Sevinç Elaman, 29.9.14
On this day, in August 1914, women in Britain officially joined the war effort, with the formation of the Women’s Defence Relief Corps. British women’s roles during the First World War, and the impact the war had on the advancement of women’s active roles in British society is widely recognised. The impact the Great War had on Middle Eastern women, however, is even more markedly disregarded. Gingko delegate Sevinç Elaman shares her research about the different reincarnations Turkish women’s roles experienced during WW1.
Turkish Women’s Role in the War
The First World War dealt a mortal blow to the Ottoman Empire, which after more than six centuries of rule across the Middle East and South-East Europe, had become known as the “sick man of Europe”. Following the war, the Empire was dismantled and partitioned by the victorious occupying forces, leading to a profound reshaping of the political contours of the region – including, ultimately, the foundation of the Turkish Republic following the Turkish Independence War (1919-1923). One of the under-explored stories of this period of dramatic change in Turkish society is the role of women – and the various advances, sacrifices and transformations that they experienced.
Behind the frontlines where men were sent to resist the occupying forces, women performed a number of roles in the military, hospitals, factories, fields and homes. For many, this role played by women was a defining feature of the forging of a modern Turkish nation state out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire: “The activities Turkish women made in the military, economic, social [and] cultural fields prepared the ground for them to take more active roles during the National Movement and had a major impact on the role of women as a factor that completes and unites the society as a dynamic and modern element.”[1]
Turkish Women during the War (photo credit: Assembly of Turkish American Association)
Regarding the major role women played in the war, Halide Edib Adıvar, the writer, public speaker, parliamentarian and cosmopolitan intellectual, said:
“The pressure of the Great War urged women forward to many indispensable services and sacrifices…From end to end the only producers were women…The needs of the army, its food and clothing, were supplied entirely by women. Further, the governmental departments had to recruit employees from among women…The care of the family had fallen entirely on their shoulders…travelling [and working] all over the country…for the sake of keeping alive their children. Without the activity and enormous service of women, Turkey would have collapsed internally during the Great War.”[2]
The period leading up to and during the First World War had already seen gains for Turkish women in education, work and family life, as well as leading to greater visibility and participation in cultural and social spaces. In 1911, the first lycee for women was founded and in 1914, women were granted the right to study at university. In 1917, the Family Law also brought advances regarding divorce, marriage as well as men and women’s mutual responsibilities. Such advances for women were given added momentum by the wave of patriotism and national feeling that was sparked by the First World War, particularly following the outbreak of the Gallipoli War in March 1915. A sense of patriotism and national duty played a role in driving Turkish women to join the cause and take up active roles behind the lines, where they worked often with great sacrifice. This was paralleled by the founding of a number of women’s organisations such as: Anadolu Kadınları Müdafaa-i Vatan Cemiyeti (Association of Anatolian Women to Defend the Homeland) in 1919 and Hilal-i Ahmer Hanımlar Merkezi (the Red Crescent Women’s Centre) in 1920, through which women helped soldiers, wounded and sick people, those in need, and the families of soldiers and martyrs.
Turkish Women during the War (photo credit: Assembly of Turkish American Association) Hilâl-i Ahmer HanımlarMerkezi [the Red Crescent Women’s Centre]. Published in the newspaper Servet-iFünûn, 10 Haziran 1915.[3]
Islamisation of Armenian Women during the WWI
Turkish and Muslim women were not the only women affected by the war in the Ottoman Empire: so were many non-Muslim/non-Turkish women. One of the major impacts of WWI on women in the Ottoman Empire during and after the war is the “Islamisation” of Armenian women as part of the massive “forced relocation” of the Armenian population in 1915. The Ottoman government ruled by the Young Turks, as well as the leaders of the nationalist movement that created the Turkish Republic, aimed to decrease the numbers of non-Muslim “others” within the nascent Turkish nation. Such groups were seen as a threat to the government’s policy of “cultural homogeneity” and to their vision of a “Turkish society” that essentially consisted of Muslim Turks.[4] Mindful also of shoring up loyalty to Ottoman forces during the conflict with Russia to the east of Turkey as part of WWI, the Ottoman government oversaw the forced “relocation” of the Armenian population, resulting in death of a tragic – and what many have claimed genocidal – scale. As part of this process, and faced with the threat of deportation or worse, many Armenian women were effectively forced to marry Muslim Turkish or Kurdish men and to convert to Islam.[5]
The effects of the aftermath of the First World War on Turkey: The Foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923) and the “New” Turkish Woman
After the foundation of the Turkish Republican state in 1923, the position of women received growing attention as part of the nation-building process, and the question of what role women should play in public life, and how to create a new female identity fit for a modern Turkey, became a central subject of debate. In the attempts to become a “civilised” nation and to improve the status of Turkish women, the foundation of the Turkish Republic was followed by several legal and constitutional reforms, including the adoption of the Swiss civil code in 1926, which shook the unquestionable authority of the Islamists, replacing the Shariat. Among other things these reforms abolished polygamy and granted women the right to choose their spouses and to initiate divorce; prevented child marriage by imposing a minimum age for marriage; and led to the enfranchisement of women to municipal elections in 1930 and national elections in 1934. Such reforms were crucial steps in granting women opportunities in social and political life and in the development of Turkish feminism. However, this process had its own shortcomings: the new rights granted to women sought primarily to strengthen the sense of a new official national identity as being based on a break from a “backward” past, in a way that left women’s subjugation largely unaffected in practice in a number of areas of life.
These points are reflected in the creation of the ideal of the “New Turkish Woman”. She became an integral part of the visions of nationalist reformers as a woman with important roles that were both “public” (fulfilling a number of civic duties and functions in realms such as government and education) and “private” (in that women were expected to continue to play the role of mother in order to raise the next generation for the project of national modernisation). This is because, for the new Turkish Republic, the image of the New Turkish Woman was a marker of both cultural authenticity and a “civilised” society.
New Turkish
“New” Turkish Women pictured in 1934
The New Turkish Woman’s sexual morality was deemed to be crucial to the maintenance of the sanctity of marriage and reproduction and, thus, to the dominant moral and socio-sexual codes of modern Turkish nationhood. Within this vision, marriage, sexuality and education were conceived more as “social” duties than sources of “individual” fulfilment. In this sense, the new discourse of nationalism was not so different from the ideology of the Tanzimat [“Reorganisation”] period of modernisation that was initiated under the Ottomans in the 19th century, in the sense that nationalist reformers continued to see women’s primary contribution as being within the domestic sphere and performing their duties as wives and mothers. As the leader of the new Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself asserted, the most important duty of the Turkish woman is motherhood – and to fulfil this duty, virtue is her most important quality:
The [New] Turkish woman should be the most enlightened, most virtuous, and most reserved woman of the world…The duty of the Turkish woman is to raise generations that are capable of preserving and protecting the Turk with his mentality, strength and determination. The woman who is the source and social foundation of the nation can fulfil her duty only if she is virtuous.[6]
Mustafa
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and “New” Turkish Women
In summary, this image of the “ideal” New Woman illustrates the parameters of the space created within the project of modernity for Turkish women’s emancipation: respect for the community over the individual, faith in education (in order to perform her “duty” as a “good” wife-mother) and careful exercise of her sexuality.
“The Mother of the Turks: Halide Edib Adıvar (1884-1964)”
Halide Edib Adıvar (1884-1964)
Halide Edib Adıvar is perhaps the most prominent female symbol of the Turkish nationalist movement and is often regarded as a model for this New Turkish Womanhood; her contribution to the national movement and her engagement with national causes and ideological debates on “Turkishness”, particularly in light of her experiences during the Balkan Wars (1912-13) was so significant that she came to be regarded as “the Mother of the Turks”. In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and during WWI, she delivered a number of public lectures, most famously in the heart of Istanbul in Sultanahmet in 1919, where she called upon Turkish women to join the Turkish national movement and urged them to fight against the occupying forces. Adıvar later noted that the Turkish Independence War could not have been fought without the support of women and indeed she herself joined the Turkish Independence War and was given the rank of corporal by the war’s leader – and later the founder of Turkish Republic – Mustafa Kemal.
Adıvar’s involvement in the nationalist movement following the occupation of Istanbul after WWI led her to write one of the most famous Turkish nationalist novels: Ateșten Gömlek (‘The Shirt of Flame’, 1921). This novel takes place during the Allied occupation of Istanbul (1918-1923) and is often regarded as the greatest novel of the Turkish War of Independence. The central character and heroine of this novel, Ayse, is depicted as an image of New Womanhood and symbol of the nation. At the Gingko Conference, I will explore this my paper and show how analysing a novel such as Ateșten Gömlek helps us to develop revealing insights into the role that women were being envisaged to play in these embryonic visions of new nationhood.
Endnotes:
[1]Nevin Yazıcı, “Çanakkale Savaşı’nda Türk Kadınının Rolü (The Role of Turkish Women During the Gallipoli Campaign)”, Akademik Bakış, 5 ( 9), 2011, pp. 245-264.
2Adıvar, Conflict of East and West in Turkey, Lahore: S.M. Ashraf, 1935, p. 196
3Source: NevinYazıcı, “Çanakkale Savaşı’nda Türk Kadınının Rolü (The Role of Turkish Women During the Gallipoli Campaign)”, p.264.
4-This has changed at the turn of the twentieth century: Turkey became an official candidate for membership in the European Union (EU) in 1999 and since then, the governmental initiatives towards minority rights have gained momentum.
5-See, for example, http://nabukednazar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/cagdas-turk-edebiyatnda-islamlastrlms.html; Uǧur Ümit Üngör, “Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and 1923 -Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914”, War in History, 19(2), 173–192. In the late 1990s, with the beginning of European Union accession talks, Turkey witnessed a proliferation of literature on the subject of the Islamisation of Armenian women: For this burgeoning literature, see for example, Serdar Can’s Nenemin Masallari (‘My Grandmother’s Fairy Tales’), 1991; Fethiye Cetin’s Anneannem (‘My Grandmother’), 2004 – among others – on individual life stories of Armenian women who married Turkish/Kurdish Muslim men and converted to Islam in order to survive during the deportation.
6-Atatürk’ün Söylevve Demeçleri (‘Atatürk’s Statements and Speeches’) 2 (1989), 242, as cited and translated by Zehra F. Arat, Deconstructing Images of “the Turkish Woman (Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1998), 1.
– Sevinç Elaman is currently working as a part-time lecturer in the Middle Eastern Studies Department at the University of Manchester (UK), where she has taught courses in Modern Turkish Literature and Middle Eastern Studies.
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