Anatolia
Modern-day: Turkey
Ottoman Anatolia is the setting for Leslie Peirce's studies of the imperial harem and the provincial court of Aintab, both showing a considerably more legally active female population than the harem stereotype suggests (Peirce, 1993, 2003). The modern Turkish republic's secularist state imposed an escalating ban on headscarves in universities and public institutions from 1980, hardening after the 1997 military intervention, before phased reforms between 2010 and 2013 progressively lifted it — a case of state power suppressing rather than enforcing a religious practice.