Constructing women for the republic: The spatial politics of gender, class, and domesticity in Ankara, 1928--1952

Beginning from the 1980s, contemporary Turkish feminist scholars critically re-examined major discursive tools, such as women's emancipation and state feminism, used effectively by the official ideology in Turkey in the making of the "republican woman" as a nationally constructed icon during the 1930s. The majority of these works however have focused primarily on elite women's experience of "emancipation." The transformation of their material and visual culture became a prime marker of modernization leaving class aspects overlooked. Likewise, the social history of modern architecture in Turkey has predominantly been told as the story of the well-off. These debates have been limited to the single family houses built for higher-income groups, and to the normative models of domesticity that it manufactured. Although Turkish scholars have produced groundbreaking work and made seminal contribution to the studies of gendered nationalism in Turkey, one important question remains largely unexplored: how did women, in their real socio-spatial geography and from within a variety of class positions, consume the project of their "emancipation"?;My dissertation explores lower-middle-class residential, entertainment and professional culture in early republican Ankara as a critical reevaluation of the dominant narrative of modernization. My examination of lower-middle-income housing projects, single-sex girls' schools, and major recreational areas built between 1928 and 1952 shows that the agency of non-elite groups played a significant role in traversing the well-established boundaries carefully demarcated by the newly formed Turkish bourgeoisie. By crisscrossing class divides in education and appropriating localized building traditions, non-elite women and the families at the "periphery" of the state-sanctioned project of women's emancipation in Turkey effectively inhabited the so-called public domain hitherto acclaimed by the urban elites alone. Thus, my dissertation not only acknowledges the significant presence of, but also shows the constructive role played by the lower-middle-class in the making of Ankara, which marked the formation of nuanced, varied and alternate routes to the production of modern domesticity.