(Un)building social contracts

In late Ottoman women's media, performing decorum represented a symbolic struggle over respectability as manifested tacitly in luxury display via goods, décor and interior configurations in private dwellings. While these distinctions provided upper-class women with a public status within their social circles, they also entailed outsourcing domestic labor and concealing the laborers' presence from the public's gaze. The status hierarchy embedded in decorum was discernible in the architectural fragments: the qualities of the ostentatious salon and dining room, which reflected the prestige of the housewife, contrasted and overshadowed the rear rooms and internal divisions reserved for the housemaids. This essay exposes intra-household tensions reflected in domestic arrangements by concentrating on etiquette manuals (Ottoman: adab literature) addressing women – in women's periodicals, home economics, and etiquette books – along with plans and photographs from the early twentieth century. Its objective is to extrapolate from this historical moment and interpret decorum as a social contract whose norms become contested and whose meaning becomes variable for actors of different classes and genders.