Digital Humanities and Women's Studies: Perception of Women in the Founding Years of the Republic

Abstract

This article examines the place of women in society, their emergence as individuals, and their changes over the years from the Ottoman period to the early years of the Republic. This study was conducted with the help of the Ottoman Turkish Discovery Portal-Muteferriqa. Thanks to its collections of printed sources published from the Ottoman Empire to the mid-Republic and its search facilities, the concept of woman, the subject of the research, has been examined comprehensively. In this sense, after briefly mentioning the developments in the field of digital humanities, the article deals with how women have shaped their existence in the historical process, starting roughly from the Tanzimat Period. Three magazines with different perspectives were focused on, and thus, the approach of all segments of society towards women was analyzed. These magazines are Süs, Sebilü’r reşad, and Akbaba. The research’s focal period is 1923, when the Republic was proclaimed. The reason for focusing on this year is that even in this period, which is seen as an indicator of the transition to modernity, there were reactions about women that were not expected. Concrete examples of this can easily be found when these three magazines are analyzed.