In the tangled and complicated history of interactions between “East” and “West,” few issues have proved a greater source of confusion and contradiction than gender. This paper contributes to a more nuanced version of this issue by looking at a particular instance of intercultural exchange that centralized the role of women and domestic spaces: I will examine both the activities of American missionaries in Turkey in the Victorian era and how that missionary activity in Turkey influenced American style in clothing and interior design. Significantly, in the late nineteenth century, when missionary activity to Turkey was at its peak, Turkish clothing and furniture became increasingly prevalent in style magazines and etiquette books in the United States. The role that women missionaries had in promoting these new styles in America is tied closely to the access they had to authentic domestic interiors and their ability to experience them as social spaces, something rarely extended to their male counterparts. Indeed, the educational and medical functions that women typically performed in missionary work necessitated a close association with their “heathen sisters,” with whom they often established close bonds and mutual respect. Unlike the public world of diplomats, trade missions and military confrontations, American and Turkish women enacted an exchange behind the scenes that had a profound effect on both sides.

Significantly, by the nineteenth century, the use of gender-oriented spaces had become a common practice in the Ottoman Empipare, especially in urban homes.Footnote ¹ The men's quarter was the selamlık, literally meaning “the place of greeting,” and the women's space was harem or haremlik, meaning “forbidden” or “prohibited.” Seating arrangements in these spaces consisted of a low, continuous surface along the wall (divan) that enabled users to rest in a variety of body positions: reclining, legs folded, and so on. The informality of seating habits and the lack of clearly defined individual spaces were legacies of the Central Asian nomadic past of the Ottomans, where personal space was much more casually defined. This tradition of informality created problems when stricter prohibitions about physical contact between men and women were introduced with conversion to Islam, especially in an urban setting.Footnote ² Maintaining the traditional form of seating furniture while simultaneously observing this prohibition was resolved in part by the social separation of women's and men's quarters in the traditional house. The arrangement of domestic spaces in the Ottoman Empire became one its most striking features to Westerners who traveled there. As such, the “discourse of the harem,”Footnote ³ as it has been called, is an important index of Western attitudes to the Orient and a useful vantage point from which to view the changing character of East–West relations in the course of the nineteenth century and beyond.

Nineteenth-century European travelers frequently commented on the social separation of men and women in Ottoman Turkish houses and the inaccessibility of the harem for the male travelers to the East.Footnote ⁴ This often led to an exaggerated world of “orientalist” fantasy about what these spaces looked like and what happened there, particularly among male travelers. The eroticized view of the harem, where beautiful women are kept imprisoned, waiting idly for their men to pay attention to them, surrounded by instruments of pleasure and indolence, is itself a figure of the desire for exotic pleasures that lured secular travelers to the Orient. Based on the writings of others rather than on actual observation, these accounts mingle together fact and fiction without regard for historical specificity, essentializing the “oriental” woman into a figment of Western imagination.Footnote ⁵

Artistic representations of oriental women inspired by accounts of male travelers provide interesting parallels.Footnote ⁶ In many of these paintings the Eastern women were gently placed on divans. The softness of the relaxed bodies and the clothes which loosely wrapped them were based on orientalist assumptions about harem women. Whether they were realistic or not, the travel accounts, accompanied by images of women reclining seductively on soft divans in orientalist paintings, created an association between the idea of bodily comfort and the East. Muslim women, of course, did wear flowing costumes, but as an expression of modesty. Ironically this social custom, aimed at covering the form of the body, was interpreted as just the opposite in representations by Westerners. In their paintings, clinging or diaphanous robes revealed salaciously the female form beneath them and contributed to their construction as sexual objects. Intentionally or not, the artists of orientalist paintings often created a correlation between the freedom of bodily posture and the relaxation of sexual taboos.

Before turning to the missionaries, it will be useful to consider accounts by secular women travelers to the Orient, the most famous of whom is the intrepid Lady Montague.Footnote ⁷ Montague made much of the fact that she could gain an intimate view of Turkish life that was not available to her male counterparts. However, her descriptions are notoriously orientalist themselves and so laden with erotic overtones that they have been suspected to be the forgeries of male authors. More likely Montague adopted, as did many traveling women who produce literary texts, male writing features of the time.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, Montague was typical of most female secular travelers in interacting with the highest class of people and seeing only the most attractive elements of oriental life.Footnote ⁹ Even so, an assessment of the accounts of women travelers indicates that Western women were often able to understand the social character of these spaces in contrast to the sexual tropes of male fantasy.Footnote ¹⁰

In contrast to the eroticized descriptions found in the accounts of male travelers, the more authentic accounts of women are reflected in the more modest descriptions, and in specific details of interactions. Susan Lesley visited a harem in Egypt in 1867 and reported passing through kitchens and entries to a distant room, a large, bare, almost unfurnished room, quite different from the splendid parlor in which they were received: “There on a divan, at one end, sat eight women … The women were all very friendly, and examined our clothes and desired us to examine theirs.”Footnote ¹¹ In no account by a male traveler does the traveler himself become a reciprocal object of curiosity like the women in this account. An account of Emelia Bithynia Hornby reveals an underlying sense of identification between Western and Turkish women:

The detailed description of the interiors is so vivid one could almost build this space. Women travelers, like their male counterparts, were rarely abroad for more than a year at a time or stayed in the same location for a long time, and although they generally provide more authentic views of oriental interiors and a more realistic view of their female occupants, they still remain curious outsiders seeking the thrill of encountering the exotic other, in part because of its inaccessibility to their male counterparts.Footnote ¹³

In contrast, Western missionaries were more typically able to encounter a broader range of people in Anatolia and were able to do so more intensively and for a longer time.Footnote ¹⁴ Parts of the Ottoman Empire were intensively targeted by missionary activity from the United States. In time, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) invested more money and human power in Ottoman Turkey during the Victorian period than in any other country.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1860, there were forty-nine churches and eleven schools under the control of the American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire; by 1880 there were ninety-seven churches and 331 schools; by 1913, there were 163 churches and 450 schools.Footnote ¹⁶ Unlike many other missionary destinations, there were already Christian communities in Turkey. Indeed, unlike Africa or the Far East, the eastern Mediterranean was part of Western religious culture and was thus a more attractive destination.Footnote ¹⁷

The missionary agenda consisted of three goals: to reform and aid the oriental Christians, to convert the Muslim population or at least to increase Christian cultural influence on Muslims, and to serve women and through them to elevate the whole country to the level of Western civility.Footnote ¹⁸ These goals necessarily presumed an effort to engage these peoples on their own turf and in their own terms. Dr. Judson Smith, foreign secretary of the ABCFM, wrote that the first duty of the missionary on arrival in the field “is to acquaint himself with the people, their language, their customs, their inherited faith, and their institutions.”Footnote ¹⁹ Although Western missionaries seem an unlikely vanguard for cultural understanding between East and West, their goals required a much more intense engagement with local peoples of all classes.

Victorian ideas about domesticity and the place of women in the social order impacted the goals and strategies of these Western missionaries in many ways. Of first importance was the idea that women in general, as embodying the kinder and gentler instincts of humanity, could have a profound “civilizing influence” on their more brutish brothers.Footnote ²⁰ Corollary to this was the idea that the condition of women in a country was the measure of civilization. This made oriental women a prime target for missionary work. At the same time, as Pruitt has shown, an “orientalist” discourse about the woeful status of women in “heathen lands” played a key role in mobilizing millions of women to support missionary work from the very beginning.Footnote ²¹ Typical is the remark of Maria A. West, a missionary of the American Board in Turkey, who stressed the significant influence of women for the welfare of the society as a whole:

This kind of link between the dignity of women and spiritual and moral progress is a theme repeatedly sounded by men and women.Footnote ²³ Despite a somewhat patronizing attitude towards oriental peoples, the discourse about the place of Eastern women in their own world often implied an inchoate critique of Western patriarchy and contributed to the articulation of a discourse on the inequality of Western women in their own sphere.Footnote ²⁴

Although the male missionaries did not eroticize the harem, their exclusion meant that it was still for them an object of imaginative construction based on orientalist clichés. So the medical doctor and missionary George E. Post wrote of an Ottoman home in Beirut that

Despite the accuracy of the description of furnishings in this account, the relentless succession of masculine pronouns emphasizes the author's sense of himself as a desiring subject and focus of activity, whether imagined or real, so that the physical space itself recedes before the focalizing presence of this more subjective “he.” Even though there are no women to be seen, the description of the room is saturated with the values and perspectives of a voyeuristic male gaze.

In his book Crisis of Missions: or the Voice out of the Cloud (1886), American pastor Arthur Tappan Pierson compared getting access to the harems of Turkey with “forcing gates of steel in walls of adamant.”Footnote ²⁶ According to Pierson, it was only the women missionaries who were able to take down the barriers and unlock these gates of steel. In an annual meeting of the Woman's Board, Rev. George Washburn spoke of the degradation of the women of Turkey, arguing that American women “have the power to elevate them. By visiting from house to house, by spiritual instruction, by care for the sick, and by Christian schools, they can bring them to the light of the Gospel.”Footnote ²⁷ There are in these words a clear linking of the spiritual mission and a more general goal of bringing greater dignity to women through education and health care. At the same time, it is hard not to sense a sexual subtext in this desire by men to penetrate forcefully the Ottoman harem. No doubt the intentions of the missionaries were respectable, but those intentions cannot but be affected by the larger currents of orientalist fantasy from which their missionary sisters were generally more immune.

Initially, the only missionary women who traveled to Turkey were trailing spouses who accompanied and supported their husbands, but it became increasingly clear to the missionary societies that women were better able to get unmediated access to Ottoman Turkish women.Footnote ²⁸ Missionary wives devoted a considerable amount of time visiting indigenous women in their homes.Footnote ²⁹ Eventually, the missionary societies started sending single women as missionaries and eventually women outnumbered men in the field. One consequence of the feminization of missionary work was that these women missionaries, both wives and single women, needed a more advanced level of training, particularly in foreign languages, and advances in women's education in the United States fueled this effort.Footnote ³⁰ Colleges like Mount Holyoke College, the first publicly endowed institution for women's advanced education, played a significant role in women's missionary work in general, but especially missions in Turkey.Footnote ³¹ Graduates of Mount Holyoke served in various capacities as missionaries: presiding over schools, teaching, providing medical services, ands so on.Footnote ³² In the 1860s women founded their own mission societies independent of general mission boards, and concentrated on supporting single women missionaries.Footnote ³³ One such group was the Woman's Union Missionary Society, an independent, interdenominational mission board founded in 1861 to send single women out as missionaries. The founding of this society reflected frustration with the dominant policy of the major Protestant mission boards.Footnote ³⁴ By 1900, over forty denominational women's societies existed, with three million active women, some despite sustained hostility from the men of the church.Footnote ³⁵

Again, this expansion of women in missionary work occurred in the context of Victorian ideas about gender roles. Women were responsible primarily for the education of their own children and their success in the domestic sphere was necessary for the well-being of country and society. But religious duty in the missions bridged the domestic and public spheres for many American women. Because of the particular advantage that women had in carrying out such work in places like Turkey, it became a key front in the expansion of women into the public sphere. The expression “woman's work for woman” became emblematic of women's missionary work in the 1870s, an expression through which American women staked their claim and articulated their effectiveness in the missions. American women missionaries saw Christianity as the source of all goodness and civility and they wanted to share what they already had with their Turkish sisters. In their memoirs women missionaries pointed out the negative aspects of life for non-Christian sisters in these “heathen” lands, often linking Christianity with personal liberty and dignity:

At the same time, missionary women could break into public life, expand educational opportunities for themselves and other women, and acquire professional competence in education and medicine. Indeed, Christian self-sacrifice was one arena in which American women in the nineteenth century could compete with men and win.Footnote ³⁷ Missionary work enabled women to move beyond the boundaries of their homes, while not explicitly contravening their socially inscribed roles.Footnote ³⁸ The growth of missionary activity in Turkey by American women coincided with their increasing visibility in the public realm as leaders and professionals. As Melman notes, Victorian notions about the very qualities that had made women the custodian of the “home,” their moral superiority and generic spirituality, qualified them as a social and religious reformers.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, missionary activity is one of a number of religious-based movements, such as the Women's Christian Temperance movement, where women played prominent leadership roles. These organizations and movements became a voice for women's rights and are an important source for modern American feminism.Footnote ⁴⁰

However, as Dana L. Robert notes, “Woman's Work for Woman” bore an ambiguous relation to the realities of cultural imperialism: “The proponents of ‘Woman's Work for Woman’ assumed that non-Christian religions led to the degradation of women, while Christianity provided not only salvation but ‘civilization,’ the nineteenth century term for social liberation, albeit in western dress.”Footnote ⁴¹ Maternalistic and chauvinistic, yet idealistic, the impulse behind this movement saw all women as sisters that should support each other, a unity that was celebrated in missionary journals such as Heathen Woman's Friend, inaugurated in 1869.Footnote ⁴² Yet the emphasis on social changes toward Western norms made “Woman's Work for Woman” a partner with the myths of Western superiority so common in the Victorian era.Footnote ⁴³ What from the missionary perspective seemed to be a great opportunity for women to fulfill their Christian duty alongside their Christian brothers was often perceived by the missionized as cultural imperialism designed to tear down their own customs and societies.Footnote ⁴⁴

Despite the resistance of Western men to women working in the public sphere and the resistance of Eastern women to interference in their domestic spaces, missionary women penetrated the lives and homes of Turkish women to a degree impossible for secular travelers. Their lengthy stays abroad, often remaining in the same area for decades, meant that they became entwined in the fabric of everyday life, particularly through their medical and educational expertise. Unlike curious travelers, for whom the harem was a spot on the tourist trail, missionaries were more likely to grasp Turkish culture as a lived experience, and this is reflected both in the detailed descriptions of Turkish interiors to be found in missionary writings, and in their better grasp of the meaning of material culture. Some representative examples illustrate the general muting of the sensationalist orientalist clichés found in secular travelers:

In contrast to accounts given by secular travelers, the first example gives a detailed description of the furnishings that emphasizes their social function, the way in which they express the character of the women who live there, and the way furniture mediates relationships with others. The second example indicates that the visitor had actually to be told that she had entered the harem. Her account transforms this legendary space into a simple room in an “oriental” home, something that it can only be for women. Indeed, it is because of the things that women can do and say in each other's company that this demystification of the harem is effected.

In another telling example, one British traveler recounts that their missionary hostess in Smyrna told her that when harem women expect English visitors they “dress up for the occasion, put on all their jewels, and receive them in state; but when I go they are pleased to have me just in their ordinary way; and I thought you would like best to see exactly how they live in private.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Here we recognize the tendency of “tourist attractions” to produce the kind of experience for visitors that confirms expectations rather than striving to be authentic. The educational and medical roles that women missionaries played in the homes of their Turkish hosts presumed a completely different kind of interaction. Despite the inevitable limitations imposed by cultural imperialism, in time a spirit of mutual respect blossomed among American and Turkish women that laid the groundwork for reciprocal influences between the two groups. Not surprisingly, domestic spaces figure prominently among these reciprocal influences.

Like the oriental harem, American domestic spaces were also the special realm of women. American homes were correlated strongly with moral values, such as cleanliness and orderliness, reflecting the moral rectitude of the household. However, American wooden furniture made quite different assumptions about social interactions in such spaces from those typical in Turkish domestic spaces, and this difference is one of the most frequent observations made by travelers of all kinds to the Ottoman Empire. Remarks about the differences between Turkish and American furniture are also legion in the writings of missionary women. As one would expect from our discussion so far, missionary women emphasized the social character of these differences. Because they understood and experienced the day-to-day use of furnishings, they had a better grasp of the advantages Turkish furniture and clothing offered for comfort and practicality.Footnote ⁴⁸

In addition to the more authentic character of missionary women's observations and experiences in Turkey, the manner in which these experiences and observations circulated back home heightened the impact they had on the reception of Turkish styles in America. American missionary women would typically serve abroad for a specific time and then return to the US to recruit and raise money for their missions by traveling from community to community. In their presentations, they would talk about the important work that they were accomplishing abroad; but at the same time they would also tell exotic stories and present examples of material culture to create interest in these far-off places. In addition, missionary letters were published and circulated widely in journals like Life and Light. There were thus extensive networks for the large number of missionaries to disseminate the vigorous accounts of their experiences abroad. It can be no coincidence that when missionary activity to Turkey was at its peak, representations of Turkish clothing and furniture became increasingly prevalent in style magazines and etiquette books in the US, representations that often indicate an intimate knowledge of Turkish interiors and female fashions.Footnote ⁴⁹ To these developments in America we must now turn.

Just as the missionaries were preceded by generations of secular travelers to the Orient, nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for Turkish designs had its own forerunner in the turquerie fashions of the eighteenth century. Turquerie was an elitist fashion that found its way to America through Europe, making such fashions in the United States reinterpretations of European interpretations. Elite furniture traditions in America, with their elaborate exposed woodwork and restrained upholstering, are strongly influenced by this European, especially French, tradition of elegance. An important aspect of this elite tradition is the principle of unity, which demanded that the elements of a room should cohere into a unified design. This principle can be observed in the creation of “Turkish rooms” and “Chinese rooms,” or “period rooms” where the goal was a complete ensemble of furniture, art and appointments. However, transformations in both domestic life and in the furniture industry in nineteenth-century America created the conditions for a new tradition of furnishing.

Increasing urbanization, for example, contributed to the inauguration of an elaborate discourse about domestic spaces and how the home could become a sanctuary to relieve the unsettled conditions of urban life.Footnote ⁵⁰ Simultaneously, American furniture production was transformed by industrialization and the emergence of a wealthy middle class.Footnote ⁵¹ Improved transportation, mass production techniques, greater access to raw materials, and important innovations in furniture construction, such as the metal coil spring, made the production of completely new designs simple and economical.Footnote ⁵² The resulting abundance of inexpensive furniture gave Americans an unprecedented level of selection. In contrast to the elite stylistic principle of unity, American middle-class tastes diverged into an exuberant eclecticism that privileged more practical issues like comfort and economy, or, in the words of Seale, “the ambience of livability,”Footnote ⁵³ creating spaces that deployed a wide range of styles. For example, Americans often created “Turkish corners” within a room, or used Turkish chairs or “Turkey work” fabrics within ensembles that did not adhere strictly to the principle of unity. One of the few places where the principle of unity did maintain its sway was in the creation of “smoking rooms,” where men could retreat from female company, surrounded by plush oriental appointments, with perhaps a few hunting trophies, to smoke cigars and indulge in fantasies about far-off exotic places where men could still enact the rituals and special privileges of their gender.

For missionary women, oriental decor had a completely different meaning. They had not only seen and experienced authentic interiors in Turkey, but they used their knowledge in their presentations to Americans back home in the course of raising money for foreign missions. The following account from a Methodist Missionary Society publication narrates the use of oriental realia in a presentation about missionary work:

This quaint scene clearly seeks to deploy “queer-looking” materials for dramatic effect, but is also noteworthy for its emphasis on social interactions and its translation of the exotic in terms of the familiar. The redeployment of cushions from the church pews to reproduce the plush feeling of a Turkish harem could be read as an ironic gesture, except that the entire scene is imbued with a sweet and ingenuous spirit so different from the salacious double entendres ubiquitous in orientalist writing about harems. Also remarkable is the presentation of a young Turkish girl who turns out to be an American girl in costume, producing the uncanny effect of blurring the differences between Turks and Americans by reference to an underlying continuity among women as women. In place of the objectifying gaze of the orientalist, the participants are invited to become Turkish themselves, to enter a Turkish home, removing their shoes and drinking tea. This charming re-creation of a harem “domesticates” this place and the activities that go on there.

Other missionary documents from the period give a variety of advice for arousing interest in things Turkish as a means to promote contributions and support, and again these often focus on activities that foreground social interactions. These include activities like a “curio social,” where souvenirs of various kinds are set out on tables where a young woman dressed in the costume of the country stands by, ready to explain whatever is on her table, followed by a plea for the missions.Footnote ⁵⁵ A turn-of-the-century Missionary Manual lists a number of similar means of exploiting the enormous interest in foreign lands to draw attention to the religious activities there, with specific instructions on using scrapbooks, curio meetings, impersonation meetings, missionary museums, missionary “tours,” exploration meetings, ands so on.Footnote ⁵⁶

In addition, the letters of missionaries often make personal and intimate observations on their lengthy stays abroad. The Missionary Manual cited above specifically urges members to band together and pass around good missionary letters.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus these letters, which are addressed to friends, colleagues or family, transcend the personal sphere for which they are ostensibly written. As examples of women's writings, they occupy a territory precariously positioned between the public and the private, parallel to the position occupied by the missionary women themselves. In general, these accounts are less orientalist and more authentic. Even though patronizing at times, they more regularly express sympathy for the position of oriental women, a sympathy grounded in a firm belief in the dignity of all women and enlivened by a sense of women's growing opportunities in the West.

Equally important, these letters reveal detailed knowledge about Turkish costumes and more openness to the advantages they bring to those who wear them.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, in the United States, the eminently more comfortable clothing of the Ottoman Turks was being suggested as an alternative to the dresses worn by American ladies. Avant-garde groups, like the Aesthetic Dress Movement and the Rational Dress Society, were founded to encourage clothing which was “perfect in healthiness, comfort, and beauty,”Footnote ⁵⁹ and protested against the introduction of any fashion in dress that either deforms the figure or impedes the movements of the body.Footnote ⁶⁰ Amelia Bloomer, whose The Lily is considered one of the first feminist journals in the US, described the Turkish pantaloon as more comfortable than Western fashion and dress, with its idealization and disfiguration of the female form. The liberation of female bodies from the restriction of corsets became a metaphor for the social freedom of women. Although the “Bloomer” fashion was rejected and even ridiculed by many, it paved the way for future discussions of women's clothing and the issue of equality. This idea of “liberating” women in the West by recourse to fashions in the East is indicative of the kind of multiple and contrary effects that intercultural relations often produced.Footnote ⁶¹

In my survey of domestic interiors in East–West relations, both gender and class have proved to be important. The experience of male travelers to the East – whether diplomats, adventurers or missionaries – have certain characteristics imposed on them by the limitations of their gender. None of them experienced oriental domestic interiors as a social space. Male travelers tended to reproduce eroticized fantasies about harems that are rhetorical topics derived from a vivid literary tradition. Female travelers often reproduced the same clichés, but many of them were also able to have actual experiences of harems, however limited by the circumstances and motives that brought them to the East. Female missionaries, on the other hand, were driven by different motives and were compelled by their goals to engage more fully and more intensively with ordinary women on their own terms. The American missionaries, in particular those who went to Anatolia, became participants in an intense dialogue with their “heathen sisters” about their status as women and wives in the intimacy of their homes. These same missionaries, often middle-class women with a high level of education, returned to the United States to share their experiences with their congregations, not just as intrepid travelers, but as serious promoters of God's work, especially that part of God's work that was “Woman's Work.” The impact that they had on middle-class tastes cannot be measured precisely, nor can one measure precisely their contributions to the growing women's movement. However, their activity coincided with a number of other developments in American furniture selection and taste that laid the groundwork for their impact to be as great as possible. American eclecticism and practicality prepared the way for a broad and varied reception of comfortable clothes and furniture from places like the Ottoman Empire, and American missionaries helped disseminate positive views of that material culture.

It was the very same Victorian notions about women and their role in the home as nurturers, educators and interior decorators that opened the doors to new opportunities in public spheres. These qualities which were perceived to be embedded in femininity made women perfect candidates to become missionaries as well as to serve in medical, educational, and fashion fields. The elite tradition of furniture, largely a reinterpretation of European interpretations, continued in the highest levels of American society, requiring the services of expert interior decorators familiar with the details of traditional tastes. But a new middle-class sensibility was simultaneously emerging with enormous force, driven by many changes in social and material conditions, a sensibility which invited women to exercise greater autonomy in the decoration of their homes as one manifestation of the greater autonomy they were seeking in other realms of life. The complex relationship between American missionary women and their heathen sisters in Anatolia was a key factor in the evolution of domestic interiors in Victorian America, a factor that is legible in the extensive penetration of Turkish culture into a distinctively American style.