State feminism

Sunday, May 1, 2005

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  For most of my students in America, the term “state feminism” is an impossible coupling, an oxymoron: Not for those coming from Turkey though, not for us most certainly.

  Even to this day, when talking about the early republican reforms concerning the position of women in family and society in Turkey, we still use the verb “to give,” as in “the state gave us our rights” or “Atatürk gave us our rights.” The state is thought to be a father-like figure, doing a favor to his daughters. Thus the need to be grateful!

  Underlying the social transformation forged by the Kemalist elite was a significant historic rupture with the past. And the most significant visible difference the republic brought to the urban space was the public presence of women. The Kemalist reformists saw women s emancipation as the most telling sign of the transformation the country had gone through. Not only modernization would correlate with secularization, they argued, but also women s public visibility, as well as the encounters between the two sexes would eventually bring about the conversion of civilization (tebdil-i medeniyet). It is precisely upon this background that the ideal of a new woman was drawn.

  This “ideal woman” could not be “the peasant woman” because even though she had fully participated in the War of Independence, she was spatially located outside the urban spaces where the cultural imagery of the republican regime was to be created.  The “ideal woman” could not be “the upper-class urban woman,” since even though she was often outwardly modern, she had not fully and wholeheartedly sacrificed herself to the ideals of nation-building the way the peasant women had done.  What other options were left to the Kemalist elite when choosing the “female face” of the new republic? For instance, the altruistic, patriotic woman teacher! She would be “the young female role-model for the next generations;” she would be educated with and within republican ideals and taught to fully commit herself to the service of the nation before all else. Her mission was to enlighten the masses.

  One of the most obtrusive definitions of the “new woman” was presented by İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu in the1930s when he stated: “The new woman is not a housewife. First and foremost she is educated. She is not a fragile, ailing beauty. The new woman is healthy, hale, agile, successful and active.” 

  Yakup Kadri, too, argued that the new Turkish woman should not use her freedom to polish her nails, to be a baby doll ... but to serve the state and society. She had to be healthy and well educated and dedicated to the nation. Hence the veneration of the new woman went hand-in-hand with an emphasis on a woman s role as a “good citizen and patriot.” The challenge for the reformist elite was to take this figure of the patriotic urban woman out of her privileged environment and send her into the “backward” countryside where she would face and eventually transform her own people!

  In Yakup Kadri s prominent novel “Ankara,” the “Istanbulite” female protagonist of the book, Selma, moves from the cosmopolitan/old/imperial Istanbul to its modern/republican alternative: Ankara. The move is part and parcel of her consciousness-raising. The more she turns towards the “plain, friendly and sincere Anatolian atmosphere” the more she will come to know her nation as well as herself as an individual and as a woman. In this mission-journey Selma is portrayed as an ideal woman; spiritually, intellectually and physically. She does not have the curved, “feminine” body features -- thought to be so typical of eastern/Ottoman women -- but a slim figure and almost unnoticeable female features. She looks like a boy, spends most of her time with boys, and is devoid of the problems of the female world. “A woman who did not look like a woman” or “being a woman without being womanly or feminine” were certainly words of praise in the writings of the Kemalist cultural elite. State feminism in Turkey has always relished a comrade-woman figure and situated this image against a concubine-woman – the symbol of Ottoman times.

  I try explaining all this to my American students, for whom feminism basically means the “women s social movement” in the 1970s, burning your bras on the street and the suffragists of an earlier era. The state is nowhere in the picture.

  It is not easy.