Question: What was the position of women in the Mongol Empire ?

Those who wish to study gender history would on the whole be well advised to stick to more modern periods: the overwhelming majority of medieval sources available to us were written by men, for men, and about men (though of course something can be teased out even from such material).

But a good deal is known about the status of women in Mongol society: most notably that it was quite extraordinarily high by the standards of the rest of the thirteenth century world. Women of the royal house (who, inevitably, are the individuals we know most about) were often extremely influential, and on two occasions Empresses Dowager ruled the empire for periods of several years, between the death of a Great Khan and the election of his successor. The Mongols seem not to have regarded this as in any way strange; though other observers, such as the North African Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta, seem to have thought female influence and status at the Mongol courts to have been both dangerous and undesirable.

David Morgan
Professor of History and Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin - Madison