Complicating Orientalism: The Egyptian Feminist Union, the Turkish Women's Union, and the International Alliance of Women's 1935 Istanbul Congress

The International Alliance of Women, founded in 1904 with the goal of gaining women’s suffrage worldwide, pledged "absolute neutrality" on members' national politics. Through this praxis, however, the Alliance reaffirmed imperial hierarchies and failed to meaningfully support members living under authoritarian conditions.

The Alliance would host its first congress in a Muslim-majority country in Istanbul, Turkey in 1935. This meeting was a watershed moment for the Alliance as they believed hosting their congress in the Turkish city proved the unity of “East and West” in the movement. The Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) and Turkish Women’s Union (TWU) saw the congress as an opportunity to self-represent their years of activism and struggles to different ends. Despite a decade of interaction with and membership in the Alliance, the EFU and TWU still faced marginalization by the international organization vis-à-vis Orientalist rhetoric, but did not respond as a monolithic bloc.

I examine the ways in which Egyptian and Turkish suffrage activists’ negotiations of Orientalism complicated their relationships with the Alliance. Unlike the EFU which consistently opposed the Alliance's Orientalist inclinations, the TWU used it to promote the congress and whitewash Mustafa Kemal’s authoritarian leadership. The TWU possessed a more autonomous character from its founding in 1923 until 1927; the congress demonstrated how it was a state feminist organization in the 1930s. Ultimately, the group would be betrayed by the regime at the congress’s close.

EFU president Huda Sha‘rawi viewed Turkey as a model for how her own nation should modernize and reform. After years of pressing the issue, the EFU secured an Alliance resolution criticizing the Capitulations which negatively impacted women’s citizenship rights. Despite successes for the EFU and TWU, I argue that the Istanbul congress was a culmination of the Alliance’s interwar agenda: upholding imperialist privilege and complicity engaging with authoritarian leaders.