was, like its Western counterparts, a male entity,
which denied women the right to participate in the
exercise of state power. Women were expected to
contribute to nation-building primarily by produc-
ing and nurturing good sons and daughters. While
state power remained male gendered, it was also
ethnicized on the basis of Turkish ethnic identity. In
the same vein, the Iranian state emerged as a patri-
archal unitary regime centered on Persian ethnicity.
In the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman state in
1918, Ottoman Kurdistan was re-divided, and
incorporated into the newly formed states of Iraq
(under British rule, 1918–32) and Syria (under
French rule, 1920–46), and Turkey. The small
Kurdish population of Russia came under Soviet
rule by 1921. The five states – Turkey, Iran, Iraq,
Syria, and the Soviet Union – pursued different
policies in integrating women into their nation-
building projects, and thus shaped the lives of
Kurdish women in diverse ways.
Modern state- and nation-building has often
entailed the use of violence. In this region, identi-
fied as a “zone of genocide” (Levene 1998), the
Ottoman regime and the Republic of Turkey elimi-
nated the Armenian and Assyrian peoples in the
course of genocidal campaigns from the late nine-
teenth century to 1923. Beginning in 1917, the gov-
ernment forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of
Kurds to the western parts of the country; many
perished during these operations. State violence in
the form of genocide, ethnocide, linguicide, or eth-
nic cleansing continued throughout the twentieth
century in republican Turkey, in Iraq under the
Ba≠th regime, and, to varying degrees, in other
countries (Fernandes 1999). The gender dimension
of this violence has not received adequate research
attention.Women in the Kurdish
nationalist project
Nationalist and feminist consciousness emerged,
more or less simultaneously, in the Ottoman Empire
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The
Kurdish aristocrats and intellectuals exiled in
Istanbul formed literary, political, and journalistic
circles, which promoted the idea of a distinct
Kurdish nation with claims to self-rule within
the Ottoman state. The circle, led by the uprooted
Badir Khan rulers of Botan principality, launched
the first Kurdish newspaper in Cairo in 1898. One
of the members of this group, Haji Qadir Koyi
(1817?–97), a mullah and poet, emerged later as the
ideologue of Kurdish nationalism. He encouraged
the Kurds to embrace modern science and educa-
tion, and learn from the national liberation move-360 kurdish women
ments of the time. Part of his modernist politics was
advocacy of women’s education. Referring to the
Prophet Mu™ammad’s saying that Muslims should
search for knowledge by going as far as China, Koyi
addressed the Kurds: “There is no difference
between males and females in this saying, if the
mullah forbids it [women’s education], he is a non-
believer” (Koyi 1986, 186–7). The emerging modernist
Kurdish intelligentsia, mostly males, developed this
nascent idea of gender equality into a full-fledged
nationalist discourse on the Woman Question be-
tween the 1908 constitutional revolution and the
formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
For the intelligentsia, the Kurds constituted a
nation because they possessed a homeland, a dis-
tinct language, a literary tradition, and their own
culture and history. They conferred on women a
prominent role in these early efforts to map the con-
ditions of a modern Kurdish nation. Women con-
stituted half the nation, and had to be equal to men
in rights and privileges. Moreover, women, especially
those in rural areas, were the bearers of genuine
Kurdish language and culture, which distinguished
the Kurds from the Turks, and conferred on them
national rights including self-determination. Rural
women were the embodiment of a distinct nation in
so far as they enjoyed more freedom than Muslim
Turkish women, and at the same time were bearers
of a pure language and culture not tainted by the
Turkification rampant in the cities. However,
women whose illiteracy and domestic life had pro-
tected them from assimilation into the dominant
nation had to be educated so that they could con-
tribute to Kurdish nation-building (Klein 2001).
Religion was not a constituent of nationhood and
womanhood since the Kurds were, like their adver-
sary, the Ottoman state, predominantly Muslims.
Nationalists founded the first Kurdish women’s
organization (Kürd Kadınları: Teali Cemiyeti,
Society for the advancement of Kurdish women) in
1919 in Istanbul where the size of the Kurdish pop-
ulation had been growing due to forced migrations
and war (Alakom 1995).the republic of turkey (since 1923)
Turkish nationalists led by an army officer,
Mustafa Kemal Pasha, later celebrated as Atatürk,
“Father of the Turks,” defeated the invading for-
eign armies, and declared the formation of the
Republic of Turkey in 1923. Formally abolishing
the Ottoman regime, Atatürk replaced it by a secu-
lar, Western-type, and nationalist order based on
Turkish ethnic identity. Women were assigned a
special role in this project, which included reforms
such as the separation of state and religion, and