Hizmetçi İdaresi

In the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world, there was no tradition with free maidservants. Free Muslim women where expected to live in sex segregation in as high degree as possible. This made it difficult for Muslim women to work as domestic servants in the home of another family. It also made it difficult to employ free male servants. The domestic servants of private homes in the Islamic world where therefore normally house slaves; female slaves or eunuchs, purchased as children. To work as domestic servants was one of the two main tasks for female slaves during the era of slavery in the Muslim world, alongside that of sexual slavery (concubinage in Islam). When a slave was freed, they rarely had no other option than to continue to work for their former owners, with no true difference in their conditions or status.

Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was nominally abolished by the Reform of 1889, and the slave market Avret Pazarları was officially closed by the Disestablishment of the Istanbul Slave Market. From this point on the house slaves where referred to as servants rather than slaves, but where de facto still slaves. The nominal emancipation made it easier for employers to get rid of slaves they no longer wanted, by firing them rather than to sell them. Consequently, a class of free maidservants was created.

By this point in time the new concept of free employed maidservants was first described in Ottoman literature, where they were described with suspicion as potential untrustworthy seductresses and criminals.^[1] Former female slaves rarely had other options than to continue to work for their former enslavers. If they were fired, they were often forced to rely on prostitution to survive.

The Young Turks founded the Hizmetçi İdaresi as a Servant Institution to assist former female slaves to find employment as domestic workers and maidservants in order to escape prostitution to survive.^[2] In practice, however, the institution is reported to have functioned as a slave market.^[3] In Ottoman society, free domestic servants where not viewed as different from chattel slaves, and there were no distinction made between the two categories. Until the end of the 19th-century, domestic servants had been synonymous with slaves, since there had been no free servants. Female slaves where still sold in public in the Ottoman Empire in 1908.^[4]

• Women in the Ottoman Empire