forms of “sexual torture,” including rape. The
mothers of the disappeared organized into a vocal
group called Saturday Mothers, and demonstrated
every Saturday in Istanbul, which has emerged as
the city with the largest Kurdish population (Kurd-
ish Human Rights Project 2002).
In 2002, Turkey took new steps in extending
legal gender equality. However, in the Kurdish
provinces (officially called the “southeast”), viola-
tions of women’s rights were prevalent in, for
instance, domestic violence including honor killing,
polygyny, wife exchange, and early, forced, arranged,
and child marriages. Women were not aware of
their rights under the existing legal system (Ilkka-
racan 1999). However, non-official and non-party
feminist initiatives emerged in Istanbul and major
cities, which ranged from “Islamic feminisms” to
radical secular projects. While the phrase “Kurdish
woman” was officially considered “separatist
propaganda” and a crime against the “indivisibility
of the Turkish nation,” Kurdish women had formed
their own feminist groups, and launched feminist
journals (for example, Rozaand Jujîn, both launched
in 1996), rights advocacy groups (for example,
K. Ka. DaV, The foundation for solidarity with
Kurdish women and research on the Woman
Question, Istanbul), shelters, and literacy and skills
training programs (for example, Ka-Mer, the
women’s center in Diyarbakir). They also engaged
in debate or dialogue with Turkish feminists.iran
Demands for the reform of gender relations in
Iran date back to the late nineteenth century, when
nationalist and liberal intellectuals questioned the
oppression of women, especially veiling, segrega-
tion, polygyny, seclusion, and illiteracy. During the
Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, social demo-
crats and radical members of the new parliament
demanded women’s suffrage rights, and there was
considerable women’s grassroots organizing in the
Caspian region. The violent suppression of the rev-
olution in 1911 silenced radical voices, although
outside the sphere of the state, women continued
their organizing activities, journalism, advocacy of
equal rights, and opening girls’ schools (Afary 1996).
Most of these activities were confined to Tehran and
major cities, leaving Kurdish provinces and much of
the country marginally affected. Opposition to
women’s demands came especially from conserva-
tives among the clergy and in the government.
Kurdish women were a target of the armies of
Russia and Ottoman Turkey when they invaded the
northern parts of Kurdistan during the First World
War. In 1915, the Russian army massacred the male362 kurdish women
population of Sauj Bulaq (Mahabad) and took away
about two hundred women for abuse (Fossum
1918).
State intervention in gender relations in Kurdis-
tan was more visible after the 1921 coup d’état,
when the central government further expanded its
military and civil administration to all the cities and
towns. Reza Shah, army officer and founder of the
Pahlavìdynasty (1925–79), established a highly
centralized dictatorial regime largely through the
use of military power. By the early 1930s, he had
suppressed all independent women’s activism and
crushed the religious centers of power. Much like
republican Turkey, and inspired by it, the Pahlavì
monarchy was a nationalist, secular, modernizing,
and Westernizing unitary state, which assigned
women a major role in its nation-building project.
In this multiethnic and multicultural country, women
had to be modern, Westernized, and Persian(ized).
The most visible intervention in gender relations,
Reza Shah’s 1936 decree on the unveiling of women,
was enforced largely through coercion. According
to confidential government correspondence of the
period, there was no need for unveiling in the rural
and tribal areas of the country, especially in Kur-
distan, where women were always unveiled. How-
ever, the colorful and distinctly Kurdish clothing of
women was treated as “ugly and dirty,” and had
to be replaced by the “attire of civilized women,”
that is, Western-type dress (Iran National Archives
1992, 171, 250, 249, 273). In Kurdistan, this state-
imposed “unified dress” was known as Pahlavìor
Persian (≠ecemî) rather than European clothing.
Another official initiative was the opening of the
first public schools for girls in Kurdish cities in the
1930s, of which there were few.
The Soviet Union and Britain occupied Iran dur-
ing the Second World War, and replaced Reza Shah
with his son Mohammad Reza in 1941. Soon after
the war ended, Kurdish and Azerbaijani national-
ists established their short-lived autonomous govern-
ments in northwestern Iran in 1946. The National
Government of Azerbaijan granted women suffrage
rights, while the Kurdish Republic encouraged
women’s participation in public life outside the
sphere of the family. The Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP), founder of this mini-state, launched a
women’s party (Hizbî Jinan), which promoted
women’s education and rallied them in support of
the republic. Women teachers and students from
girls’ schools appeared unveiled in official cere-
monies and other public spaces wearing their uni-
forms, and wore the Kurdish national dress.
The short-lived experience of the two govern-
ments, overthrown within a year through Tehran’s