significant popular and financial support for the
Kemalist forces. After the War of Independence,
Kemalists attempted to incorporate women’s auto-
nomous activism into the nationalist framework so
that they could both secure an important vanguard
group for their secularization reforms and assimi-
late a strong rival that might easily mobilize
resources against them (Çaha 1996, 115–16). They
therefore granted women equal rights in educa-
tional, social, and political spheres. Various schol-
ars took issue with the content and the limits of
these reforms, asserting that although they pro-
vided women with unprecedented opportunities,
they preserved the predominant patriarchal struc-
tures and failed primarily in rural areas (Tekeli
1990, Kandiyoti 1991, Arat 1994). Building upon
such arguments, this entry explores how in the
specific case of veiling women’s emancipation in
Turkey is significantly contingent on their compli-
ance with the nationalist regulations of Islam.
Kemalists did not initially ban but informally
discouraged women’s veiling, arguing that it sym-
bolized social backwardness and religious obscu-
rantism. It was implicitly assumed in the early
twentieth century that female civil servants, parlia-
mentarians, and students should not wear head-
scarves. Nevertheless, the relative relaxation of
state controls over religion in the 1950s and the
resurgence of religious activism in the 1960s com-
pelled the Kemalist elite to take more austere meas-
ures. In the 1970s, a considerable number of veiled
university students were dismissed from school
because of their improper attire. In 1983, the
Higher Education Council introduced the first
nationwide ban on the wearing of the veil on uni-
versity campuses. The ban was severely contested
by the Islamist groups and later by the members
of the Motherland Party, then in power. The
Turkish Constitutional Court put an end to the
legal aspect of the debate in 1988, stipulating that
the veil was a political rather than a religious sym-
bol and hence it should not be worn at universities
(Özdalga 1998, 41–6).
It is important to dwell upon the consequences
of the ban on veiled women’s socioeconomic and
political status. While the court’s decision does not
prohibit women from wearing headscarves in pub-
lic spaces, veiling is prohibited in educational insti-
tutions, which provide individuals with the formal
training and qualifications necessary for attaining
future success. The decision also serves as the pri-
mary legal justification for denying veiled women
employment in the state sector, a crucial source of
employment in contemporary Turkey. Women’s
turkey 731participation in national politics is also restricted
by the internal ordinances of the parliament, which
endorse that women should not wear headscarves
within the General Assembly. In 1991, two veiled
women, Neslin Ünal of the Nationalist Action
Party and Merve Kavakçı of the Virtue Party, were
elected to the parliament for the first time in the his-
tory of the republic. Whereas the former took off
her veil and served her term, the latter faced vehe-
ment protest from secularists for having come to
the oath-taking ceremony with her veil on. Kavakçı
had to leave the chambers without being sworn in
and later lost her parliamentary seat on another
technicality (Göçek 2000).
The legal restrictions on veiling are usually cou-
pled with a general endorsement from secularist
social groups that “women may wear headscarves
at their homes but doing so as a civil servant or
student should be considered as a sign of religious
fundamentalism” (Oran 2000). Such exclusions of
veiled women from the nationalist public sphere
have accelerated their involvement in the Islamist
circles, which also curtailed their autonomous
demands. Considering the Woman Question sec-
ondary to other macro-political issues (Karabıyık-
Barbaroso(lu 2000), Islamist elites granted them
inadequate representation in the party mechanisms
(Saktanber 2002), supervised their publications to
the degree of purging them (Göle 1996, 121–6),
and denied employment in order to foster a “mod-
ern” company image (Özbilgin 2000). Hence, at
the beginning of the twenty-first century, secular-
ism and Islamist mobilization in Turkey both
enable and constrain women’s struggle for greater
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