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Feminism in Turkey: A Short History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Nükhet Sirman
Nükhet Sirman*
Affiliation:
Boğaziçi University, Department of Sociology
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Extract

In May 1987, about 3000 women marched through the streets of Istanbul to protest against the battering of women in the home. This was not the first time that women in Turkey had taken to the streets, but it certainly was the first time that they had voiced demands specific to their conditions of existence as women in Turkish society. As stated by one of the speakers at the rally marking the end of the march, women were not marching for their nation, their class, nor for their husbands, brothers and sons, but for themselves. I take this march and events following it to signal a new form in which the position of women in Turkish society is being articulated within the political terrain of Turkey. This new visibility of women in Turkish political discourse has many links to strands of thought that can be broadly called ‘feminist’ and as such provides a fruitful arena for the investigation of the forms this ideological current takes in Third World countries.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 3 , fall 1989 , pp. 1 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1989 

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Footnotes

*

This is a revised version of a paper presented to the Symposium on ‘The Plural Meanings of Feminism’ at the XIIth ICAES held in Zagreb, July 1988. I would like to express my gratitude to Aynur Demirdirek, Deniz Kandiyoti, Ayşe Saktanber and two anonymous reviewers for help and encouragement in writing and revising this paper

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