The voices of Ottoman women activists, which are essential to gaining a better understanding of both the late Ottoman and modern Turkish history, have been consistently left out of the nationalist narrative due to the limited range of sources scholars have used and the way in which they have utilized these sources. Attempting to fill this void, this paper examines the usually overlooked women’s periodicals of the constitutional period, such as Kad?nlar Dünyas? (Women’s World, 1913) and Kad?nl?k (Womanhood, 1914), and uncovers the voice of Aziz Haydar, a newspaper columnist, an educator, and one of the most ardent defenders of women’s rights of her time. Aziz Haydar’s voice, which reached thousands of people in 1910s through newspapers and public speeches but has become silent since then, is significant in many ways. Not only does it represent the sentiments of many female activists of the period, but it also embodies the complex interplay among feminist, nationalist, westernist, and Islamist dynamics in the Ottoman Empire in early twentieth century. Furthermore, it portrays an alternative view of history that emphasizes women’s agency, which has been hitherto ignored in nationalist historiography. This paper suggests that a contextualized analysis of the writings and speeches of Aziz Haydar will clearly demonstrate that Turkish women in the last decade of the empire were actively involved in political, social and cultural debates, including the one on woman and gender, and pushed for their own agenda by changing both the issues at hand and the language that was used. It will reveal that through these debates, Turkish women were able to claim equal citizenship, challenge the male-monopoly on public discourse, defy established gender roles, criticize patriarchal values, and implement change from the bottom up. Thus, helping to restore women’s agency in Ottoman and Turkish history, the analysis of Aziz Haydar’s voice will refute the nationalist discourse that has long claimed that Turkish women were lucky because they were given equal rights with men without having to ask or fight for it.