This paper is inspired by a "100-year-old sewing machine" that I inherited from my grandmother. The machine came with a long narrative story of its own, showing how dramatically it affected my grandmother's life. Probably no other technological invention has had a more transformative effect upon the lives of women and the household than sewing machine. Since its introduction to the Middle East in the latter half of the nineteenth century, sewing machine came to play a decisive role in redefining the social status of women across the board. Perhaps as importantly, sewing machine also opened up a new channel of technology transfer between Europe and the Middle East. “Singer” as a brand name signifies the unfolding of this twofold process that lasted well into the middle of the twentieth century. Taking its cue from the argument that the tools in our homes are not passive instruments, rather they shape and transform our lives in a reciprocal manner, the present paper aims to study a particular aspect of the process by which “Singer” turned into a modernizing tool in the hands of the Turkish elite and was devised to transform the social status of women. Ten years after its foundation, Turkey had achieved a certain degree of success in remodeling the society after European example; and the Turkish elite with its commitment to modernity had created institutions and launched policies to upgrade the status, particularly, of urban women. Part of this process was training that was given to women in formal and informal institutions about how to use sewing machines. The tightly-state controlled media was full of sewing machine advertisements, encouraging women to buy sewing machines or learn how to use them. For almost three decades, “Singer” became a loaded name; more than a household technology, symbolizing prestige and economic independence for Turkish urban women. Having had a chance to listen to my grandmother’s experience with her hundred-year old “Singer”, I designed an oral history project for my thesis to document and analyze the impact of sewing machine upon Turkish urban women. Based on two dozen interviews, Singer's publications and advertisement materials such as posters, and women's magazines, this paper argues that sewing machine played a key role in the definition and redefinition of the social status of women in Turkey during much of the twentieth century.

The Turkish Ezan and State Language Reform The 1932 change of the Islamic call to prayer (ezan in Turkish) from classical Arabic to modern Turkish has been explored in a number of ways. It has been framed as a part of the early Turkish secularization reforms, a step toward modernization, or a personal project of Atatürk. While this reform is certainly an aspect of all these, the ezan change has yet to be approached within the context of the Turkish language reform (this reform introduced Romanized characters as well as grammatical and syntactical shifts to the existing Ottoman language). In this paper, through the lens of language reform, I highlight, as of yet, unexplored societal alterations and civic religious reorientation assisted by the Turkish ezan. Of these societal alterations, the Turkish ezan contributed to successful adoption of modern Turkish, solidification and dissemination of Turkish nationalism, and creation of a new Turkish ethnicity. In the religious realm, the ezan change participated in untangling religion from the state apparatus and assisted in creation of the civic version of Islam seen in Turkey today. Moreover, this paper fleshes out instances of linguistic conflict between competing narratives, nascent views of Turkishness, and the practical problems involved with language reform and populace adoption. This paper draws upon original Turkish newspapers and commentaries as well as secondary sources to open new optics on this pivotal point in national solidification. These sources present a local perspective on the Turkish ezan and marks ways this view changed from its beginning in 1932 till the ezan's shift back to classical Arabic in 1950. Beyond highlighting accounts of the ezan change in Turkey, this paper builds a framework to better understand the success of the Turkish language reform. More broadly, it begins to sketch a methodological outline of nationalist language reforms in general and the role religion and the civil society play in a language reform’s overall success or failure.

Existing literature on early republican Turkey has been shaped by a state-centric approach, preoccupied with the high politics of the Kemalist political elite in the capital. We know a great deal about the ideals of the regime, but we know little about how these ideals entered the practice of everyday life and how they were consumed in the local level. Therefore, in what ways state policies and reforms were negotiated, compromised and/or resisted in the society remains to be a crucial question. The change of women’s dress is one of the richest sites to study the interaction between the state and societal actors under Kemalist modernization. With the beginning of organized anti-veiling campaigns in the 1930s, women’s clothing became a battleground for various actors to debate the issues of religion, secularism, modernization, and women’s role in the public sphere. In Turkey, in contrast to what is generally understood, anti-veiling campaigns were organized in the local level, mainly by the initiatives of the local elite rather than by the direct involvement of the regime leadership. Mechanisms used to fight peçe (face veil) and çar?af (black full-body cloak) varied significantly in different cities, leaving a space to negotiate the regime ideals. This paper aims to look at domestication of Kemalist reforms and state-society relations in the local level by focusing on the anti-veiling campaigns in the 1930s. Based on an extensive research on local newspapers of five cities, and state and municipal archives, it will explore a) the reflections of Kemalist ideals on women’s dress in the periphery, b) the role of the local elite in shaping the content and implementation of the unveiling reform, c) societal reactions, and d) various ways in which women handled this dramatic change. The focus will be on cities other than Ankara and Istanbul, where state control was harder and less consistent, and conclusions will be drawn based on the anti-veiling campaigns in ?zmir, Bursa, Konya, Adana, and Trabzon. The argument of the paper is that formulation and implementation of the reform included discussions, negotiations and concessions in the local level. This allowed a wide range of possibilities to manipulate or compromise the new dress codes in the public sphere, leaving a space for the local elite to influence the content of the reform, as well as for women’s agency.

This paper examines the peasants’ response to heavy agricultural taxes of the Turkish single-party government, which funded the industrialization program with burdensome direct agricultural taxes during the interwar period. Despite the abolition of the Tithe in 1925, the rates of other taxes, especially the Land Tax, the Livestock Tax, and the Road Tax multiplied during the late 1920s and weighed heavily on the peasantry, especially poor peasants and smallholders. Although these taxes did not generate widespread peasant insurrections, contrary to the arguments of conventional accounts focusing exclusively on high and legal politics, the peasants did not remain passive, but resisted the agricultural taxes in covert ways in everyday life and forced the government to reduce the tax rates and other tax obligations. Although the peasantry composed almost eighty percent of the population, the interplay between the peasants and the government has not been studied in depth. Scholarly interest in the Anatolian peasantry during the period has remained focused exclusively on the state economic policies and socio-economic trends. Therefore, the scholars mostly failed to notice the covert and informal forms of struggles waged by the peasants against the state. The existing accounts have portrayed the Anatolian peasants during the interwar period as hapless victims succumbing to the over taxation due to the absence of organized and political peasant movements. This paper, on the basis of new archival sources such as gendarme records, provincial governors’ situation reports, and the politicians’ reports on their election districts and inspection district, and local newspapers reports, and drawing on history from below approach, “everyday forms of peasant resistance” concept of James C. Scott, and source reading methods suggested by Subaltern Studies, shows that the peasantry resisted the heavy agricultural taxes in daily life and managed to curb and circumvent the heavy taxes to a remarkable degree. Furthermore, this paper examines the impact of the everyday resistance of the peasants on decision-making of the government. Underscoring how far the peasants thwarted the tax-collection efforts and forced the government to reduce the high rates of agricultural taxes and to implement tax relief programs during the 1930s, this paper brings “the rural passivity thesis” into question and locates the everyday politics of the peasants in the center of the political life even under the single-party regime in Turkey.