This paper examines normative discourses on modern womanhood in Turkey from 1946 to 1950, from the establishment of multi-party democracy to the opposition Democrat Party’s (DP) election victory against the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in 1950. Feminist historiography in Turkey understands the late 1940s as the consolidation of a “conservative consensus” in Turkey’s state feminist project. I challenge this narrative by scrutinizing the coherence of the state feminist project through an analysis of elite women organized in the Turkish Women’s Federation (TKB), and independent women intellectuals such as Sabiha Sertel, Safiye Erol and Suat Derviş. The TKB, which had been closed down by the CHP in 1935, was one of the civil society groups re-established in this period. Although the TKB stated that it would remain outside of politics, political realities had compelled them to be engaged with day-to-day politics. In fact, highly critical of the abandonment of militant secularism in the 1940s, the TKB assumed a pioneering role to “make” the ideal, modern Turkish woman. Although they had to act within very narrow political boundaries, they carefully criticized the CHP’s and DP’s appeals to Islamism. They frequently wrote on issues around public femininity including the wearing of chador, thriftlessness, employment and motherhood. Yet, TKB members overlapped with the state elites especially on issues such as anti-communism and policing of men and women’s bodies. On the other hand, political writings and popular novels by independent women intellectuals directed their critical gaze towards policing of public femininity and sexuality. Moreover, they problematized that the state elites, men and women, neglected the women of several class and status groups. They offered alternative narratives of women’s realities and brought women who were deliberately left outside the state’s or the TKB’s normative discourses into public debate. Relying on daily newspapers, the TKB’s main publishing organ, Kadın Gazetesi (Women’s Gazette), the TKB members’ memoirs, and popular novels, I argue the following: 1) The state feminist project has been hardly coherent in this period. It was fraught with contradictions and ambiguities due to ideological clashes, and domestic and international political developments. 2) The conventional wisdom about the period of 1935-1960 as “silent years of feminism” renders gendered and classed responses of elite women and independent women intellectuals to political transformations in the 1940s invisible.