Reading Comprehension Passage 27 MCQ Test With Answers – EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

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EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN

The woman's position in Turkey had changed relatively little since the days of the Prophet. Despite growing discussion of her predicament, both before and after the reign of Abdul Hamid, she still lived subject to the rules of Islam, in seclusion which amounted at its worst to personal slavery and at its best to virtual segregation from the outside world.

The average Ottoman Turk, in his masculine pride and possessiveness, chose still to see women as the inferior sex, deficient in morality and self-respect, requiring protection by the male against her own weaker instincts. It had become a collective as well as a personal duty to supervise her behaviour. Not merely the husband and father and brother but the whole street, the whole neighbourhood were concerned to watch over her, making sure that her limbs were totally and decently covered and intent to catch her out if she seemed to step outside the narrow path the society laid down for her.

In Constantinople, no woman might be seen walking in the street or driving in a carriage with a man, even if he were her husband. If they went out together he was obliged to walk ahead, disregarding her. Never did she appear with him at social gatherings; thus there was in effect no mixed Moslem society. On trams and boats, there was a curtain, to divide women from men. In girls' schools, when feminine education was introduced, the only male teachers were eunuchs. In the theatre, the female parts were played by men, as in Elizabethan England, or by Christian women. When women were eventually allowed into the audience it was on certain ladies' days set aside for them.

Only in parts of Anatolia, among the peasantry, were women freer, and indeed often unveiled before all but strangers. For (thanks sometimes to the influence of the brotherhoods) the peasants were often less orthodox in their customs, and moreover, their women had, for economic reasons, to work in the fields and perform other outdoor tasks for the family living.

Lord Kinross, Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation, Londra: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964, s. 418

The best phrase to describe women's situation in the Ottoman period would be:

The average Ottoman Turk felt himself

What was impossible to see or witness in the social life of the Ottoman capital city of İstanbul?

Women in villages

The passage mainly tells us about