Governing the National Family: Marriage, Gender, and Turkification in the Late Ottoman Empire

This article argues that an ideal of the Turkish-Muslim family, centred on marriage, monogamy and women's cultural and reproductive responsibilities, became a central technology of Unionist nation-making in the late Ottoman Empire. Drawing on the Kızıl Konak Papers, women's periodicals and memoirs, it traces how marriage, family law and moral conduct were drawn into a graded project of Turkification. Unionist deliberations distinguished the legal regulation of the family from the cultivation of sexual morality through society and national culture. This ideal was reshaped by nationalist prescriptions and employed to reproduce national belonging and promote assimilation through marriage.