TURKISH WOMEN REVOLT

Hokitika Guardian, 15 August 1931, Page 8

TURKISH WOMEN REVOLT

DECISION TO DOFF VEIL. Five years after Mustapha, Kemal i l’asha urged, but did not command, the women of Turkey to discard their veils, women of the Anatolian town that is named- after him, Gnzi-Aintub, have decided to heed the Westernisation call. . They recently held a mass meeting, and by popular vote decreed that the day of the hat for them had come. It was easy enough for the Gazi to order the docile men of Turkey to change their headgear, but the women are different. So much so that the J vast majority of Anatolian women still wear the traditional “tchartchaf”— I the loose hood covering head and | shoulders. They will take it off only ! when, as in the case of Gazi-Aintab, t-ey decided to do so of their own accord. Turkish city women are also independent, but Kemal Pasha’s modernising ideas have been to their liking, and they, perhaps, h,a.ve become even more Western than their liberator calculated. One thing that worries Turkey’s leaders is that these emancipated young women refuse to marry. Marriage still savours to much of the harem, and the novel role of bachelor girl amusqs them vastly. TVhile the new freedom means chiefly poker, contact bridge, and fox-trotting to the wealthy city matrons, their daughters and' the girls of the middle class are embarking seriously in professions and jobs. The Turkish medical and law. schools number many girl students. Business offices and banks are full of bobbed-haired typists, whose eyes, still shadowed with kohl, study figures and keyboards instead of the patterns of harem lattices. In the most powerful of Turkish banks, the Banque d’Affaires, a young woman Hatche Ha trim. has been promoted to* an important administrative post. in municipal councils throughout Turkey women for the last year have been deliberating with ‘ men on tho problems of local government. In the near future they will be in Parliament. Tt is I‘eported that they would have been there this year if they had not accepted so enthusiastically the motor ear rides to the polls offered by Fetlii Bey, leader of the Opposition Party, during the municipal elections. That was a defection for which Kemal Pasha’s People’s Party cannot at onoo forgive them. To overcome the bucolic indifference of Anatolian women toward the wonders of emancipation, the Stamboul Women’s Union in Constantinople is launching a big crusade. It will send out groups of city women to lecture to women of the provinces of feministic subjects, in the hojie of whetting their appetites for hats, votes, and other gifts of the Kemalist regime.