The wife of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has hailed the harem of the Ottoman sultans as “a school for preparing women for life”.

Emine Erdoğan’s comments were made a day after the president caused protests by saying he believed that “a woman is above all a mother” in a speech marking International Women’s Day. Critics have accused Erdoğan’s government of trying to impose strict Islamic values on Turkey and curtailing women’s civil liberties.

“The harem was a school for members of the Ottoman dynasty and an educational establishment for preparing women for life,” Emine Erdoğan said at an official event on the Ottoman sultans in Ankara, according to Turkish TV stations.

President Erdoğan has been criticised for urging Turkish women to have at least three children and railing against efforts to promote birth control as “treason”.

He and his wife regularly speak of their attachment to Islamic principles and the values of the old Ottoman empire, on the ruins of which the modern Turkish state was founded in 1923.

The term “harem” has long titillated the western imagination. In the Ottoman period it was an institution with strict and detailed rules that even the sultan had to follow, and precise guidelines on the recruitment and education of courtesans.

Each woman would receive an education in a discipline in which she showed promise – for example calligraphy, decorative arts, music or foreign languages. There was no age limit for the harem and women of 60 could live alongside young girls, while the most capable could rise to wield enormous influence over the court.

Emine Erdoğan’s remarks came under fire on social media and her husband’s comments drew thousands of women into the streets of Istanbul in protest.

Ozlem Kurumlar, a professor at an Istanbul university, tweeted: “In the time of Murad III [a 16th-century sultan], books were the only thing that never entered the harem.”