"However, some travelers’ accounts were more perceptive and fair-minded.

 For example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), wife of Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman empire in 1717-1718, wrote letters to friends in England which were widely circulated and later published to much acclaim. Said to be the first Englishwoman to travel in, and publish her observations of, the Ottoman lands, she took the trouble to study Turkish and had access to (and befriended) not only the male members of the Ottoman elite but also – unlike European men – the female members of their households. She derided earlier travel writers and Orientalist scholars whose descriptions of Ottoman society (and especially of Ottoman women) were, she insisted, based on ignorance or gross distortion. “They never fail,” she wrote, “giving you an account of the Women, which ‘tis certain they never saw, and talking very wisely of the Genius of men, into whose company they were never admitted,” and offered a much more nuanced and balanced perspective. Countering widespread Western images of veiled Ottoman women as oppressed and miserable, she argued that “[‘t]is very easy to see they have more Liberty than we have….there is no distinguishing the great Lady from her Slave, and ‘tis impossible for the most jealous Husband to know his Wife when he meets her, and no Man dare either touch or follow a Woman in the Street. This perpetual Masquerade gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery….I think I never saw a country where women may enjoy so much liberty, and free from all reproach as in Turkey.”

 [19. Quoted in Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 86-87. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu also used her popularity as a writer to promote the practice of inoculation against smallpox, which she first witnessed being practiced among the Ottomans; this method was used widely in Europe and beyond until replaced by vaccination at the beginning of the nineteenth century.]

-Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism by Zachary Lockman, pg. 64-65