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

• Author: ARAT, YESIM

"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 "emancipated 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 traditional 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 traditional 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 "emancipated women," 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 traditional 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. According to Gokalp:

Old Turks were both democratic and feminist ... In every business meeting woman and man had to be present together ... For any verdict to be obeyed both hakan (male leader) and hatun (female leader) had to sign the decree ... Women were not forced to cover up ... A man could have only one wife ... Women could become a ruler, a commander of a fort, a governor and an ambassador.(7) This argument allowed the Republican reformers, who readily identified modernization with Westernization, to make claims for improving women's status and defend it as a Turkish tradition. Efforts to improve women's status were used as a means to cultivate Turkish nationalism and adopt Western notions of equality and secularism.

For the Republican modernist elite, improving women's status meant formalizing gender equality irrespective of religious tradition. Islamic tradition, as practiced by the Ottomans, excluded women from the public realm and used concepts of male-female complementarity rather than equality. Under the Kemalist Republican regime, opportunities for women's education and professionalism expanded.(8) The new regime replaced the Islamic civil code, which included formal inequalities between men and women in marriage, divorce, inheritance and custody over children, with a secular code adopted from the Swiss. This new secular code granted women formal equality in these areas. Minister of Justice Mahmut Esat, who presented the rationale of the draft bill of the Turkish civil code to Parliament in 1926 argued:

Not to change is a necessity for religions. For this reason, that religions should remain only matters of conscience is one of the principles of the civilization of the present century and one of the most important elements that distinguish the new civilization from the old. Laws that derive their principles from religions ... constitute one of the major factors and reasons impeding progress ... As a matter of fact, the stipulations of the religious Ottoman code are doubtlessly irreconcilable with contemporary civilization. But it is also obvious that the Ottoman code and similar other religious regulations are not reconcilable with Turkish national life.(9) The Kemalists readily discarded the traditional, religious legal framework to meet the demands of "contemporary civilization"--a term they used to describe their goals of Western civilization and modernity In this attempt they adopted a Western legal code as a cornerstone of their modernity project, which they hoped would ensure political victory over the Islamist opposition to the Kemalist modernists. Considering how difficult it has been to make even minor adjustments in Islamic law to improve women's status in other Middle Eastern countries, it was a radical move to adopt the Swiss civil code and formally try to make women equal to men.(10)

Another crucial change was the granting of suffrage to women in 1934. The prime minister at the time, Inonu--who presented the draft bill to parliament--claimed that "the Turkish nation prospered and pervaded the whole world with its power and civilization only when its women had occupied their just and prestigious place along with men and worked together with men in the complicated and difficult tasks of their country"(11) In the same session of parliament, Sadri Maksudi referred to the old Turkic heritage of women's rights and pointed to suffrage as important for democracy, since only non-democratic regimes witheld women's suffrage.(12) In short, many held that suffrage was good for the country and it was Turkish tradition to engage women in state affairs.

These critical transformations in the emancipation of women took place under the strict discretion and monopoly of the Kemalist elites. Women were not allowed to organize on their own or lobby for their own rights. Even though women had been demanding civil and political rights for themselves since Ottoman times (without much success), an independent women's movement was not allowed to emerge during the Republican regime.(13) In 1923, Nezihe Muhittin, a leading feminist at the time, initiated a Women's People's Party, but was denied permission to open it, thereby preventing...