Rethinking the ‘Barren’ Decades of Women’s Movement in Turkey: Collective Memory and Intergenerational Conflicts

Abstract

Feminist historiography in Turkey has long dismissed the period between the 1930s and 1980s as the ‘barren period’ of the women’s movement. To understand the diverse and conflicted genealogies of Turkey’s feminism(s), we argue, it is necessary to critically engage with the notion of the ‘barren period.’ In the 1950s, ‘the discourse of indebtedness’ to Atatürk and the gender project of Kemalism became hegemonic through production of collective memory in which the women’s movement participated. Haunted by the radical struggles of Ottoman and early Republican feminists for equality, the mid-twentieth century women’s movement selectively remembered them in shaping this memory. Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, younger generations of women began to question women’s movement’s agendas and actions. This article focuses on two issues where the intergenerational conflict was particularly evident: (Anti-)veiling and (anti-)communism. These themes reveal that the discourse of indebtedness was unsustainable by the second half of the 1960s, when new political agencies emerged that did not assume the privileged saviour role of the women’s movement or positioned themselves as victims to be rescued. While the established women’s movement gradually acknowledged the history of radical autonomous struggle of Ottoman and early Republican feminists and their suppression by the early Republican regime, deep political and ideological rifts hindered the communication and transmission of this history to a new generation of women in the mid-1960s.