New book examines how women negotiated efforts to “modernize” their dress
In Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic, Associate Professor Sevgi Adak offers the most comprehensive account available of efforts to prevent women from wearing certain types of veils under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Her book enriches our understanding of the Kemalist regime and the response of provincial women and elites to its Westernizing project. Kemal’s Turkish Republic (1923-1945) was a one- party, authoritarian state, devoted to economic and cultural modernization and secularization. Its supporters were convinced, in Kemal’s words, that “the only means of survival for nations in the international struggle for existence lies in the acceptance of contemporary Western civilization.”
The Republican regime has often been depicted as unified, aggressive and effective in its pursuit of societal transformation. Yet Adak shows that when it came to the issue of women’s dress, officials in Ankara, the capital, were quite cautious. The goal of the Kemalists was in no doubt: while not opposed to women covering their hair, they wanted to eliminate the use of the face veil (peçe) and the traditional black çarşaf, which covered the entire body, including the hair but not the face. But after its law banning men from wearing the fez caused an uproar, the regime decided not to take similar action on women’s dress. Instead, it left the matter to local authorities, encouraging them to act while also seeking to rein in the overzealous. The initial response of local elites in the 1920s proved halting and ineffectual. Then, after women were granted the right to vote and hold elected office in 1934, local anti-veiling campaigns were launched across the country, resulting in scores of bans. Even so, enthusiasm among provincial elites was not universal.
Some officials avoided taking action, and some members of the elite voiced opposition to unveiling. Thus, while the anti-veiling impulse originated in Ankara, the extent to which it was transmitted to various localities was determined to a large extent by provincial elites. No less important was the response of women themselves to anti-veiling initiatives. Here, Adak seeks to avoid what she sees as the pitfalls of three competing perspectives on women under the Republic. In her view, Islamists (who have seen unveiling as a powerful symbol of Kemalist oppression), and Kemalists (who have celebrated it as emancipatory), have both tended to portray women as passive recipients of regime policies.
Meanwhile, feminists – who have criticized Kemalist modernization as patriarchal – have underestimated the extent to which the Westernizing project touched the lives of ordinary provincial women. Adak shows that women responded actively and in diverse ways to anti-veiling campaigns and to the pressure they faced from both supporters and opponents.
In Sivas, two sisters, upon being fined for wearing the çarşaf, wrote a letter to Ankara to complain. In Maraş, rather than comply with a ban, some women stayed home by day, only venturing out at night by carriage. In Rize, women used umbrellas to conceal their faces. Elsewhere, women adopted new forms of dress that complied with the letter but not the spirit of bans. Yet in Bor, 40 women met at a library, removed their peçes and requested that they be placed in a museum as remnants of the past. Other women wrote letters to local newspapers urging women to cast off their veils in order to better their position in society.
“We can acknowledge and address the various ways women were involved in the anti-veiling campaigns, and resisted or altered them, without reducing this variety to rigid categories like full emancipation or oppression,” Adak writes. “Equally, we can scrutinize possibly empowering aspects of policies like the anti-veiling campaigns for some women, without undermining their controlling character and without ignoring the fact that some women became indeed victims of state as well as male violence because they refused to unveil, but also because they wanted to remove the veil. It is in this complexity that the actual story of women under Kemalism and their troubled relationship with it lie.”