Women and the Turkish State: Political Actors or Symbolic Pawns

Abstract

In 1987 Turkey was a country offering the perplexing spectacle of a sit-in and hunger strike by ultra-religious women students demanding the right to don the veil to go to classes (a right officially denied), and a small group of feminists marching through the streets to demonstrate against violence against women, virtually in the same week. While to an outside observer this may seem merely a healthy manifestation of political pluralism, the roots of the contemporary situation have to be sought in the specificities of the woman question in Turkey and of its evolution through time.