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ABSTRACT
This article provides a gendered history of Istanbul’s postwar years by focusing on the role “Istanbul women” had in discussions of corruption and moral decay that dominated representations of the city. It sheds light on how Istanbul was degraded to a “cosmopolitan and decadent” status. The Beyoğlu-Pera district came to symbolise this decadence. Furthermore, upper-class women of the city were associated with the radical Westernisation emanating from the district. The article also scrutinises how politically active women of the city negotiated these accusations, through an analysis of their endeavours to achieve women’s suffrage. It argues that devaluing late Ottoman feminists as “morally corrupt” Istanbul women, allowed the early Republican reformers to suppress the Ottoman feminist movement and present themselves as the emancipators of Turkish women.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Gökçen Beyinli earned her PhD in history at Humboldt University-Berlin in 2017. She has also worked as a journalist since 2001 in various media groups in Turkey and abroad. She has published extensively on women, Islam, Ottoman and Republican history, and minorities, and worked as a lecturer at Humboldt University-Berlin and Izmir University of Economics. She continues her studies within the broader discipline of “new political history”.
Notes
1 The Ottoman authorities referred to the city as “Konstantiniye”, “Dersaadet” or “Istanbul”, whereas foreign powers referred to it as “Constantinople”. The city’s name was officially changed to Istanbul in 1930 with the Turkish Postal Service Law. In this article, I will use “Constantinople” and “Istanbul” interchangeably depending on the context.
2 Yaprak Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap (Istanbul: Metis, 2003), 158–65.
3 I borrow the term “radical Westernisation” from Murphey for the Turkish term aşırı batılılaşma, Rhoads Murphey, ‘Westernisation in the Eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire: How Far, How Fast?’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23 (1999): 116–39. “Aşırı batılılaşma” means embracing Western morals to the extent of losing one’s national (Turkish) and religious (Muslim) virtues.
4 ‘Kadınlar ve Mebusluk’, Cumhuriyet, February 25, 1925, 2.
5 ‘Anadolu İstanbul kadınlığı yoktur, Türk kadınlığı vardır’, İkdam, February 26, 1925, 2.
6 Stefanos Yerasimos, ed., Istanbul, 1914–1923: capitale d’un monde illusoire ou l’agonie des vieux empires (Paris: Autrement, 1992); Nur Bilge Criss, Istanbul under Allied Occupation, 1918–1923 (Leiden, Boston, 1999); Charles King, Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). The scholarship on the occupation produced in Turkey has increased during the 2000s; Ahmet C. Saraçoğlu, Gazeteler, Gazeteciler ve Olaylar Etrafında Mütareke Yıllarında İstanbul (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2009); Mümin Yıldıztaş, Yaralı Payitaht : İstanbul’un İşgali (Istanbul: Yeditepe, 2010); Devrim Vardar, İstanbul’un İşgali 1918–1923 (Istanbul: Doğu, 2011), Ali Karakaya, İşgal Altında İstanbul (Istanbul: Inkılap, 2016).
7 For exceptions: On corruption see Mehmet Aydın, ‘İttihat ve Terakki’ye Yönelik İstanbul Basınında Yer Alan Bazı Yolsuzluk İddiaları’, Turkish Studies: International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 3, no. 7 (2008): 696–706. On the Anatolian-Istanbul women divide, see Zehra Toska, ‘Cumhuriyetin Kadın İdeali: Eşiği Aşanlar ve Aşamayanlar’, in 75 Yılda Kadınlar ve Erkekler, ed. Ayşe Berktay Hacımirzaoğlu (Istanbul: Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 1998), 71–88. On moral decay, Carole G. Woodall, ‘Sensing the City: Sound, Movement, and Night in 1920s İstanbul’ (PhD diss., New York University, 2008). For the experiences of Ottoman women during the war, Elif Mahir Metinsoy, Ottoman Women during World War I: Everyday Experiences, Politics, and Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Yiğit Akın, ‘War, Women, and the State: The Politics of Sacrifice in the Ottoman Empire During the First World War’, Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 3 (2014): 12–35.
8 Şerif Mardin, ‘Super Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century’, in Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives, ed. Peter Benedict, Erol Tumertekin, and Fatma Mansur (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 403–46; Berna Moran, ‘Alafranga Züppeden Alafranga Haine’, in Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış 1 (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008), 259–68.
9 Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades: Images of Women in the Turkish Novel’, Feminist Issues 8, no. 1 (1988): 35–50.
10 Zehra F. Arat, ‘Educating the Daughters of the Republic’, in Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Women”, ed. Zehra Arat (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 157–80; Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Emancipated but Unliberated? Reflections on the Turkish Case’, Feminist Studies 13,no. 2 (Summer 1987): 317–39; Yeşim Arat, ‘The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey’, in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Reşat Kasaba and Sibel Bozdoğan (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 1997), 95–112; Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Women and the Turkish State: Political Actors or Symbolic Pawns?’ in Woman-Nation-State, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias (London: Macmillan, 1988), 126–49.
11 Nazan Maksudyan, ‘Introduction’, in Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective to Ottoman Urban History, ed. Nazan Maksudyan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014). For exceptions, in addition to this edited volume, see Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility (1880–1940) (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
12 Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, ed., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1997); Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, ed., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919. Vol. II: A Cultural History (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2007).
13 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, ed., Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918–1923 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011).
14 Stefan Goebel and Derek Keene, ‘Towards a Metropolitan History of Total War: An Introduction’, in Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War, ed. Stefan Goebel and Derek Keene (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 2.
15 Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, ‘Introduction: Women’s Movements and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918–1923’, in Aftermaths of War, ed. Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe, 4–5.
16 Vedat Eldem, Harp ve Mütareke Yıllarında Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun Ekonomisi (Ankara: TTK Yayınları, 1994), 50–1.
17 Büşra Karataşer, ‘Cost of Living in the Ottoman Empire during the Armistice Period: A Case of Istanbul’, Journal of Emerging Economies and Policy 2, no. 1 (July 2017): 182–3.
18 ‘Maliye Nazırı Abdurrahman Bey’in Beyanı’, Sabah, January 5, 1919, 1.
19 Necati Çavdar, ‘Mütareke Dönemi’nin İlk Aylarında İstanbul’da Ekmek Meselesi’, Belleten LXXVIII, no. 281 (April 2014): 309–10.
20 Ekin Enacar, ‘Press/Journalism (Ottoman Empire)’, in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel et al. issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2018-07-11.
21 Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, ‘Feeding the Cities’, in Capital Cities at War, ed. Winter and Robert, 342.
22 Gülten Kazgan, Tanzimat’tan 21. Yüzyıla Türkiye Ekonomisi (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2004), 54.
23 Aydın, ‘İttihat ve Terakki’ye’, 700.
24 Quoted in Eldem, Harp ve Mütareke Yıllarında, 131–2.
25 ‘War Profiteering in Turkey’, Norwich Bulletin (Norwich), February 6, 1919.
26 Quoted in Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Türk İnkılâbı Tarihi (Ankara: TTKY, 1983), 539.
27 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Vatan Yolunda (Ankara: Birikim, 1980), 39.
28 Falih Rıfkı Atay, Çankaya: Atatürk Devri Hâtıraları (Istanbul: Pozitif, 1968), 143.
29 Halide Edib Adıvar, The Turkish Ordeal (New York; London: The Century Co., 1928), 9. Halide Edib was blamed for supporting the American mandate model, was a pioneering figure during the War of Independence and was then forced to go to exile because of conflict with Mustafa Kemal. She wrote these memoirs in London as a counter-narrative to the dominant historiography.
30 ‘Turkish Profiteering’, Daily Telegraph (Launceston), February 10, 1919, 5; ‘The Young Turks’, The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA, 1889–1931), February 10, 1919, 8; ‘Turkey’s Downfall’, The Mercury (Hobart, Tasmania, 1860–1954), February 10, 1919, 5. For an analysis of the Malta prisoners, see Bilal Şimşir, Malta Sürgünleri (Istanbul: Bilgi Yayınları, 1985).
31 Ahmet Ağaoğlu, Mütareke ve Sürgün Hatıraları (Istanbul: Doğu, 2010), 83.
32 Falif Rıfkı Atay, Mustafa Kemal’in Ağzından Vahidettin (Istanbul: Pozitif, 2005), 16.
33 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nutuk, Vol. II: 1920–1927 (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1969), 575. Nutuk is Mustafa Kemal’s canonical work - a history of the War of Independence through his eyes. It is also worthy to note that Istanbul represented the Byzantine Empire for Mustafa Kemal; in a letter to Yakup Kadri on 1924, he wrote:
The republic will definitely chastise the Byzantine. We will clean the dirt but this will not be easy. Perhaps the whole Black Sea with its waves will enter the Bosphorus to flood everything. … The republic will make a man out of Byzantium which was poisoned by lies and immorality.
34 Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri I, Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi’nde ve C. H. P Kurultaylarında 1919–1938, 5. Edition (Ankara: Atatürk Araştırma Merkezi, 2006), 15.
35 Among the others cited here, see for instance Ahmet Rıza, Anılar (Istanbul: Cumhuriyet, 2001), 71–2.
36 İ. Hakkı Sunata, İstanbul’da İşgal Yılları (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2016), 26. See also Ağaoğlu, Mütareke ve Sürgün, 48–9, the part written on 21 February 1918 entitled “Beyoğlu Şen Şatır, Haliç’in Ötesi Sanki Bir Mezar” (Beyoğlu cheerful as a lark, beyond Haliç it was like a cemetery).
37 Jean Louis Robert, ‘The Image of the Profiteer’, in Capital Cities at War, ed. Winter and Robert, 104.
38 Gülten Kazgan, Tanzimat’tan 21. Yüzyıla, 54.
39 Zafer Toprak, İttihat-Terakki ve Devletçilik (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1995), 157.
40 Zekeriya Sertel, Hatırladıklarım (Istanbul: Remzi, 2001), 58–9.
41 Aydemir, Tek Adam, 319. Indeed, the city’s entertainment life around Beyoğlu and Pera was lively at the time, fuelled in particular by the Russian émigrés; see King, Midnight at the Pera Palace, especially the Chapter ‘The Post-War World was Jazzing’, 133–52. A correspondent from Salonika reported as early as 1916, for instance, that there was “still much gaiety in Constantinople. Theatres and picture shows are open till 3 o’clock in the morning”; ‘Constantinople Still Gay’, National Advocate (Bathurst) August 3, 1916, 2. George Theotokas, a local Rum, remembered the years of occupation as a “perpetual party”; Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453–1924 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 385.
42 Berna Moran, Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış: Ahmet Mithat’tan A. H. Tanpınar’a (Istanbul: İletişim, 1990), 202.
43 Seçil Deren Van Het Hof, ‘Erken Dönem Cumhuriyet Romanında Zenginler ve Zenginlik’, Kültür ve İletişim • Culture & Communication 13, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 96. See also Tamer Erdoğan, Türk Romanında Mütareke İstanbul’u (Istanbul: Kanat Kitap, 2005).
44 Peyami Safa, Mahşer (Istanbul: Ötüken, 2000), 93.
45 Sedad Simavi, Yeni Zenginler/Les Néo-Riches (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Orhaniye, 1918).
46 Simavi, Yeni Zenginler/Les Néo-Riches, 13.
47 For others, see for instance Suat Derviş, Emine (Istanbul: Resimli Ay Matbaası, 1931); Sermet Muhtar Alus, Harp Zengininin Gelini (Istanbul: Kanaat Kütüphanesi, 1934); Reşat Enis, Kanun Namına (Istanbul: Sühulet Kütüphanesi, 1932); Peyami Safa, Sözde Kızlar (Istanbul: Semih Lütfi Kitabevi, [194–?); Mithat Cemal Kuntay, Üç İstanbul (Istanbul: Sander, 1938).
48 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Ankara (Istanbul: İletişim, 2017), 62.
49 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Sodom ve Gomore (Istanbul: Hamid Matbaası, 1928).
50 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Kiralık Konak (Istanbul: Iletişim, 1980).
51 Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 103. This “corrupted” Turkish woman is indeed similar to the “gharbzadeh” woman of 1960’s Iran: “she was a super-consumer of imperialist/dependent- capitalist/foreign goods; she was a propagator of the corrupt culture of the West; she was undermining the moral fabric of society”. Afsaneh Najmabadi, ‘Hazards of Modernity and Morality: Women, State and Ideology in Contemporary Iran’, in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: Macmillan, 1991), 65.
52 Nilgün Tarkan, ‘Leman Karaosmanoğlu 8 yıl önce yitirdiğimiz bir edebiyat ustasını anlattı:Eşim Yakup Kadri’, Taha Toros Archives, no. 80. Yakup Kadri and Leman Hanım met at a gathering at the house of Falif Rıfkı Atay.
53 Adıvar, The Turkish Ordeal, 6.
54 Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 111–2.
55 Ibid., 112.
56 Ağaoğlu, Mütareke ve Sürgün, 109.
57 Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın, 168.
58 Mefharet Çetinkaya, İkbal, Yıkım ve İşgal: İstanbullu Bir Genç Kızın Anıları (1900–1921) (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2011), 132. Mefharet Hanım was born into an upper-class family but lived under difficult circumstances during the occupation due to the worsening of the financial situation of her family.
59 Bülent Bakar, Esir Şehrin Misafirleri: Beyaz Ruslar (Istanbul: Tarihçi Kitabevi, 2012).
60 Constantinople To-day; or, The pathfinder Survey of Constantinople: A Study in Oriental Social Life, under the direction of Clarence Richard Johnson; foreword by Caleb F. Gates (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 280–8.
61 Ibid., 293. Halide Edip emphasised that poor women she encountered in Istanbul’s public transport were “always unveiled”, Halide Edip, The Turkish Ordeal, 7. Anti-veiling campaigns became a nationwide phenomenon during the 1930s and various local institutions issued bans, but no official decision was made in Istanbul, Sevgi Adak, ‘Women in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere: Anti-Veiling Campaigns and the Gendered Reshaping of Urban Space in Early Republican Turkey’, in Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective to Ottoman Urban History, ed. Nazan Maksudyan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 44. I regard this as evidence of the rareness of the veil in Istanbul. Adak’s point on radical Westernisation of early republican women is crucial: “Even during the heyday of the anti-veiling campaigns in the mid -1930s, the control over women’s sexuality and the obsession with preventing women from being ‘too much Westernized’ were very visible”. Ibid., 61.
62 Atay, Çankaya, 475.
63 Ibid., 478.
64 Falif Rıfkı Atay, Mustafa Kemal’in Mütareke Defteri ve 19 Mayıs (Istanbul: Yeni Gün, 1999), 99.
65 The Civil Law outlawing polygamy and child marriage was enacted in 1926, and women were considered legally equal with men as regards testifying in courts, and inheriting and maintaining property. As Kandiyoti rightfully argues, not only the Civil Law but also women’s enfranchisement were “part of a broader struggle to liquidate the theocratic institutions of the Ottoman state and create a new legitimising state ideology”. Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Introduction’, in Women, Islam and the State, ed. Deniz Kandiyoti (London: Macmillan Press, 1991), 4.
66 Zehra Arat, ‘Turkish Women and the Republican Reconstruction of Tradition’, in Reconstructing Gender in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity and Power, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek and Shiva Balaghi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 58.
67 Aydemir, Tek Adam, 320. Aydemir and Atay narrates that Mustafa Kemal was very conservative in his personal life on women. For instance, he totally rejected inter-religious marriage of Muslim women and even did not accept it as morally proper when Turkish men married foreign women. When he met with the writer Abdülhak Hamid and his “foreign wife”, he refused to call him a “man” (adam), Atay, Çankaya, 613.
68 ‘Yakup Kadri’nin Eşi Hasta’, Taha Toros Archives, no. 80-Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, 14 January 1996. For an analysis of Leman Hanım’s personal memoirs, see Bahar Gökpınar, Ayşe Leman Karaosmanoğlu: Bir Sefirenin Özel Arşivine Yolculuk (Istanbul: İletişim, 2015).
69 Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri, 151–2. Organising republican dance balls was a strategy of Mustafa Kemal to create a “modern” image of the new republic, but his parties must have been not “fancy”, rather national and modest.
70 Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 122–38.
71 İpek Çalışlar, Latife Hanım (Istanbul: Doğan Kitapçılık, 2006), 198. It is noteworthy that although republican men denied political rights for women believing that it was “early”, people of the country nevertheless voted for leading women such as Latife Hanım, Halide Edip, Nezihe Muhiddin, Mevhibe Hanım, Kara Fatma, Müfide Ferit and Aliye Fehmi in the provinces Izmir, Konya, Malatya and Diyarbakır, ibid., 202.
72 Necmettin Sadak, ‘Hanımlarımız ve Aile Hukuku Kararnamesi’, Akşam, January 21, 1924, 1.
73 Women who were chosen to establish a commission to follow the matter during the meeting were all feminist activists from the Second Constitutional Period, Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 143. A leading Islamist female intellectual of the time, Fatma Aliye, also supported their endeavour.
74 Toska, ‘Cumhuriyetin Kadın İdeali’, 80. Tezer Taşkıran, Cumhuriyet’in 50. Yılında Türk Kadın Hakları (Ankara, Başbakanlık Yayınevi, 1973), 112–3.
75 Toska, ‘Cumhuriyetin Kadın İdeali’, 81, Taşkıran, Cumhuriyet’in 50. Yılında, 110–112.
76 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 16.
77 Gökçen Beyinli, ‘The Religious and National ‘Others’ of the State: People, Superstitions and the Nationalization of Islam in Turkey (1925–1970)’ (PhD diss., Humboldt University-Berlin, 2017), 182–4.
78 Erik Jan Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 1905–1926 (Leiden: Brill, 1984).
79 Kandiyoti, ‘Slave Girls’, 50.
80 Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap, 58.
81 Şirin Tekeli, Kadınlar ve Siyasal Toplumsal Hayat (Istanbul: Birikim, 1982).