Ambassadorial wives leveraged marital status into unique harem access

Evidence

Another category of tourists had even better access to the harem and that was of course ladies. The most notable of these is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom one might call a tourist. She was the wife of the British ambassador; she therefore had no formal duties, no official function and was able to conduct herself as a tourist with the freedom and leisure which that gave her. Her letters are among the very best. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 781

Categorization

• XREF: Montagu’s letters are a canonical female-counterpart correction to male Orientalist harem fantasy; connects to critique that even female travellers reproduced imperial knowledge frameworks. — connects to: European portrayals of the harem projected fantasy rather than observed reality — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 306