Nükhet Sirman

This year the concept of ‘public space’ has been at the top of the agenda in Turkey. Along with state offices, streets and even places the President of the Republic has appeared in have been defined as public spaces. This definition has functioned as the final link in a chain of precautions limiting the movement space of women wearing headscarves. However, at the same time, it also became a means of questioning the meaning of “public space” especially in the socio-political context of Turkey. Thus, the question, which has long been asked by feminists both in Turkey and elsewhere in the world, has begun weighing on the minds of political actors as well.

Starting from the maxim that “the private is political,” both the theory and the practice of feminism have emphasized that the relationship between the public and the private is determined politically . The meaning of this is that, the content of the private or the public cannot be defined through any universal absolute. No natural or supra-societal necessity, like ensuring fertility or the importance of physical strength, determines this separation; on the contrary, this separation is produced in the organisation of social life and the definition of what is private and what is public occurs within the political process. Departing from this point, feminists have argued that the organisation of society must be reconsidered for the liberation of women. They have made this argument by demonstrating that women’s social dependence on men is not a natural necessity but the result of the organisation of the private/public distinction according to regulations stemming from kinship to civil law.

For feminist theory to be able to make sense for feminist practice, it is necessary to determine how the dichotomy of public/private is produced under social conditions. In other words, the creation of the separation between public and private in Turkey cannot be understood by quoting and borrowing from other societies, other histories. Only this has been exactly what societies like Turkey have consistently been doing. Let us call these societies either less developed or third world countries, or even post-colonial societies; for these societies western societies have always functioned as models, benchmarks. Therefore quoting from them, borrowing from them has been a common and consistent practice of political actors. However, it is also necessary to consider that this constant state of quoting from the west is determined by repertoires of terms formed in the framework of the actors’ own political histories and therefore can never be exact copies of the west itself. What must be done is to understand what kind of politics lies behind the formation of both these repertoires of terms and the separation between public and private.

The Public Sphere in Turkey as a ‘Sphere of Anxiety’

It has been said by some researchers that the public in Turkey (and therefore its private) has emerged through women, or actually, through an anxiety related to women . Therefore, it is no coincidence that the appearance of women wearing headscarves in the public sphere today has caused a crisis in the public sphere. The aim of this piece is to present a political and historical hypothesis on the reasons why the appearance of veiled women causes anxiety in Turkey’s public. The starting point of this hypothesis is that the very public sphere itself has first appeared as a space of anxiety.

We know that the developments which changed Turkish social life began with the Tanzimat reforms , continued with II.Abdulhamid’s and İttihat and Terraki’s politics strengthening the centralized state, and gained a legal structure with the proclamation of the Republic. However, neither the gender dimension of these developments, nor their consequences regarding the society itself have been considered in the frame of the separation between the public and the private. To quickly summarize arguments which need longer treatment , it is possible to talk about a ‘house’ system constructed upon a kinship based society which now becomes the subject of politics. As also stated by Kandiyoti, this system was one which kept, first and foremost, the young men within the house under pressure and they were the first to revolt. This rebellion is best seen in Namık Kemal’s plays, novels and newspaper articles. In these pieces Namık Kemal says that the family, far from being a heaven in a heartless world, was actually nothing more than a den of intrigue and trouble and that it was through the education of women that this sorry state could change. Through education, women would not only be good wives and good mothers, but they would also be able to use their reason to tame their love and passion, so that true companionship by marrying the appropriate person would shape the form of the new house.

This very sentence is the summary of how both gender and the separation between the public and the private are imagined in this geography. This sentence describes the desire to sever the hierarchical relations between heads of households that bound the different houses together. These hierarchical relations, of course, meant that no notion of the public could be imagined since all relations were under the rule of the powerful fathers/households and their relation of vassalage. To become a home, heads of households as well as the relations of dependency between them had to be abolished. Later on, in the process leading to the establishment of the Republic, this desire came to be articulated through the slogan ‘society without classes or privileges’, and indicated the imaginary of the new society. What is striking, of course, is the way a series of terms derivative of the French Revolution took shape in the discourses of the political actors of this society to articulate their desire for a new social order.

The education of women immediately became a source of anxiety, just as expected. Tons of novels, magazines, stories which told women how they were to love, which type of love was good and which was bad were quickly written. It was emphasized, with similar ideological narratives, that they were to use this education in order to become good wives and mothers, and above all pass on the love of one’s country to the younger generation. When Şemsettin Sami was asked if the education of women was a good thing or not, he replied: “Yes, it is a good thing; an educated woman protects her “namus” with her brain, and not with a head scarf.” With these words he laid bare the very foundation of these anxieties.

The writer who best describes how honour does not actually result from a religious imperative, as is commonly believed, is Germaine Tillion . Tillion sees the honour of women as a regulation of a kinship based society to keep the woman’s body under control in order to keep land within the group, While this kinship based society accepts the veil because it helps control women’s fertility, it has never followed Islam’s decree that girls are also to inherit since this would cause the division of land.

…And ‘The New Woman’

Despite the existence of a quite deeply engrained house tradition, first the Ottomans and then, in an even more determined fashion, the young Republic has made a lot of effort to transform this, all so that women could ‘take their place in the society’ – as the process of modernizing the family is now described. This ‘place in the society’ was not a call to freedom; instead it was a new definition of womanhood, framed within certain boundaries, and this was called ‘the new woman’. This new woman was to be as self-sacrificing as the traditional woman and also as well-educated as the ‘selfish’ upper class women living in mansions. The education of women, their citizenship duties, the rearrangement of the structure of the family and almost every aspect of the effort of modernization was suddenly linked to changing the status of women. The new order was calling women to be, as Kandiyoti says, not only mothers to their children, but also mothers to the nation. This call and these arrangements were both important and risky efforts which made it necessary for the limited resources to be spent for this cause. So, why was this risk taken?

The answer to this question lies in the role the new family structure played in the collapse of the old social order. The old social order was based on the fact that the men, as heads of households, were hierarchically related to each other. In this order, both the women and the powerless men were subject to the head of the household, who in turn was subject to his patron and protector, who had brought him to this position. The disintegration of these relations of subjection would enable the liberation of men, as well as weaken the old, ‘big house’ system resisting the new order. The Civil Code of 1926 freed only married men. Those who were single were to remain on the peripheries of the society as they used to, and women could be no more than ‘helpers and advisors’ to their husbands. The new order gave these helpers and advisors in the home, duties outside the home as well. Those who were ‘private’ in the old order were called to step out of their homes as mothers of the nation, and, as such allowed them a space for movement without shedding the mantle of the secret and the sacred that the concept of harem provided them.

However, the anxiety did not end with women. The real issue was how the new families, whose inter-dependencies had been abolished by law, and the married men at their heads were to be related to each other, and how these relationships were to be regulated. In other words, the question of how the relationship between the men, (who were still defined as household heads and still held power even though their power had been whittled down), and the new governing power at the head of the modernizing nation-state was to be regulated was a much greater source of anxiety than the namus of women.

The duality between the public and the private took shape in the context of these issues. It was unclear how men who were at the heads of households were to act in public, outside the realm of familial relationships. Issues like who had the right of speech and who had to listen to whom were still fuzzy; that is, the classless and privilege-free society did not exactly know how to go about its everyday relations. In the old society there was no space whatsoever for equals to interact: Households and the hierarchical relationships between them had covered the whole political domain. The relationship among equals known to and coming from the kinship-based society was competition. In kinship-based societies, due to the fact that a rival must be defeated through war or exchange in order to have access to the limited resources (woman, land and animal), communities are equal as long as they cannot beat each other.

With the emergence of the public sphere as a domain of anxiety along with the foundation of the Republic, women, once again, came up as a topic of discussion. In the regulation of the relationships among citizens and between the state and citizens within the new society, women, by ‘taking their place within the society,’ allowed the whole nation to be considered as a family. The appearance of women in the public allowed, as Nurdan Gürbilek states, “the public and the private to intertwine” and the relationships among citizens and between citizens and the state to be regulated through love and not competition. Public space became, thanks to women, a space where love, sincerity, that which is ‘ours’, were to dominate and a space where the hierarchies based upon age and gender operative among relatives, could still regulate daily interaction.

After these determinations it is necessary to underline some important points. The emergence of women into the public in Turkey has still not had a liberating effect; on the contrary, it has been greatly restrictive for both women and for all subordinated sections of society. The public sphere, instead of becoming a space where political ideas were discussed freely, became a show case of the modernity of the nation, a space of sincerity, regulated by love and respect,. Both the actions and external appearances of individuals in public were meticulously monitored by the state. Nevertheless, men had the right to exhibit their now limited amount of power in this space. This kind of exhibition, took the shape of a competition between autonomous persons, just as it was in the kinship-based society. It becomes apparent now mostly in the competition in the economic domain, in the stands during football matches and in the ease with which men are prepared to enter into physical fights with each other in the name of honour. By contrast, women, as the symbols of the nation, were brought under a new discipline.

By contrast to this state of exhibition and aggressive visibility, what is called ‘the private sphere’ was defined as a space of privation and privacy. When the ‘public’ became that which is in the open, that which is exhibited, the background where this exhibition was prepared where chaos, contention and hardships ruled, had to be fastidiously kept away from the exhibition was covered up. And until feminists brought up the issue of domestic violence, this background could never be openly discussed in public.

In complete contrast with the privacy of ‘the private sphere’ what people had done in the public sphere came to be discussed to the minutest detail. Since the public was a showcase, the bodies appearing in this space were immediately placed under observation to see whether they fulfilled their obligation to appear in public according to the definition of the nation. It is for this reason that headscarves were for years belittled as symbols of ignorance, illiteracy, backwardness and peasantry. When women in the 1980’s, came to classes in their universities covering their heads, it was at first received as a great shock. Following this shock, it quickly became commonly accepted that this appearance would not fit the required public image. The headscarf, which first created shock and then anger in the universities, the hearts of knowledge and learning, finally crystallized in political debates as a political symbol of a different image of reality. Because the public was a showcase, the bodies exhibited in this space were always perceived as political texts and they were read and interpreted as such. Since women with uncovered heads wearing coats and skirts symbolized the woman of the Republic, covering one’s head could only be the symbol of yet another political project; because each and every person born in this country knew very well were to find political symbols and how to interpret them.

Ottoman intellectuals had made women into the subjects of love and the family and therefore experienced great anxiety about the identity of women. The public sphere they created was thus nothing but this anxiety; it was actually nothing but a great void, the result of the dissolution of the big ‘households.’ In effect, in the early years of the Republic, nobody knew how the public was to be regulated and what would become of it. A short respite occurred in the 1930s and everybody relaxed when this public was accorded the status of ‘showcase’. However, this relaxation gave way, once again, to a new anxiety in the process leading up to and after the military coup of September 12, 1980. This time the anxiety was caused by the ambiguity and uncertainty of the political regime.

This is exactly why now the public sphere is once again being called duty, to regulate women’s bodies and determine the identity of the nation, as well as the regime of the state, over these bodies. But now it has a name: the public sphere is in the process of being defined in the name of science and progress and as if an absolute and universal definition could ever be found. What the public sphere is to display is now the subject of a heated political discussion, and this, despite the efforts of various political agents who vehemently argue about the truth of Turkishness. The attempt is to give the showcase an immutable content: will it reflect the identity of the nation, or the faith of the individual? In other words, what is in question is a conflict between the images of the citizen of the Republic and that of the individual of the neo-liberal system. However, this conflict will neither emancipate women, nor allow the public to operate differently.

I guess it is useful to also indicate that the public and the private, the showcase and the secret, are actually dependant on each other, and that women’s existence in the public sphere fits in quite well with their definition in the private one (the fact that women are invited to work in jobs like teaching or nursing is an important indication of this continuity).

Even though women’s emergence into the public sphere is not a path to their liberation and because this emergence has been determined by the way the ‘public’ itself has been constituted, one must not draw the consequence that work outside the home or political activism has no significance whatsoever for women’s liberation. On the contrary, it is a great probability that women will, individually, be empowered, through these.

What does not seem to change is that women, as a gender, are still ‘the second sex.’

From Amargi- Issue 1