Women In Turkish Society

This is an interdisciplinary feminist reader about women in modern Turkish society put together by Turkish women scholars. The contributors demonstrate the problems inherent in existing social and economic institutions, the failed promises of education and development programmes, and the media's continuing dissemination of traditional sexual stereotypes. They consider power relationships within families and explore women's political participation.

Women in Turkish Society: Seljuks, Ottoman Empire, and Turkish Republic, Livre de Lyon

Focusing on three important interrelated issues, Women and Civil Society in Turkey challenges the classical definition, developed in the West, of civil society as an equivalent of the public sphere in which women are excluded. First it shows how feminist movements have developed a new definition of civil society to include women. Second it draws attention to the role of women in the modernization of Turkey with special reference to the debate on the possibility of an indigenous feminist movement. Finally, it underlines the contribution of feminist, Islamic and Kurdish women’s movements in the transition from an ideologically constructed, uniform public sphere to a multi-public domain. Giving attention to the influence of diverse women’s movements over Turkish political values this book sheds light into the issue of how a feminine civil society has been constructed as part of a plural public space in Turkey. Ömer Çaha argues that this new public realm is the product of values and institutions which have been developed by diverse women’s groups who have succeeded in eliminating the traditional barricades between public and domestic spheres and in steering women into public life without sacrificing their own values.

An investigation that reveals the paradoxical nature of the patriarchal ties that bind Turkish women politicians. These women are also Muslim women expressing themselves in a political medium both secular and democratic, yet in a context in which neither secular nor democratic politics is firmly embedded.