Ελληνική Σελίδα
Welcome to the website of the Exhibition & the Conference
Women’s Press – Women of the Press
Women’s Periodicals and Women Editors in the Ottoman Space
House of Culture, Rethymno, November 9-11, 2018
The Exhibition and Conference entitled Women’s Press – Women of the Press are organized by the Department of Philosophy and Social Studies of the University of Crete in collaboration with the Hellenic Open University (Master’s Program in Public History), under the auspices of the Regional Unit of Rethymno. They concern women’s publishing activity during the late Ottoman period, and more precisely during the period extending from the first women’s periodical publication year (1845) to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1923). They include both women’s press of all genres and its impact in the public space, and women as editors, contributors and readership.
Ottoman women’s press – as women’s press in international literature – has primarily been approached as a field of construction and reconstruction of women's collective identities; as a forum for debating the "women's question" and undertaking public interventions; as a place of advancing writing and welcoming female literary works, and – to a lesser extent – as a space of communication and power network development, negotiation of new (bourgeois) life models, and inter-communal communication. Women’s press as a business enterprise, and women as editors of and/or contributors to publications have attracted little research attention so far.
The majority of studies on the aforementioned fields/topics explore women’s publishing activity separately, within the confines of each Ottoman religious community. Additionally, the bulk of the research results has been published in the national languages of the modern nation-states that emerged from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Both historiography traditions place significant restraints on the promotion of research and an overall,“holistic” approach to the historical phenomenon under discussion.
The Exhibition and the Conference are organized as complementary events. The former visualizes the research conducted so far on Orthodox women’s periodicals (namely on women’s publishing activity within one of the Ottoman millets), aiming at promulgating it to the public, while the latter aims at promoting the discussion among academics and researchers with a view to contributing to the advancement of research on the subject of Ottoman women’s publishing activity as a whole.
More precisely, the Exhibition presents Women’s journals published within the Orthodox-Greek community of the Ottoman Empire along with a number of posters on Bulgarian women’s periodicals. The Conference, though, aims at including presentations referring to women’s press across all Ottoman communities (millets). The Conference therefore seeks to bring together researchers in the field and serve as a forum for academic communication and addressing related issues: to present the results of the research so far, to identify convergences and divergences in the emergence and evolution of women’s publishing activity and the women’s press, to highlight research gaps, discontinuities, constraints, and limitations in research, and to present new theoretical approaches and research questions in the field.
Both events run in parallel at the House of Culture (Rethymno). They are funded by the Universities organizing the events, the Regional Unit of Rethymno, and the following generous sponsors: General Secretariat for Gender Equality (G.G.I.F.), Ecumenical Federation of Constantinopolitans (OI.OM.KO.), European Reliance (A.E.G.A.), and Antonis Avdelas Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, SANI RESORT – IKOS RESORTS.