4 ideas
In a 1717 letter from Adrianople, Montagu describes old women who opened a vein, placed matter from a smallpox pustule into it, and produced a mild case that left lasting immunity. She then promoted the practice against physicians who resisted it partly because it came from a foreign folk practice and was done by uneducated women.
A woman observer could enter the baths, harems, and women's visiting rooms that were closed to every male European traveller, so she could see things they could not. Montagu used this to correct male travel writers, arguing that they had described the harem from imagination and hearsay. Earlier accounts that seemed authoritative turned out to rest on places their authors had never entered.
Montagu argued that the veil and the loose outer robe made Ottoman women anonymous in the street. That anonymity let them move about, keep secret meetings, and escape a husband's surveillance more easily than European women could. She concluded that Turkish women, who also held their property separately, were in some respects freer than Englishwomen. On this view, whether a custom constrains people depends on what it hides and from whom, not on how restrictive it looks to outsiders.
Montagu predicted that English doctors would fight inoculation because it threatened the income they earned from treating smallpox. The practice also came from peasant women in a Muslim empire, which gave the medical establishment a second reason to dismiss it. She describes resistance to a working innovation that is driven by who benefits from the status quo and by the low status of the people it comes from, not by evidence about whether it works.