THE FORMATION OF FEMINIST IDENTITY: FEMINISM IN THE 1930’S TURKEY AND BRITAIN

This article focuses on the improvement of Turkish women’s rights pursuant to reforms made by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey, in constructing a modern Turkish nation, and discusses 1930’s women’s movements in Britain. Women’s suffrage in Turkey emerged as a part of a modernization process, during which Atatürk instituted equal rights before most Western countries had done so. He improved women’s status through his innovations thus building the most modern, democratic and secular Muslim state. Still, feminists of the 1980s question the Kemalist project of modernity in search of “liberation beyond emancipation”. Women’s rights in England emerged by women standing up for their rights, whereas those rights in Turkey emerged as a nationalistic policy by Atatürk