Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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Istanbul to celebrate Turkish women’s suffrage, the state issued a set of com-

memorative stamps for the occasion. The stamp with Mustafa Kemal’s pic-

ture was accompanied by the phrase ‘Liberator of Turkish women’.

The title

reﬂected an attitude shared by the men who had issued the stamps and the

women who gained the right.

A most prominent woman promoting the leadership cult was Afet

Inan, one

of Kemal’s adopted daughters. She wrote proliﬁcally highlighting his achieve-

ments, particularly those relating to women’s liberation. In her writing, she

depicted Kemal as the leader who had single-handedly won the War of Inde-

pendence, established a new nation, founded a new state and pioneered a series

of radical reforms liberating women. She wrote that the ‘progressive and rev-

olutionary ideas of Atat

urk’ were behind women’s suffrage and that Turkish

women were indebted to him.

Afet

Inan’s role was important because she

helped establish the ofﬁcial ideology and history of the Republic, and through

her work she precipitated the discourse of the veneration of Atat

urk. In the

following decades, women were allies of the state and, until the 1980s, did not

challenge the remaining restrictions to which they were subject.

The formal, laudatory style of the day contributed to the reiﬁcation of

Mustafa Kemal. In its magazine issued on the tenth anniversary of the Republic,

the Turkish Women’s Association declared that ‘Turkish Womanhood, which

owes the eternal honour of Turkishness and history to her Gazi, sincerely

wishes that the Great Leader not depart from this world and remembers her

Great Liberator who gave her life with long-lasting love’.

Writing in the same

issue, Halide Nusret claimed: ‘Mustafa Kemal, just as he saved and gave life

to the Turkish nation that was sentenced to death with the S

evres Treaty,

just as he reinstalled its liberty, sovereignty and honour, reinstalled the rights,

liberty and honour of the Turkish woman by saving her from degradation and

slavery.’

Even the famous Turkish feminist Nezihe Muhittin, whose attempts

to found the Women’s Republican Party in 1923 were thwarted by the state

elites, dedicated her book Turkish Woman, with self-effacing words, to the

‘Great Guide’, Mustafa Kemal.

7 Aslı Davaz, ‘24 Nisan 1933, 1 Kongre 15 Pul’, Pazartesi (May 2005), p. 16.

8 Afetinan, Herkesin bir d

unyası var (Ankara: T

urk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1958,) pp. 62,

50.

9 Kadın Sesi, 29 October 1933,p.3.

10 Halide Nusret, ‘Kadın: inkılaptan evvel ve sonra’, Kadın Sesi, 29 October 1933,p.7.

11 Nezihe Muhittin, T

urk kadını (Istanbul: N

umune Matbaası 1931), p. 4; Yaprak Zih-

nio

glu, Kadınsız inkılap: Nezihe Muhiddin, kadınlar halk fırkası, kadın birli

gi (Istanbul:

Metis Yayınları, 2003).

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

Public veneration of Atat

urk as the person who liberated women under-

played women’s agency. He had indeed been a critical ﬁgure in the political

realisationof women’s rights, but womenhad also been ﬁghting for their rights,

writing and organising to have their voices heard. They had fought along with

men in the wars that led to the establishment of the new Republic. When

the Republic was founded, women’s attempts to speak in their own names

and demand civil as well as political rights for themselves were foiled. The

political leaders obstructed Nezihe Muhittin’s attempt to establish a women’s

party, which sought to integrate women into the public and political life of the

country in 1923. Instead, she was asked to organise a women’s association. The

Woman’s Association hosted the International Women’s Congress that met

in Istanbul in 1935. After the meeting, the regime closed down the association,

most likely because, in an independent move, it allied itself with Britain and

France in opposition to Germany prior to the Second World War. The political

elite, who preferred to adopt a more cautious stance, did not approve.

A pact

had been made between the Republican state and women: in return for docile

allegiance to the state, women received opportunities to expand their role in

society.

Under this Republican pact, women’s status improved. They beneﬁted from

the secular legal codes as well as the opportunities the Republic offered,

particularly in the areas of education and employment. The female liter-

acy rate, about 10 per cent in 1935,was25 per cent by 1955 and about 55

per cent in 1980.

Women moved into professions that required higher edu-

cation, such as medicine, law and teaching, and formed a striking critical

mass. By the 1970s, about one-third of scientiﬁc workers and professionals

were women. At the time these ﬁgures compared very favourably not only

with the rest of the Middle East, but with Europe and the United States

as well.

Yet many other indicators revealed that women remained second-class cit-

izens in the Republic. Even though the literacy rate had improved compared

to the early years of the Republic, almost half of Turkey’s women were still

illiterate in the late 1970s. While one-third of doctors or lawyers in Istanbul

were women, there were gender discrepancies both in secondary and higher

education, and these were exacerbated by urban–rural differences. As late as

1980, 9.5% of the male and 6.8% of the female population had graduated from

12 Zafer Toprak, ‘1935

Istanbul Uluslararası Feminizm Kongresi ve barıs¸’, Toplum-D

us¸

un 24

(1986).

13 State Institute of Statistics, www.die.gov.tr/ist

gostergeler.pdf.

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junior high school, and those graduating from senior high school were 8%of

men and 6.7% of women in Turkey. Only 4% of males and 2% of females were

university graduates.

In 1980, 36 per cent of the economically active popula-

tion was female. However, about 88% of this group worked in the agricultural

sector as unpaid family labourers, with 4.6% working in industry and 7.5%

in services; 46% of women were housewives. Only 4.5% of registered prop-

erty was in women’s names.

The percentage of women in parliament had

not risen beyond 4.5%, a level reached when Atat

urk had appointed eighteen

women to the parliament back in 1935.

Despite this grim disparity, women did not wage a serious protest against

state discourse and practice towards women until the early 1980s. The three

or four decades following the granting of suffrage were a period of contain-

ment in women’s struggles for empowerment. Women who could do so

explored the new opportunities and struggled to normalise the new roles

they eagerly adopted. In the context of internal migration, urbanisation and

social transformation, the ﬁrst generation of educated women became suc-

cessful professionals, serving as role models and entrenching the roles they

carved out for their gender. In their struggle, those who were vocal and public

used a language of ‘othering’, which underlined that they were liberated by

the Kemalist reforms while those who could not beneﬁt from the reforms

were not. The second generation of women in the Republic began to be

critical of the state of affairs, but their criticism was channelled through a

leftist political activism that dismissed any feminist inclination. Women who

could not access these opportunities struggled with their own predicaments

individually.

Within the leftist ranks,in 1975, womenorganised around the

Ilerici Kadınlar

Derne

gi (Progressive Women’s Association,

IKD), but the members of this

organisation did not assume a feminist ideology. They worked within a Marxist

paradigm, where class struggle was assumed to be the cause of women’s

deprivation.

Nevertheless, the

IKD signalled the emergence of the awareness

that women had problems that required separate organising. After the military

coup of 1980, the state closed the organisation. Feminists began to organise

independently and many former

IKD members joined the feminist ranks as

committed activists.

14 Devlet

Istatistik Enstit

u, Temel Kadın G

ostergeleri 1978–1 993 (Ankara: D

IE, 1994), p. 27.

15 D

IE, 1955–90 Genel N

ufus Sayımları, in TC Bas¸bakanlık Kadının Stat

u ve Sorunları

Genel M

url

u, T

urkiye’de Kadın:(Ankaran.p.2001), pp. 77, 81.

16 Emel Akal Aslan, ‘Kadın ve siyaset aykırı bir

ornek:

IKD’, in Aynur

Ilyaso

glu and Necla

Akg

okc¸e (eds.), Yerli bir feminizme do

gru (Istanbul: Sel Yayıncılık, 2001), pp. 455–84.

396

Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

Resurgence of feminist contestation (1980–2005)

The 1980 military coup cracked down on both leftist and rightist movements

in an attempt to depoliticise Turkish society. In the context of this ideological

vacuum, the second-wave feminism of the West began to penetrate Turkey’s

borders. Women began to redeﬁne their relationship to the state, challenging

the notion that they had been liberated by the founding fathers of the Republic.

In the early 1980s, some professional middle-class, middle-aged women, most

of whom had been associated with leftist activism prior to the coup, began

reading feminist writings from the West and gathered together in what they

would later term ‘consciousness-raising’ groups. The primary aim of this new

wave of feminist organising was to foster acceptance of women as individuals

in control of their lives, not as mere members of communal groups in which

men had higher status and more rights.

The feminist activism of the 1980s distanced itself from the state. Feminist

pioneers were sceptical of the ‘strong Turkish state’, fearing that it would

mufﬂe women’s voices and co-opt their challenge. They aimed to enhance

their feminist consciousness and propagate it independently of the state. They

located themselves in relation to different feminist ideologies such as radical

feminism or socialist feminism, shared their experiences through journals such

as the radical feminist feminist and socialist feminist Kakt

us, and made them-

selves publicly visible through political statements and street demonstrations.

Ideological debates kindled feminist commitments, as women carved different

feminist identities for themselves. In addition to cleavages among feminists on

the left, women who were traditionally allies with the state positioned them-

selves as ‘Kemalist feminists’, in opposition to radical and socialist feminists,

and began criticising the state for failing to improve women’s status. Kemalist

feminists were inclined to collaborate with the state to improve women’s con-

ditions, whereas the more radical feminists were deeply suspicious of statist

measures.

In 1986, feminists organised a petition campaign to have the UN Convention

for the Elimination of All Types of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),

which Turkey had signed in 1985, implemented. They began criticising the

Turkish legal framework, particularly the civil code and the penal code, and

thus made a radical departure from the entrenched assumption that Turkish

women had achieved equal rights under the law. Feminists of diverse persua-

sions united over their dissatisfaction with the legal framework.

Radical feministsbrought the issues of women’s sexuality,sexualharassment

and domestic violence towards women, which had been taboos in public

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Fig. 15.1 Demonstration against article 438 of the penal code, which reduced sentence if a

victim of rape were a prostitute

[courtesy of the Women’s Library and Information Centre Archive]

discourse, into public debate. In 1987, they took to the streets for the ﬁrst

time in an unprecedented protest to condemn domestic violence. The protest

politicised a major problem that the Turkish public had ignored, and deﬁned

a critical issue around which women in Turkey would continue to organise.

Violence towards women, and particularly domestic violence, was to become

a priority issue for feminists in Turkey.

In their attempts to intervene in public debate and make themselves visible,

they experimented with new forms of protests besides mass demonstrations.

After the protest against domestic violence in 1987, feminist activists organ-

ised an open-air festival in Kariye, in front of a Byzantine church in Istanbul.

In 1988, they put together a temporary museum exhibiting women’s subju-

gation in daily life. In 1989, they held a purple needle campaign, in which

feminists sold needles for women to protest and protect themselves against

sexual harassment.

The scepticism that characterised the relationship between feminists and

the state reached a climax when, in 1990, the government established the

Directorate of Women’s Status and Problems in the context of CEDAW obli-

gations. Even though there were divisions among them, and some were more

398

Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

Fig. 15.2 The banner reads: ‘Our bodies are ours, our labour is ours, our identity is ours’

[courtesy of the Women’s Library and Information Centre Archive]

sceptical than others, most feminists opposed the Directorate because they

were concerned that it would co-opt independent feminist activism.The Direc-

torate was supposed to gather all independent women’s organisations under

its umbrella, which feminists found unacceptable.

After the establishment of

the Directorate, the relationship between feminists and the state evolved into a

more conciliatory one, mostly due to feminist bureaucrats who ﬁlled the Direc-

torate’s ranks and worked within the state to improve women’s conditions.

The changing relationship between the state and feminists in the 1990s and

beyond allowed women to extract resources from the state and push back

its patriarchal frontiers. Even the more radical feminists collaborated with as

well as challenged the state. They realised that, to help themselves, they had

to begin by changing the laws and the policies of the state. Under conditions

of scarce resources, they tried to channel state funds for women’s issues.

Feminists gained the self-conﬁdence and acquired the skills to institu-

tionalise their activities. The unconventional, radical protests of the 1980s,

such as the needle campaign and the temporary museum, gave way to the

17 Selma Acuner, ‘90’lı yıllar ve resmi d

uzeyde kurumsallas¸manın do

gus¸as¸amaları’, in Aksu

Bora and Asena G

unal (eds.), 90’larda T

urkiye’de feminizm (Istanbul:

Iletis¸im Yayınları,

2002).

399

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establishment of more conventional civil society organisations, such as foun-

dations, associations and even ﬁrms. Women’s organisations, which had been

about 10 in number between 1973 and 1982 and 64 between 1983 and 1992,

multiplied, reaching more than 350 by 2004.

They encompassed different

professional and community afﬁliations, including women’s groups in bar

associations, neighbourhood organisations away from the cities of Istanbul or

Ankara, and gay and lesbian groups.

As the movement grew, the cleavages between women’s groups became lay-

ered along religious and ethnic lines. Women associated not merely as Turkish

women of different secular feminist persuasions, but also as Islamist women

or Kurdish women of different feminist and non-feminist persuasions. This

diversiﬁcation led to further confrontation as well as collaboration between

different groups of women on various issues.

Many of the new organisations began acquiring funds from abroad. These

included the women’s library, associations to ﬁght against violence towards

women, the women’s journal Pazartesi, the association to promote women in

politics KA-DER, and the women’s communication network Uc¸an S

urge.

Local embassies and consulates of countries where feminist politics had left

their imprint on socio-political life helped women organise, by offering their

services and limited funds to feminists who wanted to convene conferences,

bring feminist experts from abroad and publish booklets to propagate their

ideas.

Feminist research and ﬁndings proliferated in the 1990s. Women’s stud-

ies centres and academic programmes opened in universities, generating

new information and studies on women. The Istanbul University Women’s

Research and Education Centre, established in 1990, the Ankara University

Women’s Studies Centre (KASAUM), established in 1993, and the Middle East

Technical University Gender and Women’s Studies Centre, established in 1994,

all became important loci of feminist activism. These centres did not merely

open women’s studies programmes for students, but also undertook educa-

tion programmes for women in political parties, trade unions and voluntary

women’s associations to educate women about their rights and raise feminist

consciousness. The centres educated the laywomen of women’s associations

and provided professional advice for their activities. Women’s studies centres

opened not merely in large metropolitan universities but also in universities of

peripheral regions such as C¸ ukurova and Van. Individual academics and fem-

inists began receiving foreign funds to pursue projects on women and their

18 T

urkiye’de Kadın

Org

utleri Rehberi (Ankara: Uc¸an S

urge Yayınları, 2003).

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

problems. Those who were members of civil society organisations used these

projects to strengthen their respective organisations. The Directorate that

feminists had initially opposed helped coordinate fund giving and informa-

tion gathering under the direction of feminist bureaucrats who were sensitive

to women’s needs. Feminist knowledge spread within the media and inﬁltrated

into government structures and political parties.

As the feminist movement diversiﬁed, became organised in multiple groups

and inﬁltrated the state, international pressureon the state to improve women’s

status increased. Both the CEDAW framework and Turkey’s application for

accession to the European Union (EU) precipitated state responses to women’s

demands. The regular reports Turkey submitted to the CEDAW committee

for review exposed the country’s record on women’s rights to the critical

evaluation of the international community. The election of a Turkish feminist

professor, Feride Acar, to the presidency of the Expert Members Committee of

CEDAW cultivated Turkey’s organic links to the group. The process educated

not only the bureaucrats, but also ministers responsible for women’s issues,

who then lobbied for change.

Turkey has also had to meet the requirements regarding male–female equal-

ity that are part of the political criteria establishedin Copenhagen as a necessary,

if not sufﬁcient, condition of membership in the EU. The yearly reports on

gender equality prepared by the European Parliament or the European Com-

mission explicitly stated that candidate states had to achieve gender equality

to be eligible for membership. Women in Turkey beneﬁted from this require-

ment and referred to it in their local lobbying activities. After Turkey became

a candidate country for membership to the EU in 1999, the Turkish state com-

mitted itself to improve women’s status in the National Plan and prepared to

meet the European accession plan.

To maximise beneﬁts from this development, women in Turkey made

alliances with the European Women’s Lobby, an umbrella organisation bring-

ing together about four thousand women’s organisations from twenty-ﬁve

European countries.

In 2004, women’s organisations in Turkey joined the

European women’s lobby. A Turkish feminist bureaucrat/academic, Selma

Acuner, was elected to its executive committee. The Turkish women’s move-

ment has thus been able to strengthen its international links, and in turn use

this strength to ameliorate women’s position at home. This development has

empowered women against the state, and allowed them to beneﬁt from the

19 Lydia la Riviere-Zijdel, ‘From Turkey to Belgium and Back’, paper presented at the

conference Raising Mutual Understanding: Women in Turkey and the European Union,

Istanbul, 13 September 2004,p.1.

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leverage of the EU. The internet greatly facilitated this process of empower-

ment by allowing feminist activists in Turkey to link with one another as well

as with feminists in different countries. I shall now focus on issues on which

women collaborated most extensively and that resonated most in society.

The civil code

The 1926 civil code, despite being radical for its time and for the Muslim con-

text in which it was introduced, nevertheless reﬂected the patriarchal under-

pinnings of its day. The main criticism feminists levelled against it was the

secondary role that women were expected to assume in the marriage union.

According to the 1926 law, the husband was the head of the family. The code

stated that men would earn for the family, decide on the place of family resi-

dence, represent the marriage and expect their wives to be helpers. In cases of

divorce, the law recognised separate ownership of property, which in practice

left divorced women in dire poverty since most had been housewives whose

unremunerated labour at home subsidised men’s earnings outside the family

and the property men could buy in their own names.

There had been some attempts to amend the civil code since the 1950s, but

it was during the early 1980s that feminists in Turkey began criticising the code

from a feminist perspective. Different groups of feminists, radical as well as

liberal, as well as some women who did not identify as feminists, converged

on the need to amend the civil code. The Association of Women Jurists (T

urk

Hukukc¸u Kadınlar Derne

gi) crafted a draft to ground the law on egalitar-

ian terms. Women used multiple channels to make their demands heard by

the state. The demand for amendment gained momentum with the petition

campaign of the Istanbul University Centre for Research and Implementation

of Women’s Issues in 1993. The Women’s Library and Information Centre

and the Purple Roof Women’s Shelter Foundation collaborated to support

the campaign, which gathered more than 120,000 signatures for presentation

to the president of the Grand National Assembly. In 1994, the government

formed a commission to have a draft law prepared. The organisation Women

for Women’s Human Rights adopted the cause and mobilised international

support. Over time, different groups picked up the issue to keep it in the

public agenda and to shape public opinion on the subject. Women demon-

strated when it was time to commemorate the civil code, they brought it up

during the celebration of International Women’s Day on 8 March, they wrote

about it, gave interviews about it to televisions and newspapers and organ-

ised panels on it. The women’s association KA-DER, established in 1997 to

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Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

promote women in politics, endorsed the cause of reforming the code as well.

The Directorate General of Women’s Status and Problems also supported this

campaign, organising forums and symposiums to generate public support.

The international context precipitated the amendment. Turkey had put

reservations on certain articles of CEDAW because they contradicted the

patriarchal clauses of the 1926 civil code. By the year 2000, the Committee

on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women had reviewed progress

reports from Turkey and reiterated its criticisms of the inegalitarian clauses

in the Turkish civil code. After the Beijing World Conference on Women,

Turkey prepared a National Action Plan to bring its legislative framework

in line with CEDAW recommendations and promised to withdraw its reser-

vations on those articles of the convention that contradicted Turkish civil

code.

Along with the CEDAW framework, Turkey’s bid for EU membership facili-

tated the amendment. To be able to meet the political criteria for membership,

Turkey presented a National Programme in 2001. The National Programme

recognised the amendment of the civil code as a short-term obligation and

explicitly stated that the concept of a family head would be removed from the

civil code.

By 2000, local feminist groups were organised and connected with one

another through the internet to oversee the passage of the amendments.

The question of property in the civil code caused much controversy. Femi-

nists wanted to replace the separation of property regime found in the orig-

inal document with a new one based on the sharing of property. In cases of

divorce, women would be able to share the property acquired during marriage.

Thus, even when they were homemakers without pay, their unremunerated

labour would be recognised. When the Justice Commission of the Turkish

Grand National Assembly rejected the proposed change in March 2001, fem-

inists organised a national coalition to reverse this development. More than

a hundred independent women’s groups and associations, covering a range

of women from different regions, professions, classes and priorities, were

involved in the campaign.

Connected through the internet, the women’s

platform resorted to conventional lobbying tactics, most of them quite new

for the women involved, issuing press statements and visiting the members of

the Justice Commission. The amendment was accepted in parliament with the

new shared property regime at the end of 2001. Feminists continue to protest

20 Ela Anıl et al., Turkish Civil and Penal Code Reforms from a Gender Perspective: The Success of

Two Nationwide Campaigns (Istanbul: Women for Women’s Human Rights – New Ways,

Stampa, 2005), p. 7.

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