Halidé Takes To the Platform

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 460, 15 September 1928, Page 26

Halidé Takes To the Platform

Turkey’s Most

Emancipated Woman

H

.LIDE EDIB HANUM, who has just gone to the United States to be the first woman to lecture at the Institute of Politics at Williams-

town, Mass., is one of the most striking women in Turkish history. In appearance she would not seem so to the average person. A small figure, with straight, black, bobbed hair and black eyes, she would pass in New ork or London as native born. Her brunette type would suggest nothing more unusual than Spanish or Italian or some other Mediterranean descent. It would take someone fairly well versed in Mediterranean races to recognise her roundness of face and fullness of lips as belonging to an unmistakable Turkish type. So many years have passed and so much has happened since she took off the veil and emerged from the traditional seclusion of the upper-class Turkish woman that to mention the old-fashioned harem in connection with her to-day is almost an irrelevancy. '

Her public life has been so striking that it is apt to overshadow her personal life. The life and spirits pent up within her found expression in a precocious vein of mysticism. In the seclusion of the harem after her marriage to Salih Zeki Bey, she collaborated with her brilliant husband in his enormous project, the Turkish mathematical dictionary, and devoured literature, both Turkish and Western finding her greatest satisfaction in’ French literature and her own master in Zola. On the crest of the 1908 revolution she sprang into fame with a patriotic poem purporting to be an address from Othman, founder of the Empire, to the Fourth Army Corps which brought about the revolution. In 1910 her husband married a second wife. Confronted with poly-

gamy in her own home, she sought a divorce and began earning her own living with two small sons to support. Her first novel, “Ruined Temples,” was published in 1910. Her second, “Handan,” published in 1911, became extremely popular. Her third, “New Turan,’’ a semi-political novel written on her second visit to London in 1912, became a colossal success, a political gospel which flamed across Turkey and in translations across the Middle East to Tashkent and Kabul. Her Interest in education as a means to reform sent her into school work before the war and again in 1916 when Djemal Pasha asked her to organise new schools in Syria in place of the French schools he had closed.

In 1917 she married Dr. Adnan Bey of the Red Crescent and the army medical service, later Speaker of the National Assembly in Angora. They remained in Anatolia until after the Smyrna trialß of 1924 when Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s hold on the country tightened into an apparently permanent dictatorship and the remnants of the Parliamentary opposition left. Talking to a visitor recently about Turkey from which she and Dr. Adnan are exiles, she thought it was hopeful that the forms of Parliamentary Government still remained in Angora.

“Turkey,” she said, “has had a long and bitter experience of personal rule. The great Sultans were among our glories, but in recent years personal rule has become our curse. All of us who went into the Nationalists revolution, went into it with complete selflessness. In view of the history of our country we could do nothing else. We were nothing ourselves. The cause was everything. The Turkish land was our holy land. Angora was our Mecca. That was our nationalist faith and we who left our country have never changed.”