Women Administrators and Teachers Working in Ottoman Era Girls' Schools of Education and the Courses they Taught

Abstract

This work is a study into identifying the women administrators and teachers who worked at a women's teacher training institution that was established on 26 April 1870 as part of the westernization of education that began in the Ottoman period and continued during a time frame that lasted for almost fifty-four years. Towards this end I have benefited from, in wide degree, the yearbooks published during that period, documents from related archives, and other books and articles-both primary and secondary sources-that could shed light on this subject. I sorted the information derived from these documents and other elated resources into a classification. It is believed that this work is of additional importance due to the fact that it is an indication from that period of the approach taken to women working and holding administrative positions as women were assigned to positions as school principal or vice-principal at a school charged with training women teachers. Even if this was part of the movement towards the westernization of education, it is of some import, especially so if we consider the fact that even today the number of female administrators remains quite limited.