Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel: Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Kadın, Muhalefet ve Basın

Abstract

AbstractAbstractAbstract As a result of the feminist historiography or the re-interpretation of the experience of modernization/Westernization through the perspectives of women in Turkey, the image of woman built by the official historiography has been problematized in the first place. This paved the way for the politicization of the woman question by bringing the women whose personal and social histories had been left to the ‘private’ sphere to the fore. Meanwhile, a need to rethink the works, experiences and thoughts of women who took part in the women’s movement emerged. Examining the life and thoughts of Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel (1895-1968), one of the first female journalists of Turkey would be worthwhile for understanding the struggles of women, both contemporary and Republican. With her positivist, progressivist and pro-enlightenment attitude, Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel was a stubborn defender of Kemalist modernization project, even though she did not abstain from criticizing the dominant gender paradigm of the early Republican period. However, expressing the incompetency of the implementations of Republican reforms often led her to become the victim of the state policies of censor. The design of this study has been based on the observation that Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel’s publications in the framework of woman question roughly differentiated in three distinct periods. In this framework, she began to pen her first striking articles on the subordinated status of women in Büyük Mecmua magazine (1919) which was published during the chaotic atmosphere of the Armistice Period. Sertel’s approach in these writings was based on the principle of equal rights conceptualized with respect to women’s equal visibility in the public life and their desire to become Westernized. In the second period right after her return from the US and during which Turkey was passing through wide scale transformations, she continued to question the dominant gender roles, and analyze the women’s problem with a deliberate focus on the internal power relations of capitalism in her column “Cici Anne” in the Resimli Ay magazine (1924-1930) and again with the same conceptual structure in her popular column “Bana sorarsanız” (if you ask me) in the daily Cumhuriyet (1930-1931). The last phase corresponds to a period when she focused more on pieces against fascism in the daily Tan (1938-1945) during World War II and wrote relatively less on women’s issues. The paper will also touch upon Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel’s relationship with the women’s organizations in Turkey, in order to better grasp her positioning within feminism.