Mary Mills Patrick’s Cosmopolitan Mission and the Constantinople Woman’s College

Mary Mills Patrick’s Constantinople Woman’s College was one of the most influential institutions of higher learning for women in the Middle East in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. Patrick arrived in the 1870s to evangelize, but she gradually distanced herself from Christian proselytism in order to create a “cosmopolitan” college for all Ottoman women. Patrick was president of the Constantinople Woman’s College for 34 years, protecting the institution through the Balkan Wars, World War One, the British occupation of Constantinople, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the founding of the Turkish Republic. Just as the late Ottoman Empire underwent extraordinary changes, so did Patrick transform herself and the Constantinople College to meet the demands of a twentieth-century Muslim state, ultimately sacrificing her “cosmopolitan,” heterogeneous student body to an ethnically homogeneous one that reflected the newly racialized nationalism of the Turkish Republic.
Mary Mills Patrick’s Cosmopolitan Mission and the Constantinople Woman’s College explores Patrick’s career from the 1870s to the 1930s, tracking her personal religious struggle and her professional transformation from Protestant evangelist, to feminist educator, to advocate for Muslim women, to, finally, supporter of Turkish nationalism.