Turkey’s republican regime of the late 1920s – mid 1940s is renowned for its modernizing and secularizing reforms, many of which targeted women as objects of social transformation. State-sponsored efforts to accord women new rights in the public sphere, sometimes labeled as state feminism, included efforts to encourage women to give up traditional forms of (middle-class) dress and head and body-coverings. While some efforts to ban so-called “traditional” women’s attire did take place at municipal and provincial levels, a national campaign to ban the “veil” (peçe and çar?af) never occurred in the early republic. Officials and social reformers opted to promote a shift in norms among the growing middle class and educated urban elite through education, popular media, and informally enforced norms of western-style women’s dress. This paper outlines how a binary construction of two opposing figures – the backward Ottoman vs. modern Turkish woman – deployed in popular culture, professional journals, publications of the “people’s houses,” and photographs operated to foster new sensibilities in “modern” dress. The debates were less about “covering” in general than about what kinds of head gear or outerwear was appropriate in public. In this arena of contention over social practices and their meanings, radical modernizers sought to supplant women’s dress forms from the late 19th century with those representing the latest fashions of Europe in the 1930s-40s. In the paper I underscore that debates over “unveiling” and depictions of “backward Ottoman” versus “modern Turkish” women centered on a struggle for transformation among middle class and elite townspeople and urbanites. Moreover, the question of how women dressed in this era operated as “shorthand” for contention over women’s roles within all realms of life, both public and private – their access to education, political participation, rights within the workplace, and roles within the household as wives and mothers. And for some women activists of the era, focusing on dress diverted from more important questions of women’s access to an adequate standard of living and recognition within their communities and society as citizens with legitimate claims on the state for support. Sources for the paper are drawn from serial publications, historical photographs, newspapers, memoirs and travelogues, as well as selected archival sources from the Republican Archives (T.C. Ba?bakanl?k Cumhuriyet Ar?ivi).