"Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman": Suat Derviş, Nezihe Muhiddin, and Age in Turkey, 1923–35

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In the 1920s and early 1930s, Turkish women did not experience Kemalist politics in a monolithic fashion. Novels by Suat Derviş (1904/5–72) and Nezihe Muhiddin (1889–1958) served as critical commentary on women's experiences across different age cohorts. While the regime called for "new," "modern" women, those of a marriageable age found themselves in a paradoxical position: embrace the regime's reforms yet face familial and societal censure for this behavior. Derviş and Muhiddin were politically engaged, astute thinkers whose fiction documented transformations and continuities in the early republican era. In Behire'nin Talipleri (1923) and Fatma'nın Günahı (1924) by Derviş and Güzellik Kraliçesi (1935) by Muhiddin, the authors critically demonstrated that age produced distinct emotional and social outcomes for young Turkish women. I argue that both Muhiddin and Derviş highlighted and critiqued these persistent challenges and how often-contradictory demands for their subjecthood intensified in the early republican era.