The common story of the modernization of Ottoman and Turkish society is one dominated by narratives of paternalism, often focused on reforms and policies that directly concerned the everyday lives of women in Turkey. These accounts frequently present a picture where female voices are conspicuously absent, even when discussing highly gendered issues including motherhood, sartorial transformation, and public mores. Each of the papers on this panel seeks to correct this imbalance by examining how prominent female intellectuals of this period responded to and struggled with the rapidly changing environment faced by women, and how they acted on their own agency to express differing relationships with state policies.
The papers will shed light on the real personal struggles women encountered in adapting to the different periods of modernization, whether Hamidian or Kemalist, as supporters and opponents, while maintaining their status as well-known, respected public intellectuals. The papers address the work of a wide variety of female intellectuals, including Saibe Örs, Nezihe Muhiddin, Suat Derviş, Sevim Sertel O’Brien, Sabiha Sertal, and Sureyya Agaoglu, who held unique positions and perspectives on Turkish society, and female agency therein. The position of the female intellectual at this time was both marginalized, because of her gender, and elite, as a result of her status as a writer. Consequently, these women present interesting challenges to our usual conceptions of intellectual history writing. In order to have an intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire or the Turkish Republic that is properly inclusive of female voices, the authors on this panel will also address insufficiencies in the traditional methodologies of intellectual history due to biases toward dominant paternalistic and patriarchal strains, as well as biases against non-traditional forums and genres of the public intellectual. Each paper offers an analysis of the representation of many women -- whether through memoirs, journalistic reporting or literature -- in order to rethink the writer’s position and agency relative to those she portrays, and the impact that such literary production has both on each writer’s contemporary period and our own understanding of Turkish intellectual historiography. The papers also address some of the long-term continuities in the position of the female intellectual from the Hamidian period well into the Cold War era.
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Prof. Nazan Maksudyan
One of the most serious dilemmas of Ottoman social and cultural historians is the impossibility of reaching primary sources about those traditionally "humiliated and insulted" groups. In records kept for the state, in different forms of official documentation, subaltern groups such as women, children, slaves, immigrants, criminals become only partially visible. On the other hand, sources through which we can hear the voices of these individuals in their own words are extremely rare. Her social status makes it impossible to call her 'an ordinary woman'. Yet, Saibe Örs' memoir covering Abdulhamid II's reign, the Young Turk regime and the First World War is an extremely valuable historical source giving voice to a woman, who is neither an intellectual nor a public figure.
Saibe Örs was born in 1885 as the granddaughter of Hasan Hüsnü Pasha, famous Minister of Navy of Abdulhamid II. Her narrative offers an important testimony about the lives of women from the privileged classes. Though written with an overwhelming tone of a victim (of a patriarchal society, of Muslim bigotry, of unloving parents, of 'ugly' or old husbands, and so on), her account of the late Ottoman period is rich with women's autonomy over household affairs, with women's many strategies to take control of their lives, and thus with women empowering themselves in resistance to all forms of subordination.
In this paper, focusing on many women characters that Saibe describes in a detailed manner, such as her mother, stepmother, paternal aunt, mother in law, I will delineate different forms of women's agency, resistance, and empowerment. In addition, by juxtaposing these obvious manifestations of power to Saibe's self-ascribed dependence, inability, and victimhood, I will reflect upon paradox of subjectivation. These essentially different portrayals of women provide flesh and bone to the theory that processes and conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by which she becomes an individual subject and active agent.
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Dr. Kara A. Peruccio
When examined in the context of the Turkish women’s movement, the literature of the early Turkish Republic reveals Suat Derviş and Nezihe Muhiddin as central figures within a uniquely feminist nexus of production. The fact that the work of both writers has been analyzed in relation to their political activities would seem to place the two in historical conversation. Given that Muhiddin and Derviş were political allies for a brief period, it seems surprising that scholarship has neglected to examine the two as creative voices in dialogue. Even within the most recent scholarship, the two authors are discussed separately, with Muhiddin principally linked to the eminent Halide Edib, and Derviş most closely associated with her publisher, Sabiha Sertel. Such a limited contextual framework all but erases the significance of their political, as well as, their creative connection.
This paper will examine Derviş’s "Gönül gibi" (1928) and Muhiddin’s "Benliǧim Benimdir!" (1929), analyzing how Derviş and Muhiddin’s works thematically spoke to one another before joining forces to form the women’s branch of the Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Free Republican Party) in 1930. In addition to taking significant roles within this organization, Muhiddin and Derviş were included on the party’s municipal elections list of the same year. Scholarship generally focuses on Derviş and Muhiddin’s political careers; this paper explores these women as novelists and will discuss how their novels reflected the challenges of womanhood within the gendered modernization of Kemalism.
Scholarship of early Republican women’s writing features a lacuna in the 1920s and 1930s. Women’s novels were considered to be, by and large, romance novels lacking critical social commentary or a sustained political position. I seek to look beyond this generic framework in order to understand how these two novels served an intellectually marginalized audience, primarily Turkish women. Additionally, this paper will explore how these writers presented their political and social views vis-à-vis fiction as a strategy to avoid censure from the Kemalist regime. "Gönül gibi" and "Benliǧim Benimdir!" were published on the precipice of Turkish women’s suffrage and are instrumental texts for exploring Suat Derviş and Nezihe Muhiddin’s anxieties about the paternal authoritarianism of the Kemalist state.
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Dr. Kathryn Libal
Suat Derviş (1905-1972) is well known for novels she wrote in the 1920s-1960s, in which she tackled issues of class and gender through the lens of girls and women on the margins of urban Turkish society. Many of these novels have been reprinted in Turkish in recent decades and have contributed to Derviş’s “rediscovery” in feminist Turkish literary studies. Yet Suat Derviş was also a skilled and recognized journalist, trained in Berlin, Germany and widely published the early republican period. As a freelance journalist she covered international events such as the Lausanne Conference in 1922-23 and the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship’s 1935 Congress in Istanbul. But, her journalistic portfolio was unique because she wrote lengthy investigative stories related to Turkish urban life that often foregrounded “the voices” of those she interviewed. Through producing series of articles on themes such as the experiences and conditions of women’s and children’s lives, public health, or the types of homes and neighborhoods the poor lived in, she chronicled daily life in more depth than other Turkish journalists of the same era. Analyzing the content and rhetorical devices of Derviş’s reportage, my paper highlights that she drew upon narratives of dislocation and vulnerability of women and children to pierce the illusion of populism advanced by Kemalists in Ataturk’s 1930s. Through her non-fiction writing, she openly advocated for greater state involvement in providing for the welfare of marginalized members of society. Derviş’s journalistic voice was curtailed after 1944, when she and her husband, Reşat Fuat Baraner, leader of the banned Turkish Communist Party, were arrested for their political allegiances and activities. Yet she had firmly established herself not only as an important novelist, but also as a reporter willing to critique the limitations of the state and elite society. In this paper, I examine Derviş’s body of reportage in Cumhuriyet, as well as freelance pieces she published in other outlets such as Yeni Edebiyat and Tan. In addition, I draw upon several secondary analyses of Derviş’s life and published interviews of Derviş in her later life to illustrate the importance of Derviş’s contributions to Turkish journalism and political dissent in the early republic.
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Dr. A. Holly Shissler
This presentation will consider the careers and memoirs of two women, both public figures, from the early years of the Turkish Republic. Sabiha Sertel (1895-1968), a well known journalist and social activist, and Sureyya Agaoglu (1903-1989), the new republic's first woman lawyer and a founding member of many professional organizations and civil society groups. Both women were certainly supporters of the nationalist resistance at the end of World War I and both were also exponents of a new and, as they saw it, more modern role for women in the country's public life. In many ways they were products of the late Ottoman and early republican concern with modernity and women's importance to modernity, and both, at certain moments in the early years of the republic, were held up as exemplars of that modernity. However, Sertel began to come into conflict with the emerging regime as early as the mid-1920's and by 1950 was forced to flee the country, whereas Agaoglu, even though she served as her brother's defense counsel during his treason trail following the 1960 coup d'etat, remained a respected emblem of republicanism. In later years, both women published memoirs of their public lives-Sertel in 1969, Agaoglu in 1975. This paper examines and compares the extent to which these women, who were active public figures, were able to shape the events around them, the reasons behind their contrasting political fates, and the the manner in which they chose to present their political and professional lives to a larger audience and to posterity.
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Dr. James Ryan
Sevim Sertel O’Brien was the daughter of two of the most prominent public intellectuals of Turkey’s single-party era (1923-1950), M. Zekeriya and Sabiha Sertel. Born shortly after the close of World War I, her earliest years were spent in New York City, where her parents were students at Columbia University, and later spent much of her adolescence and young adulthood in Turkey after they returned in 1923 following the close of the Independence War. She would later become a frequent contributor to her parents’ newspaper, Tan, and by World War II she had married an American AP Press Attache named Frank O’Brien. Following the war, and her parents’ eventual exile to the USSR in 1950, Sevim and Frank raised their three children in the United States, primarily in the Washington, DC suburb of Chevy Chase, MD. In this paper I will discuss an as-yet unpublished memoir composed by Sevim Sertel which was meant as a way of relaying her years in Turkey to her own children. It is written in English, since her children did not take Turkish lessons in the States, and in the genre of a bedtime story. The stories vibrantly retell the experience of living in a tumultuous and rapidly changing society wherein the roles of men and women were changing. It sheds light on the lives of her parents, who held a prominent yet tenuous position as public intellectuals who were not always supportive of the policies of Mustafa Kemal and his successor İsmet İnönü. In the context of this panel, my paper will engage with the memoir as a document that remembers the intellectual history of the early Republic in a uniquely feminine manner, one that emphasized gender as a component to Kemalist modernity, and highlighted the limits placed on women in the public sphere. The paper will also place Sevim’s memories in an intellectual context with both her own writing in Tan, and the political outlook of her parents as a way of asking questions about how attitudes towards Kemalism changed over the course of generations.
