History often records wars, treaties, and political leaders. Far less frequently does it preserve the voices of ordinary women who endured displacement, violence, and exile. This dissertation seeks to recover those voices through a microhistorical study of women and families connected to Prokopi, a Cappadocian village whose Greek Orthodox residents were uprooted during the destruction of Ottoman Christian communities and later resettled in Greece. Through survivor testimony, family memory, refugee narratives, and community identity, the project asks how gender shaped both violence and the work of rebuilding life afterward.
The broader setting is the destruction of Ottoman Greek communities between 1912 and 1923 and the population exchange that followed. Deportation, forced labor, mass violence, expulsion, and resettlement transformed the eastern Mediterranean. Yet women entered this crisis from social worlds already structured by gender. No single description can represent all women in Greece or Asia Minor: class, locality, religion, education, marital status, and urban or rural life produced important differences. Even so, family and household responsibilities commonly shaped women’s work and public standing. As daughters, wives, mothers, wage earners, educators, caregivers, and participants in charitable or religious networks, women helped sustain households and communities. Debates over female education and public activity also connected women’s conduct to the perceived moral strength and future of the nation.¹
That background changes how genocide and forced migration must be analyzed. When a community imagines women as bearers of children, language, faith, custom, and family memory, violence against women can operate as violence against the group’s continuity. Perpetrators may attack women and children not only as individuals but also as the people through whom a community expects to reproduce itself biologically, socially, and culturally. The project therefore treats attacks on families, reproductive capacity, kinship, and cultural transmission as central to genocidal destruction rather than as secondary consequences of military conflict. This gendered lens also prevents a narrow account that measures destruction only through battlefield deaths or official policy.
At the same time, women were never merely symbolic vessels of culture or passive victims. Displacement often forced them to secure food, protect children and older relatives, hold scattered families together, find work, negotiate unfamiliar institutions, and recreate religious and domestic practices under unstable conditions. After resettlement, women could preserve recipes, dialect, songs, rituals, names, stories, and memories of lost places. These ordinary practices did more than express nostalgia. They helped displaced families make claims about belonging and taught later generations how to understand Prokopi, Asia Minor, and refugee identity. The same social position that made women targets of group destruction could also make them crucial agents of survival and cultural reconstruction.
The dissertation also considers a broader political question: why do authoritarian projects so often seek control over gender roles and women’s autonomy? Restrictions on women should not be treated as an automatic or universal first step toward authoritarianism, and the project will avoid imposing a present-day formula on the late Ottoman past. Nevertheless, gender hierarchy can provide political movements with a powerful language of order, obedience, tradition, and national purity. Efforts to regulate family life, education, public behavior, and acceptable womanhood may define who belongs to the nation while stigmatizing those portrayed as disloyal, foreign, or corrupting.² Used carefully, this framework can help the dissertation examine whether changing ideas about women, family, and demographic continuity formed part of the political environment in which Ottoman Christian communities were marginalized and destroyed.
These concerns sharpen the project’s research questions. How did women from Prokopi and comparable communities experience deportation, displacement, and resettlement? How did established gender expectations shape the dangers they faced, the strategies they used, and the forms of labor they performed? In what ways did violence against women, children, and family structures seek to damage the community’s future? How did women preserve, reshape, or sometimes silence memories within their families? Finally, how did those memories change across generations in Greece and the wider diaspora? Rather than assuming the answers, the dissertation will test these questions against testimony and place individual experiences within their specific historical settings.
A microhistorical method makes that analysis possible. Close attention to one community can reveal how large processes entered homes and everyday relationships. Oral history is equally important because official documents often record what governments did while obscuring how women understood, endured, and remembered those actions. Published testimonies, refugee narratives, family accounts, and collections held by the Centre for Asia Minor Studies can recover experiences that remain difficult to see in diplomatic or military records. The project will read testimony critically, attending to silence, retrospective interpretation, translation, and the circumstances in which each account was recorded. Memory is therefore not merely evidence about the past; the selection, repetition, alteration, or omission of stories is itself part of the history.
Gender history and memory studies complete this methodology. Together they allow the researcher to examine both persecution and agency without reducing women to either victims or heroines. They also reveal how public narratives and private remembrance can diverge. A story preserved by a mother or grandmother may carry meanings about grief, honor, religion, endurance, or belonging that never appear in state archives. Comparing testimony across families and generations can show which experiences remain speakable, which become muted, and how refugee identity changes over time.
The researcher brings both scholarly preparation and a personal connection to this work. As a doctoral historian, she is trained to analyze sources, historiography, and method. Her grandfather’s birth in Prokopi first drew her toward the experiences of Asia Minor refugees. That relationship does not substitute for evidence or critical distance. Instead, it creates an ethical obligation to distinguish inherited family memory from documented history, to recognize silences as well as stories, and to approach testimony with care. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that genocide and forced migration cannot be understood through political decisions alone. They must also be studied through women’s bodies, labor, relationships, choices, and memories: the places where efforts to destroy a culture met the daily work of keeping it alive.
Notes
1. Haris Exertzoglou, “The ‘Woman Question’ in the Greek (Post-)Ottoman Transition Period,” Clio: Women, Gender, History, no. 48 (2018): 69–90; Efi Kanner, “Transcultural Encounters: Discourses on Women’s Rights and Feminist Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Turkey from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Interwar Period,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 2 (2016): 66–92.
2. The dissertation uses the relationship between gender regulation and authoritarian power as an analytical question, not as a claim that all restrictions produce identical outcomes or that modern frameworks can be transferred unchanged to the late Ottoman context.
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