National and Transnational Dynamics of Women’s Activism in Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s: The Story of the ICW Branch in Ankara

This article attempts to analyze the transnational dimension of a forgotten period of women’s activism in the 1950s. In the historiography of the Turkish women’s movement, these years have been depicted as an era of state feminism, which replaced the first-wave feminist movement represented by the Union of Turkish Women in the mid-1930s and would later be challenged by the second-wave feminism that emerged as a radical and independent movement in the 1980s. It was during the 1950s, however, that a transnational women’s network was revived since the convening of the Twelfth Congress of the International Alliance of Women in Istanbul in 1935. This article unearths the story of the establishment of the Turkish branch of the International Council of Women in the late 1950s and contextualizes this transnational encounter of activist women in a local and international setting, which was both heavily imbued with nationalist and Eurocentric concepts.