When examined in the context of the Turkish women’s movement, the literature of the early Turkish Republic reveals Suat Derviş and Nezihe Muhiddin as central figures within a uniquely feminist nexus of production. The fact that the work of both writers has been analyzed in relation to their political activities would seem to place the two in historical conversation. Given that Muhiddin and Derviş were political allies for a brief period, it seems surprising that scholarship has neglected to examine the two as creative voices in dialogue. Even within the most recent scholarship, the two authors are discussed separately, with Muhiddin principally linked to the eminent Halide Edib, and Derviş most closely associated with her publisher, Sabiha Sertel. Such a limited contextual framework all but erases the significance of their political, as well as, their creative connection. This paper will examine Derviş’s "Gönül gibi" (1928) and Muhiddin’s "Benliǧim Benimdir!" (1929), analyzing how Derviş and Muhiddin’s works thematically spoke to one another before joining forces to form the women’s branch of the Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Free Republican Party) in 1930. In addition to taking significant roles within this organization, Muhiddin and Derviş were included on the party’s municipal elections list of the same year. Scholarship generally focuses on Derviş and Muhiddin’s political careers; this paper explores these women as novelists and will discuss how their novels reflected the challenges of womanhood within the gendered modernization of Kemalism. Scholarship of early Republican women’s writing features a lacuna in the 1920s and 1930s. Women’s novels were considered to be, by and large, romance novels lacking critical social commentary or a sustained political position. I seek to look beyond this generic framework in order to understand how these two novels served an intellectually marginalized audience, primarily Turkish women. Additionally, this paper will explore how these writers presented their political and social views vis-à-vis fiction as a strategy to avoid censure from the Kemalist regime. "Gönül gibi" and "Benliǧim Benimdir!" were published on the precipice of Turkish women’s suffrage and are instrumental texts for exploring Suat Derviş and Nezihe Muhiddin’s anxieties about the paternal authoritarianism of the Kemalist state.