Tenuous boundaries: women, domesticity and nationhood in 1930s Turkey

Abstract

The 1930s marked the most intensive period of modernisation in Turkey. The newly established Kemalist programme was determined to bring the young Republic into the European economic, cultural, and political milieu as an equal partner and advocated nationalistic idealism and progress through modernisation. 2 Such reforms as changing the alphabet from Arabic script to Latin, adopting the Swiss Civil Code, and replacing the Ottoman fez with the European-style brimmed cap, signi ed important steps towards this goal. In the founding years of the Republic, visible symbols of modernity were actively deployed to publicise the image of the new nation state as a radical break from its Islamic Ottoman past. Within this context, both 'modern architecture' and 'the modern Turkish woman' constituted important components of the image repertoire of modern Turkey.

Negotiating the foundations of the modern state: the emasculated citizen and the call for a post-patriarchal state at Gezi protests

“…This feature of modern statehood is demonstrated in the abundance of familial and gender metaphors used by political leaders under all sorts of regimes and governments around the world. 5 Studies on the use of gender and family tropes in relation to politics, authority and nation-building in Turkey have explored the use of women's images in the construction of a modern, secular national identity during the founding years (Arat 1997;Baydar 2002;Çınar 2005Sancar 2012;Yeğenoğlu 1998); examined how family tropes have been instrumental in the construction of nationhood and citizenship (Kandiyoti 2001;Kaya 2015;Sirman 2005); or the use masculinity as a trope of power, political authority, and military might (Akyüz 2012;Altınay 2004;Çiçekoğlu 2019;Çınar and Üsterci 2009;Sancar 2016). Erdoğan's rule is no exception.…”

“…The relation between gender and citizenship in Turkey has been widely examined by studies that explore how women have been implicated in ongoing state, nation, and citizenship building efforts as part of modernizationist policies during the founding years, as well as neoliberal governmental practices under the AKP, the majority of which address the issue in terms of women's subjugation by the state. Examining the ways in which governments have been actively involved in the regulation of women's lives, bodies, or images, these studies focus either on women's confinement to the private sphere (Baydar 2002;Dönmez and Özmen 2013;Sirman 2005), their controlled inclusion in the public sphere as mothers to act as producers of future generations and soldiers who will protect the nation (Korkman 2015;White 2003;Yeğenoğlu 1998), or their conditional inclusion as defeminized, desexualized subjects (Gökarıksel 2009;Göle 1996;Kandiyoti 1997;Parla 2001). 7 This study contributes to this debate by approaching the state's citizenship building efforts, not in terms of the subjugation of women, but as the use of feminization (and infantilization) as discursive techniques toward the interpellation of citizens as emasculated subjects at the expense of the individual autonomy of both men and women.…”

Gendered Nature and Urban Culture: The Dialectics of Gated Developments in Izmir, Turkey

“…This Republican discourse on women in Turkey had a prominent spatial and architectural component, in which modern architecture was associated with the image of newly ‘liberated’ women, both symbolically and literally (Bozdogan, ). Baydar (), in his analysis of the architecture of the new Turkish Republic, notes that ‘modern Turkish women’ and the ‘modern Turkish home’ both became part of the ‘complicated and contradictory ways that constitute the seemingly coherent narratives of architectural and cultural modernization in Turkey’. On the one hand, modern Turkish women were valorized as an antipode to the veiled Islamic women from the Ottoman period.…”

“…On the other hand, this image simultaneously served the mechanisms of paternalism, which located modern Turkish women as nurturing domestic subjects whose rightful place was in the home. Baydar () notes that structural, legal and institutional reforms brought a number of women into the public sphere but it did not fundamentally reorder the structures of power within the home and family. He concludes that the new Turkish Republic removed Islam but not paternalism from the public lives of women; consequently the modern Turkish home was simply reimagined as serving the new consumerist practices of modern Turkish women.…”

The Modern Woman Vis-À-Vis The Modern House: The Hallmarks Of Modern Nationhood Through The 1920s-1940s Iran

“…Scholars such as Duben and Cem (1991), Campo (1991), Chatterjee (1993) and Ghannam (2002) have tried to map the ties between gender, domestic space, and religion in addition to the sociocultural and political issues in the Middle Eastern way of dealing with modernity. In Turkey, scholars such as Z. F. Arat (1998Arat ( , 1999, Durakpaşa (1998), Y. Arat (1998 and Baydar (2002) have investigated the prominent role and the special position of women in the family and homes designed by the Nation-Building program. Likewise, in Egypt, Badran (1996), Pollard (2005) and Baron (2005) explored the same subject area under the reign of Muhammad Ali.…”