Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East

5. The Constantinople Home

140 Chapter 5 The Constantinople Home & When the officers of the Woman’s Board of Missions designed the Constantinople Home in the early 1870s, they planned an ambitious institution for the center of women’s missionary operations in Istanbul. Envisaging a school for girls as the focal point of the building, they also included plans for a dispensary and a city mission where American women wouldworktoimprovethehealthandhomelifeofOttomanwomen.Equally important, the officers saw the building as a place where single women could experience domestic life and organize their professional affairs without interference from the men of the Western Turkey Mission. Brandishing the language of domesticity to justify this female space, the officers of the Woman’s Board stipulated that the women in the Home constituted “a family” and appointed the principal of the Home school as its “recognized Head.”1 No longerobligedtoboardwithmissionarycouples,thesinglewomenwholived in the Constantinople Home created an alternative space of belonging where they developed a community of family, friends, and colleagues. Within this space,whichpredatedbyadecadethesettlementhousecommunitiesfounded by single women in the United States, they sought to establish the authority to manage themselves.2 The language of domesticity shaped the early development of the Constan- The Constantinople Home s 141 tinople Home, which soon became a centerpiece of American education in the Near East. In 1890 the school was renamed to reflect its earned reputation . That year, upon petition from the Woman’s Board, the State of Massachusetts chartered the Home school as the American College for Girls in Constantinople and awarded it the right to confer the degree of Bachelor of Arts. The American College for Girls became the first institution to offer a tertiary-level education in English for Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish women, among others. Yet despite its success, in 1908 the officers of the Woman’s Board forfeited control of the institution they founded to an independent board of trustees in New York City. Why, at the height of its power, did the Woman’s Board relinquish its center of operations in Istanbul and transfer the property to a group of individuals who remained independent of the mission board? The answer to this question lies in several interconnected factors that thrust the college on a path of development that the Woman’s Board was unable to support. The Constantinople Home was, as its name suggests, embedded in a foreign context . It operated against a shifting global backdrop and was terminally troubled by conflicts about women’s work that reverberated in Istanbul and Boston to the detriment of the Woman’s Board. Beginning as a modest mission school, the Home school evolved into a prominent institution of higher education that celebrated its identity as an American liberal arts college rather than its Protestant evangelical origins.3 Conflicts between Boston and Istanbul contributed to the shift, as leading faculty members of the college, determined to respond to the needs of the Ottoman capital, moved away from denominationalism to shape an emerging sense of feminist Christian internationalism at their institution. The faculty was supported financially by a new group of trustees who had close connections to American political and commercial interests. Unable to compete with the fundraising potential of this group of wealthy East Coast philanthropists , the Woman’s Board surrendered their institution to them. ThelossofthecollegewasacontributingfactorinthedemiseoftheWoman ’s Board after World War I. The causes for the folding of women’s separate missionary societies into the male societies in the1920s and 1930s have beenlargelyattributedtodomesticissueswithintheUnitedStates.4 Increased professionalizationwithinAmericanwomen’sboardscausedtheofficers to lose 142 s chapter 5 touch with rank-and-file members, leading to a loss of financial contributions . At the same time, women’s boards lost the battle in their power struggles with male boards over the nature and autonomy of women’s work. Yet local environments were critical to shaping the development of missionary institutions abroad.5 I suggest that the demise of the Woman’s Board began in the nineteenth century when women missionaries developed ambitions of their own, responded to the needs of local environments, and challenged notonlytheinstitutionalpowerofmalemissionariesbutalsothemoralauthority of their female officers. The experiences of women at the peripheries of the American missionary endeavor challenged the denominational and hierarchical structures of the enterprise and contributed to undermining the power of the Congregational Woman’s Board.6 At the same time, American cultural expansion in the Near East, which for almost a century had been largelythepurviewofAmericanProtestantmissionaries,enteredanewphase with its new...