Turkish Women in Academia: Problems of Legitimacy in Trans/National Perspective

The study of women and history stands at the crossroad of a variety of directions. Writing the "history of women" in a particular country vis-à-vis their relation to state and society is one genre. Constructing the history of how women's studies emerged is another. There may also be feminist attempts to rewrite national historiographies in order to incorporate gender into them. Following that framework, one can state that there is substantial work on the first genre, where Ottoman and Turkish women's history has been analyzed.¹ Turkish scholars have also broadly covered the history of the feminist movement within the last two decades.² What is lacking in Turkish studies now is a feminist critique of national historiography, as was tried in Creating a Nation, where an accepted Australian national historiography was challenged through a reconsideration of colonialism and gender relations.³ Having stated these directions, this essay will focus on a different dimension of women's studies in Turkey—that of the multisited positions contemporary Turkish women academicians face in their encounters with national and international academic circles. It will try to highlight two main positions vis-à-vis Turkish women scholars: first, the discrepancy between national academics trained abroad and in national universities, and second, the problems of legitimacy in international context.

Leaving aside the sporadic curiosities and nationalist publications about women's emancipation,⁴ scholarly interest in rethinking women's history in Turkey emerged in full force during the 1980s with the newly rising women's movement.⁵ This movement created its own academic programs, a women's library, social help shelters and centers, and political organizations to support women in politics. With this wave came an amount of research, which gradually led scholars toward a critique of women's status in national historiography. The Republican concept of women's emancipation apparently was not as progressive as Turkish women had so far been indoctrinated to believe; instead, this concept of emancipation was a regression from the demands and thematic richness expressed by Ottoman feminists. That such nineteenth-century Ottoman publications were in Arabic script, illegible to the Republican generation, had long postponed a thorough analysis of the Ottoman women's movement. This movement was fully aware of the rise of Western feminism and had already begun negotiating their roles and status in domestic space.⁶ Ottoman women debated their rights in education and political spheres, and adopted a more assertive discourse than their successive Republican generations.

With all its conservatism, Turkish women cherished more access to education and professional life under the Republic. Many studied abroad in different fields to return to teach in Republican universities.⁷ They acquired high-status jobs as the first generation of women teachers, doctors, judges, and pilots, accepting to a great extent their role as emancipated women in the public sphere. The Republican regime had also granted Turkish women their voting rights in 1934, before many European countries, a matter which had long been part of a proud national discourse.

The state-controlled women's emancipation model survived until the 1970s, a period when Marxism dominated the public sphere, generating clashes between left- and right-wing groups. A group of women who questioned their position and status within the leftist movement broadened their critique towards a more gendered analysis: the wind of a general critique to the political order also brought a critique of gender.⁸ The women's movement accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, with the growth of many women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the establishment of a Directorate General on the Status and the Problems of Women in 1990, and various campaigns on a variety of issues ranging from violence to citizenship rights. The movement created its own publications with more impact on general public debates. With the opening of thirteen research centers for women's issues and four women's studies departments since 1989, many young students also took part in research and writing, contributing to the development of an academic community.

With the emergence of new power domains and relations, there soon appeared a tension between...