Unmaking mother, wife, and chaste woman: subverted femininities in Theodosia Sophroniades’ narratives

This article foregrounds Theodosia Sophroniades, a half-Circassian Greek-Orthodox author, journalist, and interpreter during the Hamidian era (1876–1908). Although long overlooked in women’s historiography, Sophroniades occupied a prominent place in the multicultural and multilingual Ottoman intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth century. To situate her feminist ideas within the late Ottoman period, this article first outlines the leading discourses of Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman women’s writing, and then analyses Sophroniades’ outlook on female agency, focusing on her selected French-language narratives. In her short stories, the narrator’s nonjudgmental attitude towards subversive femininities helps us better understand the individualistic aspects of Sophroniades’ counternarrative vis-à-vis nineteenth-century Ottoman feminism. The aim of the article is to contribute to the academic literature on the multidimensional gender debate of Ottoman women’s collective history.