15 - Contestation and collaboration: women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey

Summary

Women’s struggles for empowerment in Turkey have been intimately linked to the state-initiated modernisation process. In their struggle to expand their opportunities, women have contested and collaborated with one another as well as the modernising state. Women’s strategies for ameliorating their predicament evolved in their conflictual relationships both with the state and among themselves. Confrontation alternated with cooperation. Women succeeded in changing laws and perceptions through this dynamic process of conflict and collaboration in a context of globalisation. During this process, they helped transform the relationship of the legendary ‘strong Turkish state’ to civil society, and pushed the state to cooperate with its constituents.

In this chapter I shall trace the evolution of women’s struggles for empowerment with a focus on their relationship to the state. I shall first present an overview of the historical development of the women’s movement in Turkey since the Young Turk era, and then will highlight prominent issues, groups and organisations through which women mobilised in the 1980s. My focus will be on the emergence of an organised and oppositional feminist movement since the 1980s and will include the mobilisation of Islamist and Kurdish women’s groups in recent decades. The discussion will aim to examine how women’s demands coincided or conflicted with and ultimately precipitated the Turkish state’s claim to modernity. If modernity requires respect for human rights and democratisation, women have pressured the state to ensure that these values are upheld, and this chapter hopes to throw light on this process.