The advent of scientific housewifery in the Ottoman Empire

The late Ottoman education policy implemented curriculum reforms adding science courses reduced to school children level. The modern science was popularised by supplementing public education with the new courses. Textbooks with illustrations efficiently introduced children to European material improvements and icons of progress. Between the years 1898 and 1924, home economics textbooks for girls, with improved illustrations and updated content, taught traditional tasks within modern guidelines. They conveyed the values of European family consumerism, in which material discoveries of science were adapted to domestic grounds. This paper explores home economics textbooks in an attempt to define and characterise the concept of scientifically idealised womanhood. It contextualises "scientific housewifery" within the debate on degeneration and the women question. It seeks to discuss the reproduction of patriarchal codes in the polished disguise of rationality and modern science.