Nigar Hanım’s Tea Gatherings as a Semi-Public Space in Late Ottoman Society

Abstract Book of the 8th Global Conference on Women's Studies

Year: 2026

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Nigar Hanım’s Tea Gatherings as a Semi-Public Space in Late Ottoman Society

Beyzanur Yaşar Aktı

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines the tea gatherings organized by Nigar Hanım, one of the most prominent women writers of the late Ottoman period, through the lens of women’s public presence and visibility in the context of Ottoman modernization. The analysis draws on Nigar Hanım’s memoir Hayatım (My Life), periodical writings from Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, Servet-i Fünun, and İkdam, as well as contemporary accounts by Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, Tevfik Fikret, and Ahmed Midhat Efendi. These sources suggest that Nigar Hanım’s home gatherings were not merely occasions for literary or aesthetic exchange, but also spaces of intellectual conversation where everyday life, social change, and political issues were openly discussed.

The paper approaches these gatherings as a form of “semi-public space,” where the boundaries between private domesticity and public sociability became increasingly porous. Within these settings, cultural elites interacted across gendered and class-based boundaries, enabling women’s presence in the public sphere through social and intellectual engagement. The tea rituals, musical performances, and literary conversations hosted by Nigar Hanım functioned not only as practices of refinement, but also as sites of negotiation and self-representation, where women could position themselves as intellectual subjects within the social hierarchies of the period.

Ultimately, this study argues that Nigar Hanım’s tea gatherings reveal how women’s participation in the public sphere in the late Ottoman Empire was shaped not only through political activism or literary production, but also by means of everyday social rituals and cultural interaction. The paper will analyze and discuss how these gatherings illuminate the intersections of female subjectivity, class, and publicness within the social fabric of late Ottoman modernity.

Keywords: Women’s public presence; visibility; Women intellectuals; Ottoman modernization; Female subjectivity