This paper analyzes the relationship between state violence and feminist and/or women’s politics in Turkey in the late 1950s, amidst the authoritarian turn of the Democrat Party (DP) government. In December 1957, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes called for measures to ensure the “moral public order” in his opening speech of the assembly. Shortly after, Turkish Women’s Federation (TKB), a firm Kemalist organization, announced its strong commitment to fight against sex-work despite the lack of a visible government initiative around this issue. Why did the TKB claim responsibility for ensuring moral public order in this period? How did TKB’s politics and its relation to the state change after transition to multi-party democracy? What are the discourses and narratives of ideal womanhood and manhood in the DP period? And how do different actors such as women organized in TKB and sex workers themselves counter, contest or affirm the forging of particular gendered ideal national subjects? Drawing from a comparative reading on Middle Eastern state feminisms and Deniz Kandiyoti’s research on Kemalist nationalism and idealized gender roles in Turkey, I claim that the state apparatus is not the only actor to inform the ideals about the imageries of ideal family and ideal Turkish nation. Moreover, women from various classes were not the mere victims of state control, but actively shaped gender politics by either affirming or subverting “moral public order”. This research primarily relies on TKB’s archives, daily newspapers, and the parliamentary minutes in the last period of the DP (1957-1960). Feminist scholars in Turkey have been researching gender and sexuality politics and its intrinsic rather than incidental place in the political history of Turkey for at least four decades. Post-1935 period of women’s movement until the flourishment of autonomous feminist groups in mid 1980s is usually considered as the period of state feminism due to the lack of autonomous women’s groups. Yet, the particular gender regime of the DP, women’s agency in shaping this particular regime, and feminist dissidence and/or complicity with the state are surprisingly under-analyzed in scholarly accounts. I aim to extend and contribute to three main scholarly conversations: 1) history of women’s movements and state feminism in Turkey, 2) sociopolitical history of Turkey by analytically centering women’s complicity and/or dissidence with the state’s moralist politics, and 3) history of state feminisms in the Middle East.