Westernization of dress and calendar. Unveiled
women, studying in coeducational institutions and
participating in public life, and universal suffrage
(as of 1934) were the hallmark of the modernizing
state.
The Kemalist project of building a unitary, secu-
lar, and ethnically Turkish nation-state met with
considerable resistance from Kurdish religious and
nationalist leaders. A series of revolts from 1925 to
1938 were brutally suppressed. The suppression of
the Dersim revolt of 1937–8 has been identified as
genocide. The army targeted males and females,
and many women committed suicide in order to
escape rape and abuse (McDowall 2000, 207–10,
van Bruinessen 2000). Ethnic cleansing projects
included forced resettlements of Kurds in western
provinces, the banning of all expressions of Kurd-
ish identity including the names “Kurd” and “Kur-
distan,” and the criminalization of the use of the
Kurdish language. All Kurdish organizations, in-
cluding the women’s society of 1919, and publish-
ing disappeared after the 1925 revolt.
Official propaganda and the media identified
Kurdish resistance to Turkification as tribalism,
feudalism, religious fanaticism, reactionary poli-
tics, backwardness, and banditry, all directed
against a civilizing state. The emancipated women
of the republic were recruited to highlight the civi-
lizing role of the Turkish nation. Sabiha Gökçen, an
adopted daughter of Atatürk, was promoted as the
world’s first woman combat pilot, who dropped
the bomb that killed the leader of the Dersim revolt,
and brought it to a successful end (Mojab 2001c).
The only alternative open to Kurds, women or
men, was to discard their national or ethnic iden-
tity, and become Turks.
In assessing eight decades of nationalist interven-
tion in gender relations, Turkey’s feminists of a crit-
ical persuasion argue that male dominance and
patriarchal structures remain intact in spite of the
progress made in legal equality and the remarkable
advances in women’s access to the public domains
of life (Arat 1994, Müftüler-Bac 1999). If state fem-
inism failed to displace patriarchy in Turkey, it also
failed to assimilate Kurdish women into its ethni-
cist project. By the mid-twentieth century, the num-
ber of educated women in Kurdish provinces was
increasing, and in the 1980s, a stratum of profes-
sionals and intellectuals had already changed the
fabric of Kurdish society. The new wave of Kurdish
opposition movements of the 1960s and 1970s was
different from the revolts of the 1920s and 1930s in
so far as they were urban, secular, cultural, politi-
cal, and led by communists, leftists, and national-
ists. The movements, involving mostly students and
overview 361youth, continued to be male dominated, but the left
was interested in women’s emancipation without
authorizing independent feminist organizing. Still,
by the time the leaders of the 1980 military coup
d’état suppressed leftist movements and crushed
any trace of civil society, the Kurdish Marxist direc-
tor Yilmaz Güney raised the question of women’s
oppression, and strongly condemned, in his movie
Yol(Road, 1982), the patriarchal violence preva-
lent in rural Kurdish society (Benge 1985).
After the 1980 coup, women undertook inde-
pendent feminist initiatives, and feminism gained
more currency. This trend was still Kemalist, and
denied the existence of Kurdish women. The polit-
ical environment changed, however, when in 1984
the Kurdistan Workers Party (known as PKK in its
Kurdish acronym) began armed struggle aimed at
Kurdish self-determination. By the mid-1990s,
thousands of women had joined the ranks of the
PKK and its guerrilla army. The organization was
identified as “terrorist” by Turkey and its Western
allies, and the government and the mainstream
media launched a misogynist propaganda campaign
against women guerrillas, vilifying them as “prosti-
tutes” (Kurdistan Information Centre Publications
1992, 1995). Under conditions of harsh state vio-
lence against the Kurds, gender consciousness was
overshadowed by nationalism.
Another development was the resurgence of Islam-
ist political movements in Turkey and throughout
the Middle East in the wake of the establishment
of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Turkish
Islamist movements, in spite of their own cleavages,
do not deviate from the Kemalist line of denying
the Kurds national rights. While they share with
Kurdish Islamists a politics of Islamization of gen-
der relations, their devotion to Turkish ethnicity
distances them from the Kurds. At the same time,
the secular Turkish state, faced with the challenge
of Kurdish nationalism, has used Islam and reli-
gious divisions among the Kurds including the
≠Alawì/Sunnìdivide against this nationalism. For its
part, the secular PKK responded by endorsing reli-
gion as a legitimate component of Kurdish life, and
thus recruiting Islamists and ≠Alawìs. Under these
conditions, ethnic, national, and religious cleav-
ages created a regime of ever shifting alliances
(Houston 2002), which undermined the potential
for non-sectarian feminist organizing.
The military operations against the PKK in-
cluded the destruction or evacuation of more than
3,500 villages, the uprooting of the population,
forced urbanization, and countless disappearances
and extrajudicial killings. Women in custody of
armed and security forces were subjected to various