposition of a degenerate civilization and pastoral, pre-industrial
'Eastern' life is a cliché in the nineteenth-century travelogue. The
women writers carried the theme of civilization - versus primitive life -
over into the domestic sphere. The home, whether the peasant's or the
grandee's, is seen as a pivotal unit around which society evolves. Within
this unit women's role is central. They are active, self-ruling, and often
enjoy legal and real control over the household.

7. THE EVOLUTION OF A SOLIDARITY OF GENDER

The sense of the relativism of sexual mores and behaviour and the
historical approach to both the system and culture of the harem,
together contributed to the awakening of a feeling of sympathy towards
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 327
Muslim women. Sympathy on the part of the Western orientalist - it has
been argued - is conspicuously absent from the nineteenth-century
travelogue on the Middle East.84 Feelings of this kind can be found, in
abundance, in the women's writings. In harem literature in particular,
they develop into an identification with Muslim women and a solidarity
of gender which transcends nationality, religion, and - most striking -
the sense of racial superiority. A word of warning. The Victorian
women travellers were conscious of their 'Englishness', a word cover-
ing several meanings, and notably implying a sense of one's national
identity, middle-class respectability, and proper conduct 'abroad'.
Notice, for example, the number of titles which capitalize on the term in
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

question: The English Governess in Egypt; The Englishwoman in

Egypt; An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem; Recollections . . .
by an English Governess, and so on. And the writers most certainly
considered themselves Christians. Martineau's study in comparative
religion and her final praise of positivism (in Eastern Life) is an
exception. Quite a few of the travellers I studied saw the Middle East as
a Christian landscape, illustrating biblical and New Testament scenes.
Isabel Burton, Mary Eliza Rogers, and Elizabeth Charles were
intensely religious; other examples are the Egyptologist Amelia
Edwards, the Smith-Dunlop sisters, discoverers of the Sinai Palimp-
sest, and even Lady Anne Blunt I shall return to the point later.
Solidarity of gender underscored the most brazen cultural and
religious paternalism. Or, in other words, travellers identified with the
odalisque not because she was a Muslim, but because she was a woman.
Identification was not necessarily a derivative of pity for the oppressed.
It was, rather, a consequence of observation and the comparison, dealt
with earlier, between sexuality and the condition of women in Islam
and in England. Harriet Martineau's pity for Cairene odalisques
provoked Burton who wryly comments on 'a learned lady, Miss
Martineau, [who] once visiting a Harem went into ecstacies of pity and
sorrow because the poor things knew nothing of- say trigonometry and
the use of globes. Sonnini thought otherwise, and my experience, like
that of all old dwellers in the East is directly opposed to this conclu-
sion.'85 Burton also thought that the legal status and economic condi-
tions of Muslim women were far superior to those of their middle-class
English sisters.86 The women writers were certainly not alone in idealiz-
ing the harem. Their underlying assumption is, however, the opposite
of Burton's and Sonnini's. For Burton the oriental woman is, first and
foremost, a 'physical woman'.87 Harem and purdah, like the veil, both
defend and enhance her physicality.88 The women writers elevated her
from an odalisque to a mother, a wife, and a producer. They did not
approach her merely in terms of her sexuality and could, therefore,
 328 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

humanize and personalize her and later identify with her. An identifica-
tion that cuts across the cultural differences is even more manifest in
the non-rhetorical parts of the travel narrative, which drew on the
travellers' personal experience of home life in the Middle East.
The odalisques populating the households in harem literature are
not an exotic decor. Nor is 'all intercourse [with them] conducted by
dumb show.>89 They are given names and are treated as individuals, and
they are neither passive nor dumb: they often talk and are talked to.
Most significant, quite a number of writers show genuine feeling for
them. Take, for instance, Pardoe's City of the Sultan. The book
combines realistic descriptions with an aura of oriental fantasy. There
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

are many crowd scenes in which the inhabitants of Constantinople are

treated en masse. This is, as Emmanuel Sivan has shown, a topos
characterizing Western writing on Muslim societies and on non-
European societies in general.90 It is specially characteristic of travel
writing and enabled the traveller to generalize on the unfamiliar.
Pardoe's treatment of the festivities of the betrothal and subsequent
marriage of Princess Mihrima, second daughter of Sultan Mahmut II,
seems to fit the convention. The writer devotes four chapters (Chs.
25-8) of her first volume to the festivities, concentrating on public
ceremonies in which large crowds are involved. But she uses the
technique of the Arabian Nights to convey the 'personal' angle of the
story. The theme of the princess's marriage serves as frame-story to the
anecdotal first volume and to a part of the second one. The marriage
theme first appears in Chapter 14 which describes preliminary negotia-
tions between representatives of the two parties and the politics of
imperial marriages and the imperial harem. The chapter is halfway
through the first volume. The theme is then dropped to be picked up
again in Chapter 24, discussed throughout four chapters, dropped
again in Chapter 29, and picked up again in the story of the princess's
personal tragedy. The marriage turned out a disaster (it was never
consumated) and Pardoe laments Mihrima's fate in an effusive out-
burst of feelings. The passage from the public to the personal or private,
from descriptions of crowds to the life of an individual behind the
elaborate facade, as well as the use of the topoi and structure of the
Nights, proved successful. The City of the Sultan ran into four editions
and Pardoe capitalized on the combination of fact and sympathetic
fiction in her later works (see id., pp.305-6).
Mary Eliza Rogers' descriptions of the harems of northern and
central Palestine have nothing of the fantastic in them. Rogers, who
was based in Haifa, where she played hostess to her brother Edward
Thomas Rogers, the vice-consul (1855-59), accompanied him on
various missions and gained access to a number of Muslim, Druse,
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 329
Jewish, and Christian households. Her factual descriptions in Domestic
Life in Palestine are unsurpassable for detail and an understanding of
women's daily life. Rogers developed warm and sustained relations
with several Arab women, notably with members of the Christian
family of Sekhali in Haifa and the Muslim 'Abd al-Hâdî's of Jabel
Nablus. A whole chapter of Domestic Life is devoted to his harem in the
village of 'Arräbeh. The harem included the womenfolk and children
of Mahmüd Bey 'Abd al-Hâdl, governor of the district of Nablus and
his brother S aleh Bey, governor of Haifa. It may be taken as an example
of the ménage of members of the local military and administrative elite
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

in a province in the mid nineteenth century, and compared with

evidence on the high-class harem in the government centres. In addi-
tion to a description of the spatial arrangement of the house, Rogers
gives details on the daily chores, local food and drink, child-nurture,
and sleeping-arrangements in the women's quarters (she is the only
traveller I came across who shared sleeping quarters with the entire
harem, women and children). She not only notes down the name of
every single female in the Had! household, but reconstructs their
personal histories, and she becomes especially attached to several
inmates. Let there be no misunderstanding: Rogers thought the seclu-
sion of women degrading both to them and to the men, but she equally
condemned abolition by state reform and the proselytizing efforts of
various missionary cliques. Instead, she prescribed a change from
within, ideally to be arrived at by contacts between English and Muslim
women:
It seems to me that all that we can do, is to enter into sympathy
with the Moslem women, and try to awaken and develop the
highest feelings of their nature, and to help them to understand
and feel the power which they have for governing and elevating
themselves, and to encourage them to exercise that power and to
think seriously . . . 9l
The keyword and, according to Rogers, the key to the Muslim
woman's emancipation is cross-racial and cross-cultural sympathy.
And this sympathy draws on the local women's capacity for self-rule
and their mitigating influence on males. Both these capacities are
perceived as inborn and generic. Significantly Rogers uses the same
vocabulary of the 'spheres' as Pardoe and Lane-Poole before her and
Garnett, Ellison, and Goodnow after her (see pp. 313-14).
A decade separates Domestic Life in Palestine from Isabel Burton's
popular The Inner Life of Syria (1875). Burton promises her female
readers inside information on every-day life in Damascus and its
neighbourhood. As the wife of Damascus's consul (1871-75) she
 330 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

certainly had access to that city's harems. However, she produced a

slight work, poor in detail and with an eye to a prospective best-seller.
In her description of Damascene hammams and harems she adopts a
facetious tone in imitation of that found in a tourist guide-book, and
addresses her readers in the second person singular ('Would you like to
pass a lazy day and go to the Turkish Bath?').92 The harem described in
Chapter XII of The Inner Life is not named, and after Burton's
enforced resignation from the consulship, both he and Isabel were
paranoic about Damascus's elite. It is referred to as typical of the
provincial household of the well-to-do. Burton, like Rogers, thought
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

the physical seclusion of women detrimental to their intellectual

powers and their emotional life. Like Rogers, however, she objects
to emancipation from above — in the form of abolition by state interven-
tion. She also makes some disparaging comments on the intolerance of
Damascus's missionaries - Anglican and others (Burton's own enmity
to missionaries was proverbial). Comparing the condition of the
well-to-do Muslim woman to that of her Victorian counterpart she
concludes that:

We must qualify that idea that we have in Europe, viz. that there is
no education in a harim [sic]. Reading and writing are only means,
not ends. The object of education is to make us wise, to teach us
the right way of life. Our hostesses know everything that is going
on around them. The husband, behind the scenes, will often hold
council with his wives. They consult together, and form good and
sensible judgements, and advise their husbands even in political
difficulties. Can we do more?93

'Finally', she concludes, '[in] the depth and fervour of their religious
belief, many of my friends are equal to us - in their way.'94
Rogers and Burton were deeply religious women. But their religious
tolerance made it possible for them to sympathize with Muslim women
and even reconsider the harem. This attitude of the religiously moti-
vated albeit non-proselytizing writer is in sharp contrast with that of
those writers who worked directly for, or in contact with the Anglican
missions.95 Four writers in my sample fit in this second category: Mary
Louisa Whatley (who worked under the auspices of the CMS - the
Church Missionary Society); Mary Mackintosh - who was connected to
the CMS in northern Syria; Elisabeth Ann Finn, first connected to the
London Society for the Promotion of Knowledge amongst the Jews,
known as the LJS - London Jews Society - and Miss (first name
unidentified) Hovendon, an evangelical residing in Jerusalem and
working, voluntarily, for the LJS, and also a founding member of
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 331
the Jerusalem Literary Society and a contributor to the society's
discussions and publications.
In their criticism of the harem, the four were only a little less
vehement than Martineau. Their attitude derived from their bias
against Islam, as well as from ignorance about the Muslim population.
This ignorance may be partly accounted for by the fact that missionary
work among Muslims was forbidden by law and the Anglican mission
directed its educational and welfare effort at the Jews (in Palestine) and
the Eastern Christians (especially the Greek Orthodox and Coptic
communities). Missionaries acquired an intimate knowledge of
domestic life in the Christian and sometimes in the Jewish communities.
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

And in contrast to the bulk of writers - both non-religious and the

religious but non-proselytizing ones - they idealized Christian and
Jewish women. Miss Hovendon's paper, read to the Jerusalem Literary
Society in 1849, is a typical example of that attitude.
[Muslim Women] especially shock all our ideas, and it is difficult
sometimes to suppress the feelings of disgust which their offen-
sive, unfeminine and foolish manners too often inspire; pity them
as we may and ought - but they are at once so silly and so familiar
and so haughty, so very unlike that 'ministering angel' woman.96
Note that Hovendon is disgusted by Muslim women precisely because
she finds them 'unfeminine' and lacking those inborn generic traits
of the Victorian 'Angel in the House' which the non-missionaries
also thought characterized any woman, regardless of her religion,
nationality, or race.
We may say with caution that identification with Muslim women is
common to non-religious, and religious but non-missionary individuals
of the time. Evangelical ethnography, on the other hand, is charac-
terized by a particularly strong sense of Islam as the 'other', a sense
which prevents the evolution of the solidarity of gender.

8. CONCLUSION

The encounter with polygamy, domestic slavery, and the physical

segregation between the sexes had significant effects on the mental
make-up of women travellers. In the shaping of this mentalité I discern
three inter-related, albeit not consecutive developments, or processes,
which I have attempted to outline. First was the emergence of a sense of
the relativeness of sexual morals and manners, a sense which brought
about - via the comparison between cultures - the reappraisal of the
position of women in a monogamous society. Related to this was the
desexualization of the image of the oriental female and the harem. The
 332 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

'physical woman', commonly identified with orientalist travel writing,

was developed in the women's descriptions to a more complex type. In
many cases motherhood, wifehood, and female autonomy within
woman's own sphere were substituted for merely sexual functions. The
haremlik, the locus sensualis of the imaginary Orient was divested of its
sexuality. The third development was the sympathetic presentation of
Muslim women and the emergence of the solidarity of gender. This
'group solidarity' underscored the religious and racial consciousness of
the writers and their sense of political superiority.
Let there be no misunderstanding: these three developments were
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

not necessarily conscious ones. A brilliant observer like Lady Montagu

self-consciously made comparisons between different attitudes to
sexuality in different cultures. And Martineau (notwithstanding her
unfounded views on Egyptian women) set out on a voyage that would
become the basis of a study in comparative religion.97 With other
travellers the analogy between geographically remote societies and the
historical development of manners and institutions was less conscious.
In both cases, however, the observation of morals and manners abroad
resulted in the reconsideration of mores at home.
As with the shaping of any mentalité, so also with that of the women's
attitudes to the Orient, notions did not develop linearly. To pin down
causal relations between the three developments dissected here would
be wrong and misleading. For example, Lady Montagu's view that
female chastity was not a universally valid idea and her tolerance of the
'other* are typical of Enlightenment writing. As already mentioned,
eighteenth-century travellers and thinkers came to realize that the
most varied kinds of polity and social institutions could be found in
different parts of the world. Thus a journey from one society to another
could resemble movement in time. A 'universalism' that is a belief in
the superiority of Western politics and culture could be supplanted by
relativism. And the rule of monogamy was certainly not universal, it
was rather a European peculiarity. As Edward Westermarck was to
remark in his classic, The History of Human Marriage, the prevelance
of permitted polygyny (plurality of wives) and the widespread custom
of concubinage in most human societies caught the attention and
imagination of Europeans in the age of voyage and discovery. And the
juxtaposition of monogamy and polygamy certainly attracted those
thinkers who considered marriage and the position of women. Here it is
enought to mention David Hume's article on Polygamy and Divorce,
which appeared in his Essay in 1741—42; Lord Kames's discussion of
polygamy in the Sketches on the History of Man (1774) and, most
famous, Montesquieu's exposé on the Turkish and Middle Eastern
harem in the Lettres persans and De l'esprit des lois. The comparison
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 333
between marriage in different cultures may be seen as part of an
ontological process. As Claude Lévi-Strauss succintly put it, it was the
encounter with the geographical 'other' that forced Europeans to
examine themselves.98
Whether deliberate or incidental, analogy with Muslim women
underwent some changes. Of these, most culturally significant is the
desexualization of the harem which was to follow in the nineteenth
century. This is by no means the outcome of Augustan tolerance. In
that sense Martineau, Pardoe, Lane-Poole, Rogers, and Burton did
not follow in the footsteps of Lady Montagu, but rather broke
away from her interpretation of 'freedom' as licence, and projected
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

conventional middle-class images of womanhood onto the harem. Yet,

paradoxically, it was precisely the comparison between the hanim/
odalisque and the Victorian woman which made it possible for the
travellers discussed here to reconsider the roles and status of both. Of
course, the majority of writers did not accept physical segregation. But
they maintained that seclusion and polygamy do not preclude degrees
of economic and social freedom and mobility. On the other hand, they
came to think that monogamy and social mixing between the sexes
were not mandates for women's freedom. Far from it: monogamous
marriage, bolstered by legal disabilities, economic dependence, and
the notion of 'double standard' could be almost as perilous as actual
seclusion.
Characteristically, it was those writers who knew the harem inti-
mately who identified with Muslim women. Mere passers-by found
little sympathy for the system and for individuals. Amelia Edwards is
an example of this second category of traveller. She was, evidently,
more interested in Egypt's antiquities than in the 'customs and manners
of modern Egyptians' and her prodigious Thousand Miles Up the Nile
includes only half a page on harems and contemporary urban women.
Edwards was honest enough to admit to ignorance on these matters,
but nevertheless condemned what she hardly knew."

One last point. The Victorians did demythisize the 'sensual' harem.
That, however, is not to say that they did not idealize it Some
travellers, despite their experience of every-day life in the Middle East,
were less than informed on the law or the judicial customs. Lady Anne
Blunt was one of the very few travellers, male or female, to have
possessed firsthand knowledge on Bedouin society in Mesopotamia
and central Arabia. In writing most perceptively on marriage customs,
she was able to refer to mahr as 'jointure', a term taken directly from the
vocabulary of equity.100 The women writers on the harem exorcized
Scheherazade. In her place they installed a more complex image, yet an
 334 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

idealized one. Their testimonies on the Orient are extremely self-

revealing.

NOTES
This article is part of a larger project on English travel writing on the Middle East.
Thanks are due to the Macmillan Press for allowing me to publish it.
I follow the modem Turkish spelling. The combinations 'harem system' 'harem
structure' are used to denote the structures of polygny and the seclusion of women.
Haremlik is used to signify the space in the house separated from the selamlik or men's
quarters and allocated to the women. Since the Turkish Royal Harem was emulated
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

throughout the empire, the Turkish terms are applied, on a few occasions, to non-
Turkish-speaking households (where the travellers used 'harem' to refer to both the
place and its inhabitants). Exceptions are the quotations where the writers' own spelling
is preserved.
1. In Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Harlequin comments that
'morality there is no different from that on earth' (act 3, scene 1).
2. This and all following quotations of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are from Robert
Halsband's edition of her complete letters; see R. Halsband (ed.). Lady Montagu:
The Complete Utters (Oxford, 1965-67), Vol. 1, p.327.
3. For the problematics of the term 'Orient' see B. Lewis, The Middle East and the
West (New York, repr. 1966), pp.9-10. The terms Middle East and Orient are used
interchangeably and applied to Turkey in Europe and to the territories under
Turkey's rule or sovereignty in Africa and Asia.
4. For medieval images see N. Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image
(Edinburgh, 1960). For images in Middle-English writing see D. Metlitzki,
The Mailer of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, 1977). See also R.W.
Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 1980), and
R. Barkai, Cristianos y musulmanes en la España medieval (El enemigo en el
espejo) (Madrid, 1984). For the Renaissance consult S.C. Chew, The Crescent
and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York, 1965).
For an altogether different assessment of sexuality in Islam see A. Bouhdiba,
Islam et Sexualité (Paris, 1975). Various aspects of Enlightenment concepts and
presentations of the Orient are discussed in H. Baudet's Paradise on Earth: Some
Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, (New Haven, 1965). On
eighteenth-century analogies between the harem and despotic government, see A.
Grosrichard, Structure de Serail (Paris, 1979).
5. E.E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). In similar vein are: R. Rabbani, Europe's
Myth of the Orient: Devise and Rule (London, 1986) and C. Pastner, 'Englishmen
in Arabia: Encounter with Middle Eastern Women', Signs, 4 (20), 309-27.
6. Said, Orientalism.
7. B. Farewell, Burton (New York, 1963), quoted in Rabbani. Europe's Myth, p.86.
8. My use of the term 'rhetoric' is informed by that of W.C. Booth. I am aware
that descriptive writing too can be 'rhetorical' but limit myself to the general
informative sections of the narrative. See W.C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
(Chicago, repr. 1983).
9. Richard Bevis's Bibliotheca Cisorientalia numbers over 200 titles by women; sec
Bibliotheca Cisorientalia: An Annotated Checklist of Early English Travel Books
on the Near and Middle East (Boston, 1973). Individual travellers have received
the attention of biographers. A select list of biographies should include: R.
Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford, 1960); H.V.F.
Winstone, Getrude Bell (New York, 1978), and M. Schmidt Fox, Passion's Child;
The Extraordinary Life of Jane Digby (London, 1978). The travellers, however,
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 335
are treated as individuals, sometimes eccentrics - misplaced in their own milieu,
and sometimes as mere helpmates to men travellers. (See for instance K. Tidrick's
treatment of Lady Anne Blunt in Heart Beguiling Araby, [Cambridge, 1981].)
10. The writers (in alphabetical order) are: Emily Anne Beaufort (Viscountess
Strangford); Lady Alicia Blackwood; Lady Anne (Noel) Blunt; Janet Fanny
Blunt; Lady Annie Brassey; Anna Dodd Bowman; Mary Broderick; Demetra
(Vaka) Brown; Isabel Burton; Ellen Chennels; Lady Elisabeth Craven; Georgina
Emma Dammer-Dawson; Amelia Anne Blandford Edwards; Frances Harriet
Egerton (Countess Ellesmere); Frances Elliot Minto; Grace Ellison; Eliza Fay;
Elisabeth Ann Finn; Lucy Mary Jane Garnett; Elisabeth Goodnow (Cooper);
Lady Lucy (Duff) Gordon; Annie Jane Harvey; (unknown) Hovendon;
Emmeline Lott; Mary Mackintosh; Harriet Martineau; Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu; Judith Montefiore; Caroline Paine; Julia Sophia Pardoe; Sophia Lane
Poole; Maeiane Young Postants; Mrs W.M. Ramsay; Mary Eliza Rogers; Isabella
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

Frances Romer; Esmé Scott-Stevenson; Frances Anne Vane (Marchioness of

Londonderry); Mary Louisa Whatley.
11. British Library, Bentley Papers, Additional manuscripts, 28.511, f.265.
12. For the history and influence of Galland's transcription see A. Abdullah, 'The
Arabian Nights in English Literature to 1900', Ph.D. Dissertation (Cambridge
University, 1961); TJ. Assad, Three Victorian Travellers: Burton, Blunt, Doughty
(London, 1964); M. Ali Jassim, Scheherazade in England (Washington, 1981); M.
De Meester, Oriental Influences in the English Literature of the Nineteenth Century
(1915). For Lane's translation, see L. Ahmed, Edward W. Lane: A Study of his
Life and Works and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century
(London, 1978).
13. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New
York, 1908); M. de Meester, Oriental Influences.
14. For the problematics of evidence on the imperial harem see N.N.M. Penzer, The
Harem (Philadelphia, 1936), and A.-M. Moulin and P. Chuvin, 'Des Occidentaux
à la cour du Sultan', L'Histoire, 45 (1982), 62-71.
15. Quoted in R. Schiffer, 'Turkey Romanticized: Images of the Turks in Early
Nineteenth Century English Travel Literature', Materialia Turcia (1982), 97.
16. From Travels through France, Italy and Hungary, quoted in Schiffer, 'Turkey
Romanticized', p 104.
17. Edward W. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern
Egyptians Written in Egypt during the Years 1833-35 (London, 1890), p.159.
18. Sophia Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo (London,
1844), p.vi.
19. Lady Montagu to Lady Mar, 1 April 1717, Complete Letters, Vol. 1, p.327.
20. Julia Pardoe. The City of the Sultan and the Domestic Manners of the Turks
(London, 1836), Vol. 1, p.89.
21. For the history of the publication of the 'Embassy Letters' see R. Halsband's Life
and his 'Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Her Place in the 18th Century', History
Today, 16 (1966), 94-102. On her reading public see id., Ladies of Letters in the
Eighteenth Century (California, 1969), and on her literary milieu his 'Lady Mary
Montagu and Eighteenth-Century Fiction', Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966),
145-56.
22. Montagu, Complete Letters, pp.328-9.
23. Ibid., p.329.
24. Elisabeth Craven, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (London,
1789), p.234.
25. Ibid.
26. James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Mesopotamia, Including a Journey from
Aleppo, across the Euphrates to Urfah through the Plains of the Turcomans, to
Diarbakr in Asia Minor, from thence to Mardin, on the Borders of the Great Desert,
and by the Tigris to Mosul and Bagdad with Researches on the Ruins of Babylon
(London, 1827), pp.550-51.
 336 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

27. Quoted in Halsband, Life of Lady Mary Montagu, p.63.

28. See particularly the issue from 24 Jan. 1738, quoted in Lord Wamcliffe's edition of
the letters: Lord Wharncliffe (ed.), The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, 3rd edn. (London, 1861), Vol. 2, pp.414-49. Also Halsband, Life of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, pp.163-80.
29. See Complete Letters, Vol. 1. Lady Montagu to Lady R[ich], 20 Sept. 1716 (pp.
269-72) for her notorious utterance on 'Romish' manners. On the Catholic Church
and women see particularly Lady Montagu to Lady X, 1 Oct. 1716: 'I never in my
life had so little charity for the Roman Catholic Religion as since I see the misery it
occasions so many poor unhappy Women' (p. 277). In this same letter she
condemns convents and refers to nuns as 'buried alive', a metaphor she did not use
apropos harems.
30. For Enlightenment attitudes to sexuality see P.G. Boucé (ed.). Sexuality in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 1982). Particularly useful is R. Porter's
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

'Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century

Britain', ibid., pp.1-28. See also M. de Gates, 'The Cult of Womanhood in
Eighteenth-Century Thought', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976), 21-40;
K.B. Klinton, 'Femme et philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of Feminism', ibid.,
7 (1975), 283-300, and P.M. Spacks, 'Ev'ry woman is at Heart a Rake', ibid., 8
(1974-75), 27-46.
31. Complete Letters, To Lady L, 1 April 1717, pp.312-14.
32. I limit myself to the English Enlightenment though, as it is commonly accepted,
this statement can be applied to the prominent philosophes. For a comparison with
the philosophes and a more general analysis of freedom and gender see S.M. Okin,
Women in Western Political hought (Princeton, 1979). See also J.B. Elshtain
(ed.), The Family in Political Thought (Amhurst, 1982), and particularly, M.L.
Shanley and P.G. Stillman, 'Political and Marital Despotism: Montesquieu's
Persian Letters', ibid., pp.66-80.
33. The full title is: Woman not Inferior to Man, or a Short and Modest Vindication of
the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem
with the Men, by Sophia, a Person of Quality. It was first published in London in
1739 and reprinted in 1743 together with a reply from an anonymous man, Man
Superior to Woman (London, n.d.), and Sophia's further riposte, Woman's
Superior Excellence over Man (London, n.d.).
34. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, Vol. 1, pp.100-101. She goes on to invoke the
metaphor of the slippers.
35. Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt, p.97.
36. Lucy Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt with a Memoir by her Daughter Janet Ross
(London, 1865, repr. London, 1983), p.136.
37. Mary Lucy Garnett, Home Life in Turkey (London, 1909), p.267.
38. Ibid., p.280.
39. Mrs W.M. Ramsay, Every-Day life in Turkey: Seventeen Years of Residence
(London, 1897), p.108.
40. F. Blunt, The People of Turkey, pp.260-61.
41. In his public lecture 'Off Queen's Gardens', published in Sesame and Lilies. This is
accepted by scholars as the most important single document for the characteristic
idealization of woman and the home in Victorian thought.
42. Garnett, The Women of Turkey, p.441.
43. Elisabeth Goodnow, afterwards Cooper, The Women of Egypt, (London, 1914),
p.185.
44. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, pp.136-7.
45. Lane Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt, p.175.
46. For instance, Frances Vane, Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Vienna, Constanti-
nople, Athens, and Naples (London, 1844), p.112.
47. Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past (London, 1849), p.236.
48. For Martineau's Abolitionism, see Autobiography (1877, repr. London, 1983),
Vol. 2, pp.1-93; R.K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London,
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 337
1960), Ch. V, America.
49. Martineau, Eastern Life, p.241.
50. Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, p.112.
51. Letters from Egypt to Plain Folks at Home (London, 1879), p.107.
52. Barnett Miller, Behind the Sublime Port: The Grand Seraglio of Stambul (New
Haven, 1931), especially pp.91-2.
53. Ellison, The Englishwoman, p.120.
54. E. Chennels, Recollections of an Egyptian Princess by her English Governess,
Being a Record of S Years of Residence at the Court of Ismael Pascha Khedive
(London, new edn. 1893), Vol. 1, pp.72-3.
55. Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, Ch. 17, Imitation of Western modes is lampooned in
her description of the household of 'Esma Sultane' whose inmates perform
Western dances in gaudy chintz dresses. In the same chapter, however, 'Perousse
Hanum' is presented as the Turkish-oriented, traditional woman.
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

56. Lane Poole, The Englishwoman, see particularly her descriptions of the harem of
'Habeeb Efendee', late governor of Cairo (Letter 15).
57. Chennels, Recollections of an Egyptian Princess, pp.147-9.
58. Ibid., pp.72-3.
59. For example, Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, Vol. 1, p.102; Garnett, Home Life in
Turkey, p.221: 'At the present day among the Turks of the industrial classes one
wife is the rule, and among those of the upper classes more than one wife is the
exception'; see also Ellison, The Englishwoman, p.57: 'Polygamy does not exist
nowadays in Turkey, or at least is very exceptional".
60. For women's legal status see, J. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt
(Cambridge, 1984). For married women's property consult Chapter 5. For the
social and economic position see also N. Tomiche, 'The Situation of Egyptian
Women in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century', in W.R. Polk and R.L.
Chambers (eds.). Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago,
1968), pp.177-84, and consult L. Beck and N. Keddie (eds.), Women in the Muslim
World (Cambridge, MA., 1979). A short list of important travellers' accounts on
women's legal position should include Mary Lucy Gamett's works, Blunt's
People of Turkey, Pardoe's travelogue, and, for the late nineteenth century, Mrs
Ramsay's book.
61. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.
62. For the legal status of married women consult the following: J. Bryce, 'Marriage
and Divorce under Roman and English Law', Studies in History and Jurisprudence
(Oxford, 1901); O.W. Stone, 'The Status of Women in Great Britain'. American
Journal of Comparative Law, 20 (1972), 596-621; L. Holcombe, 'Victorian Wives
and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law, 1857-82', in M.
Vicinus (ed.), A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (London,
repr. 1980).
63. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Ch. 15, Tucker edn.,
1803, 'Of Husband and Wife', pp.433-45.
64. For legislation on divorce, bastardy, illegitimacy, and guardianship see J. Weeks,
Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981).
65. Fanny Blunt, The People of Turkey: Twenty Years Residence among Bulgarians,
Greeks, Turks and Armenians (London, 1878) p.78.
66. Gamett, Home Life in Turkey, p.217. See also R. Burton, 'Terminal Essay', in A
Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainment, Vol. 7, p.199.
67. Mrs Scott-Stevenson, Our Ride Through Asia Minor (London, 1881); Blunt, The
People of Turkey, p.250.
68. On domestic slavery, the slave-trade, and social mobility see, G. Baer, 'Slavery
and its Abolition', in Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago,
1969), pp.161-90; E.R. Toledano, 'Slave Dealers, Women, Pregnancy, and
Abortion: The Story of a Circassian Slave-girl in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cairo',
Slavery and Abolition, 2 (May 1981), 53-69. and his The Ottoman Slave Trade and
its Suppression, 1840-1890 (Princeton, 1982). As for the travellers' accounts the
 338 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

following arc particularly rich in detail: Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, Vol. 1,
p.103; Mrs Harvey, Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes (London, 1871), p.10;
Garnett, Home Life in Turkey, pp.211-13; 215-16; The Women of Turkey and
their Folklore (London, repr. 1893), Vol. 1, pp.382-3.
69. See P. Thane, 'Women and the New Poor Law', History Workshop, 6 (1979), 29-
59.
70. For the structure of the imperial harem see the following: Miller, Beyond
the Sublime Post, Chs. 5 and 12; Penzer, The Harem, Chs. 6-10 (particularly
informative on the female hierarchy are Chs. 7 and 8); Toledano, The Ottoman
Slave Trade; B. Lewis, Istanbul and the Civilization of the Ottoman Empire
(Oklahoma, 1963).
71. This, at least, was Lane-Poole's impression: The Englishwoman, p.23.
72. Mary Elisa Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 2nd edn. (London, 1863), especially
Ch.7.
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

73. Ramsay, Domestic Life, pp.105-6.

74. Montagu, Letters, Lady Montagu to Lady Mar, 10 March 1718, Vol. 1, p.385: 'Now
do I fancy that you imagine I have entertained you all this while with a relation that
has received many embellishments from my hand. This is but too like (says you) the
Arabian Tales'.
75. For instance, Emmeline Lott, The English Governess in Egypt, Harem Life in
Egypt and Constantinople, 2 vols. (London, 1866), preface. Lott begins her books
with a mock eulogy to Montagu 'the princess of Female Writers', who 'swept across
splendid carpeted floors of those noble saloons of audience' and to whom 'the
interiors of those Harems were . . . a terra incognita . . . all was couleur de rose and
not the slightest opportunity was permitted her to study [the] daily lives of the
odalisques.'
76. Garnett, Home Life in Turkey, p.269.
77. See particularly Mary Mackintosh on 'Children', in Damascus and its People
(London, 1883). Also Rogers, Domestic Life. But the same can be traced back to
Montagu's Letters.
78. Mackintosh, Damascus and its People, Chs. 8-9.
79. Lott, The English Governess, Vol. 2, p.238. Ismail employed European nurses and
governesses as well as manual workers. German workers — maidservants, washer-
women, and milliners — were particularly in demand.
80. Ibid., pp.227-9.
81. Ibid., pp.211-15.
82. For the separation of home and work before the industrial 'take-off (Hobsbawm's
famous term) see, for instance: MJ. Boxer and J.H. Quataert (eds.), Connecting
Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (Oxford, 1987), and
Alan Macfarlane. Marriage and Love in England, 1300-1840 (Oxford, 1986).
83. P.T. Cominos, 'Late Victorian Social Respectability and the Social System",
International Review of Social History, 8 (1963), 8-48, 216-50.
84. Ahmed, Edward William Lane; Edward Said and Rana Rabbani are typical
illustrations of this view.
85. Burton, 'Terminal Essay', Arabian Knights' Entertainment, Vol. 7, p.196.
86. Ibid., p.199.
87. Burton writes there that 'Moslems and Easterners in general study, and intelli-
gently study the art and mystery of satisfying the physical woman.' The section in
his 'Terminal Essay' on Arabic and Indian 'erotica' is further proof of his
perception of oriental sexuality.
88. 'Oriental' here covers the Indian sub-continent with whose sexual mores Burton
was notoriously acquainted.
89. Martineau, Eastern Life, p.239.
90. E. Sivan, 'Colonialism and Popular Culture in Algeria', Journal of Contemporary
History, 14/1 (1979).
91. Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, p.372.
92. Isabel Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land from my
 THE HAREM IN ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING BY WOMEN 339
Private Journal, Vol. 1 (London, repr. 1884), p.144.
93. Ibid, p.166.
94. Ibid, p.165.
95. For the Anglican missions sec A.L. Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800-
1901: A Study of Religious and Educational Enterprise (Oxford, 1961).
96. Archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund, FEF, JER, 6. I should like to thank
the acting secretary and officers of the Palestine Exploration Fund for allowing me
to use and quote unpublished material from the Minute Books of the Jerusalem
Literary Society.
97. Martineau, Autiobiography, Vol. 2, pp.277-80.
98. C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York, 1979), p.102.
99. Amelia Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (London, 1877, repr. 1982),
pp.479-80.
100. Anne Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nedj, the Cradle of the Arab Race (London, 1881,
Downloaded by [University College London] at 03:42 18 March 2013

repr. 1985), pp.129-50.