The existence of a substantial body of women’s writings from and about the Middle Eastern harem challenges the western Orientalist stereotype of harem women as isolated, uneducated, passive, sexualized, and uniformly oppressed. Taken together, these sources provide valuable evidence of the range of women’s participation in the popular literary cultures that accompanied, tried to make sense of, and contributed to the (gendered) debates about empire, nation, and statehood which marked a century dominated by the variable fortunes of competing imperial models of East and West.