Week 12: Deniz Kandiyoti

     The progression of the enfranchisement of women is greatly impacted by the political and social change a country (in this case, Turkey) experiences throughout their history. Deniz Kandiyoti explains these changes in the context of the rise of Turkish nationalism through a secularization of the nation-state in “the Second Constitutional period, and leading to the Kemalist republican regime” (23). Focusing on the impact of war and foreign influence on Turkey’s government, Kandiyoti maps the shift of the “woman question,” that is the role and rights of women in Turkish society, away from viewing “Islam as the only form of legitimate discourse on women’s emancipation,” instead using cultural nationalism to talk about women’s rights (23). The article chronicles the move from the Tanzimat period in the late 19th century to the Young Turks, and finally to the Kemalist republic, and uses this timeline to show what form women’s emancipation took in each period. A factor noticeable in the Second Constitutional period is what Kandiyoti explains as male reformers making “a case for the emancipation of women in moralistic, sentimental and ‘civisational’ terms,” while nevertheless, still rejecting Westernism and its influence on Turkey (26). While male reformers supporting women’s emancipation but critiquing Tanzimat and Westernism may be considered a contradiction to many, it seems their opposition to Western influence was more to do with the loss of a national Turkish identity than the progressiveness the ‘West’ usually stands for. 

     The Tanzimat period in Turkey is a period of Western encroachment where the Ottoman state adapted to the expectations of Western powers in a way that resulted in alienating “the groups and classes which were excluded from the new ‘modernised’ structures” (25). This brought on the founding of the Young Ottomans which later influenced the Young Turks. The social upheaval that followed the overthrow of Abdulhamit’s regime found women’s rights issues  in the crossroads of the Balkan war as women began to enter the workforce in larger numbers. It was interesting to read about the change in workforce in Turkey and how the Turkish government dealt with the shift of women into the public sphere. There were “pro-natalist policies” implemented which made marriage required by the age of 21 for women and 25 for men, as well as offering financial incentives for each birth in the marriage (31). These policies seem to come out of the anxieties of having women enter the workforce and leaving their usual presence in the private sphere. This emphasis on family as women became workers is reminiscent of the shift to education for women in Iran which Afsaneh Najmabadi talks about in “Crafting and Educated Housewife in Iran.” The basis of calling for more educated women was the idea that women care for the future of Iran and the future of Iranian national identity, in the same sense, Turkish identity was being negated by the Westernization of Tanzimat, so modernizing Islam was a push back against Westernism by allowing women’s emancipation in the workforce, while still governing family formation. 

     The Kemalist era further distanced Turkish government rom Islam and brought in a “new notion of ‘citizenship’ dictated by the transition from a monarchy to a populist republic” (39). Yet one downside of this era was the lack of women actually involved in creating the ‘new woman’ of Kemalism, so that the ‘woman’s question’ became a male-centered debate with women being passive onlookers (38). The intertwined nature of politics and women’s emancipation in Turkey has not only served a source of “nation-building and secularism,” but it also was part of building a national identity away from the influence of Western powers (43). Kandiyoti, like many other academics we have read, has brought up the question of on whose agenda is the emancipation of women progressing, and who is this emancipation benefitting in the long run?

Works Cited

Deniz Kandiyoti. 1991. "End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism, and Women in Turkey" in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

Afsaneh Najmabadi. 1998. "Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran" in Re-Making Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, Princeton: Princeton University Press.