This presentation will consider the careers and memoirs of two women, both public figures, from the early years of the Turkish Republic. Sabiha Sertel (1895-1968), a well known journalist and social activist, and Sureyya Agaoglu (1903-1989), the new republic's first woman lawyer and a founding member of many professional organizations and civil society groups. Both women were certainly supporters of the nationalist resistance at the end of World War I and both were also exponents of a new and, as they saw it, more modern role for women in the country's public life. In many ways they were products of the late Ottoman and early republican concern with modernity and women's importance to modernity, and both, at certain moments in the early years of the republic, were held up as exemplars of that modernity. However, Sertel began to come into conflict with the emerging regime as early as the mid-1920's and by 1950 was forced to flee the country, whereas Agaoglu, even though she served as her brother's defense counsel during his treason trail following the 1960 coup d'etat, remained a respected emblem of republicanism. In later years, both women published memoirs of their public lives-Sertel in 1969, Agaoglu in 1975. This paper examines and compares the extent to which these women, who were active public figures, were able to shape the events around them, the reasons behind their contrasting political fates, and the the manner in which they chose to present their political and professional lives to a larger audience and to posterity.