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As part of a social experiment designed to create a modern, Westernized society out of a mostly rural, conservative population, the Turkish state, founded in 1923, gave women rights still radical for the time. However, these reforms by the "feminist" state did not evolve as a result of demands originating within society, but were imposed from above. The state's ideal of the modern Republican woman left out the majority of women beyond a small urbanized elite. Furthermore, state feminism did not concern itself with what happened behind closed doors, but focused on expanding women's public roles. Nevertheless, these dramatic reforms have expanded the realm of possibilities for Turkish women of all classes and allowed development of a more individualist feminism. The debates continue, but Turkey is one of the most important success stories of women's empowerment in the early twentieth century.
Keywords: education / feminism / Islam / Ottoman / state feminism / Turkey / women's rights
Over a period of six hundred years, the Ottoman Empire, at one time or another, encompassed most of North Africa-what we now call the Near and Middle East-and the Balkans. When the Empire dissolved after World War I, replaced by a self-consciously modern and Westernized Turkish Republic in 1923, new doors opened to women as well. The Republican state itself evolved into what later scholars called a "feminist" state, a male-dominated state that made women's equality in the public sphere a national policy. The new government radically changed laws, encouraged women to unveil, to enter the universities and professions, become airplane pilots, and run for parliament-in many cases before other European societies did. However, these state reforms represented only the vision of a single charismatic leader, the founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the values and interests of a small group of urban, middleclass citizens. The Republican state determined the characteristics of the ideal woman and set up a monopolistic system to propagate this ideal in a population that held often quite different values and perceptions of ideal women's behavior.
While these reforms created a generation of powerful, emancipated women, they did so at a cost. Since the new Republican woman represented the modern, secular, Westernized state, she was expected to behave and dress in...