From Emancipation to Liberation: The Changing Role of Women in Turkey's Public Realm

Abstract

Even though women have not altered the fundamental understandings of secularism and nationalism in the country, they have exposed the limitations of these concepts. Women have developed a language with which they can now redefine their relationship to the state as individual women The relationship between the state and women in Republican Turkey has changed substantively since the early decades of the Republic. It has been argued that women in Turkey were but unliberated(1) in the aftermath of the reforms initiated by the founding fathers of the Republic.(2) While women were given civil and political rights equal to men in the 1920s and 1930s, they remained confined by communal norms and customs. By the 1980s and thereafter, defiant daughters of the older generation demanded liberation: they sought autonomy from tradition and the right to speak up as individuals. Their calls for liberation took many shapes and helped liberate the public realm from the yoke of the state. After the establishment of the Republic, the founding fathers set out to modernize Turkey and to raise society to the level it deserved in the civilized world.(3) I. Sunar states that the process of modernization led to the monopolization of the public domain by the regime ... and a fusion of the official and public domains.(4) As the modernization process bore fruit and the country became more integrated with the Western world, different types of women contested this monopoly. The reformist, albeit still dominating, state enabled women to become educated and enlightened, and in turn, to challenge the boundaries that the state had drawn. Women's demands allowed for the emergence of a new public space where the bifurcation of private and public realms had to be redefined. Western institutions, values and norms were adopted, transformed and at times rejected as women became emancipated and later demanded to be liberated. This paper introduces the historical context of women's emancipation in the Republic of Turkey and then discusses how different women's groups expanded, transformed or perpetuated the parameters of the public realm with their different, at times seemingly contradictory, discourses for liberation. The focus of this article is on issues and concerns around which women voiced their differences from the founding fathers who and not on politics in formal political institutions, such as political parties or parliament. THE CONTEXT OF WOMEN'S EMANCIPATION Turkey's movement toward modernity, which brought with it the emancipation of women, was different from modernization in other developing countries. Partha Chatterjee argues that in post-colonial nation-states, a national community is created to be different from that which is traditional, as well as unique from that which is Western.(5) The traditional is selectively adapted and transformed to be modern, but not Western. In the Turkish case, however, the founding fathers of the Republic sought to become Western as well as modern. Furthermore, the founding fathers exhibited creativity in imagining the national state by rejecting Islam, the religion of the majority, and seeking to legitimize their project with a reference to the pre-Islamic Turkish past. This period was idealized, if not invented, to legitimize the 'Western values of secularism, equality and nationalism that the Turkish project of modernity sought to adopt. The modernity project was unique and indigenous, not because it revolted against the cultural hegemony of the West, but rather because it claimed that those Western values were actually Turkish. This was done, furthermore, in the context of a predominantly Islamic society. Women were crucial in this claim and in the reinvention of the national culture.(6) The Turkish intellectual Ziya Gokalp, who provided the ideological underpinnings of Turkish reforms following the founding of the Republic in 1923, argued that women had been considered equal to men among the pre-Islamic Turks in Central Asia, unlike during the Islamic-Ottoman period. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 77 citations exist upstream.