The presentation will discuss how, starting in 1924, Sahbiha Sertel, a prominent intellectual and journalist of the early Turkish Republic, began to address the problems of widows and orphans. Through her journal Resimli Ay (The Illustrated Monthly) she both revealed and investigated their economic distress and almost total lack of protection.  It is clear from Sertel's articles that she wanted to use this coverage to make the government more responsive to the the plight of poor women and children, especially female children, whom the war had left without breadwinners and without opportunities--except all too often prostitution-- for earning their own livings.  Sertal wanted to influence society to create more opportunities for women and she especially wanted to shame the government for not taking greater responsibility for the well-being of these women and children.  Her articles struck a chord in a way that was perhaps surprising and unintended by her; one of the orphan girls highlighted in her coverage was, as result, found by surviving members of her family. This lead to Resimli Ay's  becoming the site of a an outburst of letter-writing from readers pleading for information about relatives missing since the war, whether missing in battle or lost in the chaos of evacuations.  Many letters came from veterans who had returned hone to discover their families were missing.  Others came from families seeking news of missing soldiers. Still others came from civilians who had been separated from and lost sight of members of their households. The letters  made visible the anguish of scattered families and the reality that the successive Ottoman, Occupation, and Republican regimes had neither the resources nor it seemed  much interest in helping families learn the fate of those lost in the war. They also reflect the anguish and experience of many "ordinary" people, and Resimli Ay gave special attention to the condition of such people, writing about women and children without resources, and about the struggles of returned soldiers of the rank-and-file variety. The articles and resulting letters draw attention to two things:  first, that there was an active republican left in the early post-war years, which tried to focus government policy and public sentiment on questions of class and gender; and, second, that the widespread social dislocation and trauma caused by the War were of a type that made it almost impossible to separate the battlefront from the home front.