Images of Istanbul women in the 1920s

Abstract

This study concerns the debates about the question of women that were ongoing in the popular press of Turkey in the 1920s and looks at the traces of these debates in obscene literature as a marginal branch of popular literature. The question of women was at the heart of all the predicaments and conflicts of the period. In popular literature it was mostly urban Istanbul women who were scrutinized to the last detail, from their biological responsibilities to their behavior in the public arena, down to their clothes and their relations with the opposite sex. It was believed that it was urban women above all who threatened the social order. Bearing in mind that the traditional faith-based patriarchal Ottoman social system began to disintegrate after the First World War to be replaced by a nationalist, modern and again patriarchal structure, the hypothesis of this dissertation is that the popular press sought to integrate women as individuals into the new social structure and define them according to common social perceptions. Women who defied society’s definition of the ideal woman were often depicted as heroines in popular obscene stories. While these stories offered a social fantasy in which society’s concerns and paranoia about women turned into reality, from another perspective, they also reflected the social disintegration after years of secrecy and seclusion and the excitement and awkwardness felt both by men and women from coexisting in the same environment.