This study explores the audience reception among Turkish viewers of the image of Ottoman-Turkish women in Diriliş Ertuğrul (Resurrection: Ertuğrul), a Turkish soap opera which is popular worldwide. For this study, audience research was conducted to examine the relationship between study participants’ views about women and gender, and their thoughts about the representation of early-period Ottoman-Turkish women in Resurrection: Ertuğrul by carrying out in-depth semi-structure interviews. The interviews were conducted with 38 study participants in total (19 female and 19 male). The results evidence that nationalism and gender has a mutually constitutive relationship in the image of the early-period Ottoman-Turkish woman in Resurrection: Ertuğrul, and this relationship appears to be a reference point for the majority of the study participants, regardless of whether they are secular or religious conservative, to evaluate contemporary Turkish women. The evidence also reveals the female participants’ desire for power. The female participants who think that female characters in the soap opera can have access to masculine power as the mother or wife of the powerful and desired male characters also want to acquire such power from men in their real lives but they feel they cannot because of the weakening of patriarchical values.