The beginning of the 20th century brought incredible transformation in the lives of Ottoman Turkish women. They underwent one of the most brutal wars that had ever been experienced. Unlike women in other combatant countries, Turkish women felt the impact of continuous warfare for about a decade from the Balkan Wars in 1912 to the end of National Struggle in 1923. This decade marked by wars, social and political upheavals and changes made things worse for women while at the same time it created new opportunities. During World War I and especially afterwards, Turkish women’s clothing habits, fashions and their roles in the society transformed. Women gained further access to work life and education as compared to the prewar years. During this difficult period, together with positive changes, women experienced impoverishment, lost their male relatives, suffered state violence and the social impact of the war years. However, women were not passive observers of these changes in their lives. Their perception and subsequent action affected directly or indirectly the politics. Even during World War I, when mobilization forced women to sacrifice the most, ordinary women influenced the decisions of the politicians through their informal and everyday politics, which mostly was their daily survival struggles and resistance. This showed itself in their narratives in the petitions or telegrams they submitted to the state bureaucracy or in their literary works like poems or folk songs. Most importantly, ordinary women’s daily resistance forced the state authorities to modify their decisions or the laws regarding the mobilization. Covertly, but persistently, women shaped the conditions they lived in under the rule of even the most authoritative political leaders. This paper focuses on the different ways that Turkish women perceived the war, extreme poverty and gender reforms and their resistance to the negative changes in their lives at the beginning of the 20th century, with special emphasis on the years between 1914 and 1923, chaotic years which paved way for the radical nation-building reforms of the interwar period. It uses the methodological and theoretical approaches of the history from below, subaltern studies and history of everyday life (alltagsgeschichte) and new archival sources such as ordinary women’s petitions, telegrams, folk songs, poems, newspapers, periodicals, reports of the state bureaucracy on women’s problems, and laws concerning women. It aims to contribute to Ottoman Turkish women’s historiography by revealing the role of ordinary women.

Shortly after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, women's suffrage became a subject of debate,as the new regime was founded on the idea of popular sovereignty and promised women equal rights. Intellectual and professional women openly expressed their interest in political matters and demanded becoming active participants in the political process. When the state granted women the right to vote and to be elected in the municipal and then national elections in 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women cast their ballots for the first time and seventeen women entered the parliament. This event marked a watershed in terms of gender equality and has been celebrated since as one of the biggest achievements of the republican regime. Consequently, it has also become an irrevocable part of the narratives of this period. Yet, the female voters and candidates who participated in these "groundbreaking" elections have attracted almost no attention in historiography. This paper will focus on these women, exploring the following questions: Who were the women who went to the polls and were nominated for public offices in the elections of 1930 and 1935? Under which circumstances did they vote or become candidates? And how did they interpret their roles as the first female voters and popularly elected public officers in the transformation of Turkey and particularly in the establishment of gender equality? The purpose of this study, which is based on a variety of primary sources, such as national and foreign newspapers, parliamentary archives, reports of government officials, memoirs, and biographies is threefold. It aims, first, to find out these women's educational, economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds; second, to understand their views on and expectations about women's suffrage; and third, to determine the impact of women's acquisition of political rights on gender equality.

Women’s autobiography tradition offers a rich ground to explore the diversity in the reception of the nation-building process and modernization project of the Turkish Republic. This papers seeks to present an overview of this diversity, focusing on Emine Esenbel’s One Thousand Colors, One Life: Memories of an Ambassadress as an ambiguous voice among its contemporaries. Modernization project of the Republic that granted women certain rights and assigned roles such as protecting and consolidating the Republican values and raising ideal individuals as mothers were internalized by many women autobiography writers such as Mina Urgan, Muhibbe Draga, Nermin Abadan-Unat, and Mualla Eyuboglu. Also, this period was referred to as the “golden age” of women’s rights by these women. These elite intellectual women consider the Republic as a turning point in their lives, emphasizing their gratefulness to Ataturk, founder of the Republic, and his reforms in their autobiographies. However, submission to the responsibilities accorded to women was not uncontested, nor the efficiency of the reforms unquestioned. It is also possible to hear voices in some of the life stories directly opposing the modernization project or showing a critical attitude towards unfair and inadequate reforms regarding women’s place in public life such as Esenbel’s autobiography. As an elite Turkish woman chosen to realize the Republican ideals, Esenbel willfully assumes responsibility; however, she cannot conceal her contentions against this given identity and dissatisfaction with the still minoritized position of women in social life, contradicting the arguments of gender equality in other women’s autobiographies from the same period. Curiously, she negotiates her frustration with the modernization project by embracing her rather traditional role as the supportive wife of an important man in the name of serving the Republic. This ambivalent position between the modern and the traditional/patriarchal values casts a unique light on the reception of the modernization project by women.

This paper explores how two separate Islamic communities (Ismailaga Sufi community and Gulen Movement) in Turkey construct women within their community boundaries in completely different ways. These two groups differ significantly in their approaches to the role of women in society and their activities in public space. This study empirically explores the following research questions: Why do such differences emerge between these two Islamic communities? Why do they adopt distinct opinions about the visibility of women in public space? What are the textual bases of these differences, if there are any? And, more importantly, how do female members of these communities perceive the discourses on women produced by the religious elites of their respective communities? To answer these questions, I collect data from multiple sources in order to accurately reconstruct how these two communities construct women within their community boundaries. The sermons and publications of the top religious leaders of each community help me examine how such religious leaders generate certain discourses on women and how they locate women in society. Interviews with female members of these communities allow me to observe how these messages are perceived, experienced and negotiated by women. I will empirically show that different practices and opinions with regard to the status of women and, more broadly, gender relations exist even within identical cultural and geographical settings. I will also illustrate that there is not one rigid interpretation of the Qur’an or the other sacred texts of Islam; instead, various interpretations are possible and real, especially in regard to women’s status. More importantly, I will show that the female members of both of these Islamic communities are neither passive receivers nor objects of the construction of women within their respective community boundaries but are instead active subjects of these constructions. As a last point, I will empirically demonstrate that employing the term “Muslim women” as a generic analytical category runs the risk of ignoring vast national, ethnic, communal, economic and educational variance in Muslim societies and, thus, may lead to misconceptions. This study has three sections. In the first, I will deal with previous studies that investigate the place of women in Muslim societies. In the second section, I will analyze empirical data in light of the arguments proposed in the related literature. The paper will end with the conclusion part that discusses some significant inferences made from the empirical material I collected for this study.