| Turkey led women’s liberation among its Muslim peers in the same period.Kemal Ataturk’s secularization reform not only spawned the Republic of Turkey,but also greatly propelled women’s liberation.The Republic of Turkey was formally founded on October 29,1923,followed by Kemal’s reform to abolish Sultan and Caliph,which was also the prelude to Turkish women’s liberation.Kemal mainly empowered women from four aspects.First,he legalized women’s rights of marriage,property division and inheritance,and the right to vote and be elected,splitting women’s marriage and family from religious traditions.Second,when it comes to education,Kemal encouraged Western education,vocational education and coeducation.He also abolished the obscure Arabic alphabet with the Latin alphabet,which sharply cut down the illiteracy rate in Turkey and smoothed the way for women to receive education.In terms of social customs,Kemal ordered Turkish men to drop fez hats and embrace Western hats;while for women,they were asked to take off their veils and also dressed in western style.Furthermore,as for public activities,Kemal advocated women to be bread-winners and enjoy different recreations.Foundation or participation of women groups was not such a luxury at that time,let alone welfare-oriented charity activities.These measures greatly emancipated the body and the spirit of Turkish women.They gave birth to a group of elite women filled with liberation spirit,and more importantly,spread Westernization thoughts to a larger extent in Turkey.Actually,as early as Turkey was once called the Ottoman Empire,the secularization of education had germinated the consciousness of emancipation for women.However,looking back at the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey,women’s liberation had always been a by-product of war,social revolution and nation-building cause.During Kemal period,nationalism and secularism gradually became the mainstream national ideology,and national feminism rose as a response.To a certain extent,national feminism reflects the recognition and support for women’s liberation at the national level.Kemal’s policy of separating religion and politics also cleared some obstacles for women’s liberation.However,national feminism essentially betrays the idea that women are ultimately the subject of liberation,and instead turns to national supremacy.To be more specific,national feminism requires the whole group of women,including those elites,to perform as “ideal modern women of the Republic”.Yet it ignores their individual aspiration and deprives their right to express their opinions purely as women themselves in public domains.This dissertation mainly focuses on the building of the Republic of Turkey from1923 to 1938 and the changes of women’s roles during this period.Its framework is made up by four parts.The first part begins with the emancipation of women in the late Ottoman Empire and divides the process of women’s liberation into three stages,namely the Tanchimat period,the Abdul Hamid II period,and the Young Turks period.In addition,this part also discusses the gender dimension in Kemal’s reform,analyzes the impact of Kemal’s reform on women’s liberation,his view of women liberation and the connotation of national feminism born during his tenure.The second part lists two representative modern women rising in Kemal period--Kemal’s adopted daughters,Afet Inan and Sabiha G?k?en,who were also the supporters and agents of Kemal in the field of women’s liberation.After introducing their life experiences,main achievements and contributions to Turkish women’s liberation,the author figures to explore the relationship between their attitudes towards women’s liberation and Ataturism.Later,the third part introduces another two elite women as a comparison,namely Fatma Aliye and Halide Edib.They tend to show more critical cognition on the building of the Republic and women’s liberation as a whole and show different attitudes on the women’s liberation movement featured Ataturism,which also provides a new evaluation perspective for this research.The last part turns from Turkey to abroad.It extracts the international image of Turkish women based on the reports published by foreign medias and the newspapers of the Republic of China,many of which focus on the achievements of Turkish women’s liberation.The main culprit of “emancipated but unliberated” is also discussed in this part.Based on the recognition above,the author summarizes the enlightment of Turkish women’s achievements for both China and Turkish feminist movements themselves.When looking into the reason why this dissertation introduces the four elite women as the research objects of the changes of female characters during Kemal period,these women showed great concerns for both themselves and the fate of Turkish women as a whole.Besides,they offered women-based perspective for the building of the Republic and made great achievements in literature,history,military,etc.What is more important is that,they also possessed specific cognitive deficits brought by class limitations.These complicated factors constitute the typical image of modern women in Kemal period.Different from the perfect ideal women constructed by Ataturk’s government,the elite women referred to above showed a unity of both progressiveness and limitation,speaking for the wokeness and struggle of Turkish women under the new order when the liberation thought had reached its peak,especially for the well-educated ones.Turkish women’s liberation was a global leader at that time,thus the review of this process can not only function as a valuable example for Turkey’s Middle East peers,but also have practical significance for other countries around the world,including China.Those elite women,marching in the forefront of liberation,can rightly serve as vivid examples for us to understand the achievements and hidden pains of Turkish women’s liberation during Kemal period. |
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