Saliha, Elif, Nakiye, Zümrüd, Fatma, Hamdiye—these are only a few of the “ordinary” women, who, for the first time, appear as participants, negotiators, sufferers and victims during total war in the Ottoman Empire. Filed away in the Ottoman archive, cataloged not as women but as “the family of men, as civilians, or as soldiers” (p. 7), and overshadowed by their literate upper-class sisters, a women's press—often penned by men—that cared little about poor and working-class women. Ordinary Ottoman women's experiences on the home front until now, with a few notable exceptions, have been a non-topic. While there are uncountable monographs about working-class women's experiences on the European home front, Ottoman women's separate and gender-specific wartime encounters have inspired less than a handful of books. Among these, Elif Mahir Metinsoy's Ottoman Women During World War I stands out for its capable methodology in accessing ordinary women's hidden lives; its colorful, varied, and beautifully abundant archival evidence; and its meticulous attention to the everyday experiences that can highlight the “conflict between ordinary women and the Ottoman state,” and “nationalist forces, women's discontent with wartime, propaganda, and socio-economic conditions or women's appropriation of these for their self-interest” (p. 4). Relying on reports from Ottoman officials, women's petitions, and telegrams, as well as popular folk songs and poetry, Metinsoy argues that ordinary Muslim (although this is not a label she consistently applies) women's everyday politics influenced immediate wartime state policies and actions, as well as the “formation of women's citizenship right in the long run” (p. 3).

First and foremost, it needs to be said that this is a book that long needed to be written. In the last ten years, Ottoman historians have moved to study the empire's home front during World War I. Still scholars of the empire have largely ignored women, especially illiterate working-class women, as a sole research subject. While historians have neither completely neglected gender relations nor women in wartime, women's experiences, for the most part, have been woven into broader narratives. Metinsoy, placing her work at the intersection of feminist scholarship focused on World War I in the European context, such as the work of Kathleen Canning, and the long tradition of Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history), makes the empire's Muslim women her principal historical actors.

The book consists of eleven chapters arranged in four parts, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first two chapters provide important general historiographical framing pertaining to women and war (Chapter 1) and the historical context of the Ottoman home front (Chapter 2) that was plagued by famine, food shortages, high civilian mortalities, and deportations. Understandably, the author seeks to establish a conversation with women's, home front, and Ottoman history, but for the informed reader these two accounts may well have been shortened and woven into the otherwise short introduction. Muslim Ottoman women are considered in earnest starting in part two under the heading “Women's Negotiation of Wartime Social Policies.” It is here where the book begins to shine in its originality and the riches brought from the Ottoman archives. Metinsoy excavates Ottoman women's responses to the flaws and failures of the state's legal and practical measures to eliminate food shortages and hunger (Chapter 3) as well as provide monetary (Chapter 4), housing (Chapter 5), and child welfare aid (Chapter 6). Sending telegrams, petitioning, and weeping in public, women, the author argues, strategically exploited the state's religious-nationalist discourses. Herein, Metinsoy illustrates not only how women's bodies became subject to the state's disciplinary and regulatory powers, but also how women maintained, cultivated, and asserted their right to protest and work against, among other things, irregular or non-payments of pensions, civil servants’ rude behavior, at times even physical and sexual violence, and embezzlements (p. 84). It becomes clear that women's wartime work lives (Part 3), often seen as a marker of female emancipation as women increasingly entered the workplace and the public, were characterized by both opportunities and restrictions (Chapter 7). For example, the Ottoman Women's Employment Islamic Society, founded in 1916, provided jobs for thousands of women as post office clerks, secretaries, street cleaners, and garbage collectors (p. 120). Women entered into the theater and manufacturing jobs, were instructed in nursing and sewing to serve the army, and many served as army construction workers (p. 123). Still, Metinsoy is careful to alert her readers to the problems women faced, such as “unemployment, low or unpaid wages, sexual harassment, hard working conditions, absence of social security” (p.135), and Ottoman society's ongoing suspicion of “women's work outside the home” (p. 125). Women's resistance to the state's wartime demands of forced labor, taxes, the mobilization of their men, and the control of their sexuality motivated by conservative “gender codes” concludes this vibrant and inspiring monograph. World War I has often been cited for its emancipatory power. Women enter into the public sphere and into the workplace as an unprecedented number of men leave for the front. It is a good story, but not the full story. Metinsoy complicates the discourse of female emancipation propagated by Turkish nationalists, by highlighting the general social and cultural restrictions that were not undone by the war as well as women's everyday wartime struggles, such as unemployment and exploitation.

Ottoman Women During World War I is a laudable accomplishment; there is one major point of contention. It is clear that Metinsoy writes mainly about Muslim women. While the author is sensitive to women's differential wartime experiences based on class, she ignores the fact that ethnic differences were a clear determinant of how women lived the war. The disproportionate suffering of the empire's Christian minorities is absent, in particular the mass murder and the systematic sexual violence against Armenian women, who, after all, were also Ottoman subjects. Hence the book's title, Ottoman Women, is hard to justify. A couple of minor points are to be noted: First, Metinsoy writes that the Ottomans had “no choice but to ally with Germany” (p. 1). This may be true but it is important to note that the Ottomans, according to Mustafa Aksakal and others, had agency in the decision making process. Second, Metinsoy cites Muslim women patient numbers in a women's hospital as evidence for their high number of infections with venereal disease (p. 186). The reasons for Muslim women's hospitalization, however, are unclear. Given the increase of infectious diseases, like typhus and tuberculosis, in wartime, more generally, it would be challenging to isolate venereal diseases as the main reason unless one examines individual patient records.

Criticism withstanding the book fills a gaping void in the historiography and is an essential contribution to Ottoman history, the history of World War I, and women's history more generally. Metinsoy has broken open the seal to the archive and presents a narrative filled with exemplary and original archival evidence. The material is positively overwhelming in its details and the author herself writes that she has only touched the tip of the iceberg. As such, Ottoman Women During World War I will not only serve as a stepping stone, a form of inspiration for many years to come, but also will be an encouragement that the “ordinary woman” is not a historical dead end as some scholars might still believe.