In the Land of Voiceless Women

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/opinion/turkey-women.html

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In the 1980s, as a teenager, I lived for two years at the outskirts of Erzurum, a city in northeast Turkey. Once in a while, I would take the bus to the city center, about 14 miles away.

Since I got on the bus at the first stop, I would always get a seat. But I knew it was only a matter of time before I would feel compelled to offer it to an older traveler. I had been taught to be considerate of my elders, but knowing who those were could at times be difficult.

The majority of women on the bus wore a local Islamic dress called “ehram.” Figuring out how old they were was nearly impossible. Resembling a potato sack, the ehram would cover a woman’s whole body, including her face. Unless you had seen her moving, you couldn’t tell if you were talking to her face or to her back.

It was really a challenge for me to address those women. When I tried to talk to them using the urban vernacular that I was used to, it fell flat. In my family, everyone was an avid reader and addressed each other as if we lived in a Victorian novel. The women on the bus had a whole different vocabulary. Even though we were in the same city, we lived in different worlds.

Throughout my life, I have lived all over Turkey. The differences among the women I have met along the way couldn’t have been more drastic. Conservative, religious, liberal, secularist: The ways we talk, dress and communicate set us apart. Even our looks can be different.

But there is one thing that we all have in common: We are entitled to vote by law, and this makes us needed during election time. (Voting in Turkey has been mandatory since 1983.)

The irony in this is that Turkish women often have no voice in society, let alone politics. Female work force participation is consistently low by international standards. Women are underrepresented in government. And patriarchal norms pervade society as a whole, relegating many of us to subordinate roles and the domestic sphere.

There was a moment, in the early 2000s, when it seemed as if things would change. A new, moderately conservative political party, had just appeared on the scene: the Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P.

Its leaders talked about empowering women, both in politics and society. They centered their political discourse around issues that Turkish women cared about, such as social welfare. “Women branches” of the party started appearing all over the country.

The A.K.P. was phenomenally effective at utilizing the power of women as voters, urging them to go to the polls and express their support for the party. It made Turkish women think they actually had a voice: Finally, somebody needed them and their votes.

The strategy continued as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidated his grip on power. His increasingly populist rhetoric has proved successful in galvanizing less educated women from more conservative backgrounds. By positioning himself as the fatherly leader of the nation, he has won them over. And by encouraging them to procreate and raise their children as good Muslims, he gives these women purpose as mothers of Turkey’s future.

Sure, there have been some positive outcomes. The negotiations over Turkey’s accession to the European Union galvanized efforts to enshrine gender equality into the Turkish Constitution in the early 2000s. Two laws, in 1998 and 2012, established a series of measures to protect women from domestic violence. A new labor act in 2003 formally granted women the right to maternity leave and equal treatment at work.

But while their issues might have gained some visibility, women still have no voice. Turkey ranks 130th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report for 2018, which measures factors such as women’s access to economic opportunity and their level of political empowerment. In the local elections that took place last March, only four of the country’s 81 provincial capitals elected women as mayors. Female representatives make up a scant 17 percent of the Turkish Parliament.

The lack of real commitment to change isn’t anything new. The educated women of the Ottoman Empire were already campaigning for their rights when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk proclaimed the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Many of the men who had led the charge publicly supported their feminist efforts, hailing those women as the “face of modernity” — a symbol that the new regime could use to inspire the whole nation to embrace Western values.

Among those women was Nezihe Muhiddin, an intellectual who spoke five languages, wrote about feminist issues and was a staunch supporter of women’s emancipation. She was exactly the woman the new republic wanted — until she and a group of fellow activists decided to establish the Women’s People Party. The government rejected their application, noting how women did not have the right to vote and get elected yet. (Turkish women weren’t granted the right to vote until 1934.)

Defeated, Muhiddin eventually withdrew from public life. She had realized that she couldn’t do much to improve the life of Turkish women. She continued to write novels and short stories, and died in a mental institution in 1958.

Ninety-six years after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, the story of Muhiddin still resonates. In Turkey, women are always a definition. For Atatürk they were the modern face of Turkey; for President Erdogan, they are mothers above all else.

As we conform to these labels, we are encouraged to erase our diversity and dim our light. But this is not the way forward. The differences among us make us who we are as a nation. Only when we realize it, we will be able to start changing the system for the better.