Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey : State, Society and Gender in the Early Republic

In loving memory of my grandmother, Fatma Gazalcı. vi institutions, colleagues and friends have crossed its path and contributed to its development in various ways. First of all, I am immensely indebted to my PhD supervisors, Erik Jan Zürcher and Touraj Atabaki for their unfailing support and encouragement. It is mainly on account of their guidance that I was able to muster up the courage to dive into the social history of the early Turkish republic, still a largely unknown sea at the time, which proved to be an extremely rewarding endeavour, intellectually, academically and personally. Erik also extended his support in the later stages, when I was working on the final version of the book manuscript, for which I would especially like to thank him. I have been fortunate to have Deniz Kandiyoti as my mentor since the completion of my doctoral studies. She has not only influenced my work enormously through her scholarship, intellectual rigor and wisdom, but has also always been there whenever I needed advice. I will always remain in her debt. I would like to thank Berteke Waaldijk and Nicole A.N.M. van Os for their comments on the dissertation, which helped me improve the text while turning it into book. I also would like to thank my colleagues and especially the dean, Leif "The veiling and unveiling of women have been controversial issues in Turkey since the late-Ottoman period. It was with the advent of local campaigns against certain veils in the 1930s, however, that women's dress turned into an issue of national mobilisation in which gender norms would be redefined. In this comprehensive analysis of the anti-veiling campaigns in interwar Turkey, Sevgi Adak casts light onto the historical context within which the meanings of veiling and unveiling in Turkey were formed. By shifting the focus from the high politics of the elite to the implementation of state policies, the book situates the anti-veiling campaigns as a space where the Kemalist reforms were negotiated, compromised and resisted by societal actors. Using previously unpublished archival material, Adak reveals the intricacies of the Kemalist modernisation process and provides a nuanced reading of the gender order established in the early republic by looking at the various ways women responded to the anti-veiling campaigns. A major contribution to the literature on the social history of modern Turkey, the book provides a complex analysis of these campaigns which goes beyond a simple binary between liberation and oppression." -- Provided by publisher