A Dilemma: Women in Turkish Sport News Amidst Modernization and Traditionalism

Abstract

This study demonstrates how Turkey’s first two female athletes, Halet Çambel and Suat Fetgeri Aşeni, served to promote policies of a new modern woman image in the Olympic games during the early republican period. Çambel and Aşeni, Olympians in the fencing competition at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, were the most accomplished Turkish female athletes. Review of the daily newspapers and sports magazines of the period has allowed identification of the modern women’s policy of the early republican period and the performance styles of the two athletes in the Olympics. The daily newspapers Tan, Ulus, Haber, Açık Söz, Akşam, Son Posta, Yeni Asır and Cumhuriyet from 1 August to 31 August 1936, as well as the periodicals of the sports magazines Top and Türk Spor Kurumu from 1 July to 30 September 1936, were reviewed for this purpose. As a result, the female Olympians appeared to receive merely coverage in sports bulletins as anticipated by the early republican era’s modern women’s policies. This endeavour, however, parallels the policies of the early republican period, which sought to retain a women’s image that preserved their traditional identity within the nation-state.