The Turkish government’s intervention in the economy dominated the political environment from the 1930s on, as part of the comprehensive series of state-sponsored reforms. In 1931, statism was adopted in response to the trauma of the sequential wars and the severe local effects of the Great Depression. In addition to establishing new facilities, the government also continued to operate a handful of factories from the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. One of those factories, Feshane, was handed over to the state-run enterprise of Sümerbank (It was assigned to lead the drive for industrialization and to handle the labor force problems) and relabeled as Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory in 1937. The factory had employed high numbers of women workers throughout its years in operation. There is a growing literature that stresses gender, ethnicity, and race as important categories to understand the multilayered relationship between states, societies and industrial workers. However, established labor history in the Middle East narrows workers’ experiences to unionism and political activism to a large extent, and concentrates on the institutional history of the working class. The select focus of nationalist labor histories misses the social and cultural life of laboring men and women. This paper contextualizes the Republican centralized industrial program by examining the everyday lives of women workers and gendered interactions on the workshop floor in the case of Sümerbank Defterdar Textile Factory. Most of the documents need to be restudied with the social construction of gender in mind because the greatest part of the written sources is excessively male-oriented or they were written by or from the perspective of the state authorities. Hence, this study aims to discuss the possibilities of writing a gendered history of labor by finding new ways to read the archival evidence. Although workingmen are inclined to be more visible in standard records, this paper reconceptualizes the connection between gender and labor on the basis of using varying sources such as photographs, maps, newspaper and magazine articles as well as state-led documentation.