Note 121 — Chapter VI · HOME LIFE OF THE OSMANLIS IN ANATOLIA
Reading edition
A well-known English journalist, Sidney Whitman, who was long on terms of intimacy with some of the most distinguished men of the Ottoman Empire, tells us that “The stranger, whatever his opportunities, only comes into contact with one-half of the Mohammedan population; the other is barred from his observation, from his very sight. In the course of all my visits to Turkey I never had an opportunity of approaching a Turkish woman within speaking distance.” Turkish Memories, p. 267 (London, 1914).
Writing from Constantinople, where she made a special study of the Turks, their manners and customs, the gifted and brilliant Lady Mary Wortley Montague, tells her correspondent in England, “It is a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages of the Levant which are generally so far removed from the truth and so full of absurdities. I am very well diverted with them. They never fail giving you an account of the women whom it is certain they never saw and talking wisely of men, into whose company they are never admitted, and very often describe mosques which they dared not even peep into.” Letters, Vol. II, p. 5 (London, 1793).
As wife of the British ambassador to the Porte, Lady Mary had the entrée of the homes of the Turks, rich and poor, where she was always cordially received and hospitably entertained. Besides this, she was familiar with the language of her hostesses of the harems which she visited and was thus able to become far more intimately acquainted with the people than those who must needs depend on unreliable interpreters. For these reasons her sprightly pictures of the life of the Turkish women have always had special value and one can easily understand her admiration for them and for many of their customs which are so different from those of her own country—England. She would have fully endorsed what her distinguished countrywoman, Lady Isabel Burton wrote many years afterwards: “As a rule I met with nothing but courtesy in the harems and much hospitality, cordiality and refinement.” The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton: The Story of Her Life Told in Part by Herself and in Part by W. H. Wilkins, Vol. II, p. 452 (New York, 1897).