In the last decade, men in Turkey have killed at least 5,000 women and physically or sexually assaulted thousands more, which has led to nationwide protests, social media campaigns, and public debates about how to prevent gender-based violence. In an attempt to understand the reasons behind mounting violence against women, scholars, government agencies, and women’s organizations have conducted studies exploring the issue from sociological, anthropological, psychological, medical, and legal perspectives. None of these studies, however, has paid attention to the long-term historical roots of this problem in Turkish society. Yet, identifying the origins of violent acts against women is essential to fully understanding and preventing them. That is where my work comes in. In order to shed light on how violence became gendered through specific attitudes, practices, policies, and legal codes in modern Turkey, this paper will explore women's murders in the early Turkish Republic (1923–1938) based on primary sources such as daily newspapers, statistical reports, court records, and proceedings of the parliament. By studying a large number of murder cases across the country, it will discuss the reasons behind killings of women and the sociological profiles of perpetrators and victims. This paper will also analyze the specific policies, legal codes, and debates related to murders of women, as well as how various segments of society defined, classified, and discussed the issue in the press, legal system, and parliament. Benefiting from the most recent scholarship on the social and cultural history of Turkey, this paper will reveal how women's murders manifested the broader anxieties in Turkish society over masculinity, sexuality, and morality, caused by political upheaval and the rapid transition from religious to secular patriarchy, some of which left their mark on the country’s legal, social, and cultural order up to the present day.