Discovering Gender Inequality In Modern Turkey: Kemalist Women’s Activism, 1950–80

Until recently, the literature on women’s activism in Turkey had an exclusive focus on two periods, the late Ottoman-early Republican period and the post-1980 period, given that there was no significant women’s movement until late 1970s and the word feminism was long forgotten after the dissolution of the Turkish Women’s Union in 1935. According to this literature, women’s political mobilization was possible only in the post-1980 era because of second wave feminism in Turkey. Looking into Kemalist women’s activism during 1950-1980 shows that women had discovered gender inequality and the persistence of patriarchal relations in Turkish society, accordingly they were politically mobilized.  This paper concerns Kemalist women’s activism from 1950-1980.  Particularly, it concerns understooding the category and challenges of gender (and inequality) in spite of the myth that Turkey superseded the West with equality.      

The multi-party system in Turkey marked the beginning of Kemalist women’s independent organizing. Following the reopening of the Turkish Women’s Union in 1949, women-only organizations proliferated.  Parallel to these groups, the women’s branch of the (Kemalist) Republican People’s Party was formed  in 1955 to aide women with political participation. The late 1960s saw the emergence of gender as a category of (mainly quantitative) analysis in for studies of health, population, migration, education, and labor. These studies, which serve as texts preceding the field of women’s studies, also show that Kemalist women’s organizations formed conferences and did research on women’s status to increase thier social, economic and political participation.