UC Santa Barbara

Located at the intersection of Global Studies, Gender Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, this dissertation looks at Turkey's intellectual women in Kemalist and socialist movements in relation to Turkey’s gendered modernization process from 1935 to 1960. The research focuses on how women activists shaped their discourses on economic and moral frugality, nurturing the nation’s womanhood, and guarding the homeland. It further attends to the influence of their discourses and practices over Turkey’s modernization in these transformative years. This dissertation asks: how did intellectual women contest and negotiate their rights and duties in a nationalist modernization project during its implementation and transformation periods in the case study of Turkish Kemalist and socialist women? The research utilizes qualitative textual analysis, focusing on sources published by Kemalist and independent socialist intellectual women. The sources include newspaper and journal articles, memoirs, interviews, speeches, travelogues, biographies, and literary works such as short stories and novels. Many studies emphasize the gendered nature of modernization processes by emphasizing how nationalist movements situated the women in a ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ realm. This dissertation argues that women intellectuals contested this positioning and sought to open new political fields of struggle to expand their influence even when they rallied behind nationalist projects. This dissertation makes two interventions in extant studies on modernization, gender, and nationalism. First, the dissertation challenges the most significant works on Turkish women’s movements that consider the 1935-1960 era as the ‘silent years of Turkish feminism.’ Challenging the ‘conservative consensus’ framework, this dissertation reads this period of women’s activism as ‘contested modernization.’ Second, the dissertation adds to studies that analyze anticolonial nationalist politics from a prism of material and spiritual realms by suggesting that the definitions of these two realms were in fact fields of political contestation.