Gender Politics in Turkey and Russia

From State Feminism to Authoritarian Rule

Gökten Huriye Dogangün

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838604370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Both Russia and Turkey were pioneering examples of feminism in the early 20th Century, when the Bolshevik and Republican states embraced an ideology of women's equality. Yet now these countries have drifted towards authoritarianism and the concept of gender is being invoked to reinforce tradition, nationalism and to oppose Western culture. Gökten Dogangün's book explores the relationship between the state and gender equality in Russia and Turkey, covering the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Republican Revolution of 1923 and highlighting the very different gender climates that have emerged under the leaderships of Putin and Erdogan. The research is based on analysis of legal documents, statistical data and reports, as well as in-depth interviews with experts, activists and public officials. Dogangün identifies a climate of 'neo-traditionalism' in contemporary Russia and 'neo-conservatism' in contemporary Turkey and examines how Putin and Erdogan's ambitions to ensure political stability, security and legitimacy are achieved by promoting commonly held 'family values', grounded in religion and tradition. The book reveals what it means to be a woman in Turkey and Russia today and covers key topics such as hostility towards feminism, women's employment, domestic violence, motherhood and abortion. Dogangün provides the first comparative study that seeks to understand the escalation of patriarchy and the decline of democracy which is being witnessed across the world.

Part 1

Discourses on Gender in Early Modernization, Transition and Authoritarian Eras in USSR/Russia and Turkey

1

Gender Climate in the Soviet and Republican Periods

It is over the Westernization and modernization period that dated back to the pre-revolutionary period in both Soviet Russia and Turkey that the woman question was integrated into different ideological frameworks for developing and westernizing the Tsarist Russian and Ottoman empires. Before the Bolshevik and Republican revolutions, the main transformative changes in terms of women’s status and rights took place during the reigns of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Alexander II in Tsarist Russia, and during the Tanzimat era and Second Constitutional Period in the Ottoman Empire. In these periods, the woman question fluctuated between progressive efforts and retreats until a clear rupture took place with the proclamation of the Soviet and early Republican states’ official commitment to women’s equality in civic, social, economic and political life.

Tracing the Woman Question in the Russian/Soviet and Ottoman-Turkish Contexts

The changes in the social, political, legal and familial status of women date back to the first westernizing efforts, known as the Petrine reforms, initiated by Peter the Great (1689–1725) in the seventeenth century in Tsarist Russia. These reforms, which aimed to open a window to Europe and brought Russia into closer contact with Western European states, had a profound impact mainly on the lives of men and women of the imperial family and the court (Pushkareva, 1997, p.121). As part of his determination to modernize and secularize Russia, Peter issued a decree that ended the seclusion of women and ordered the sexes to mix socially (Atkinson, 1978, p.26). He defined women’s most important duties as wifehood and motherhood, and assigned to them a new role of contributing to Russian society in the family and as the bearers of future subjects. The education of women as the mothers of future servitors gained significance as part and parcel of his westernizing reforms. Many of the projects intended to recast the Russian patriarchal order, including the education of women, did not succeed and the patriarchal order persisted in Peter’s reign. His reforms took root only gradually and encountered some resistance outside the court and St Petersburg but had an irreversible impact on the lives of elite women. In the decades following Peter’s death, it started to become a belief among the ruling elite and the nobility that greater public visibility and social participation of women were requirements of a refined society (Engel, 2004, pp.13–15).

Recognizing the significance of the education of women and its relation to the wider role of women for the reorganization of Russian society had its impact on the enlightening reforms of Catherine the Great (1762–96) during the second half of the eighteenth century. Catherine sought to extend the civilizing mission initiated by Peter. She realized the centrality of education for further westernization as well as the gap in terms of accessing education between the nobility and the rest of the population. During her reign, the state assumed public responsibility for women’s education. In 1764, the first school for noble girls was established in St Petersburg for the daughters of the servitors from the elite as well as middle-level ranks of the military and civil service, especially those whose fathers had either died or lacked sufficient resources. For girls from humble origins, about twenty other institutions were founded in major cities and towns. In 1786, Catherine established free, public education for both boys and girls at primary and high school levels. However, the main purpose of women’s education during Catherine’s reign was restricted to the moral and spiritual instruction of family and children (Engel, 2004, pp.15–16, 23, 65).

A comprehensive discussion of the woman question arose in the aftermath of the Crimean War and the emergence of a new environment for initiating social reforms under the leadership of Alexander II (1855–81). The educated, socially conscious and reform-minded Russians sought the reduction of arbitrary authority and the increase of individual rights, and then they started to re-evaluate every traditional institution, including the patriarchal family. They linked the authoritarian family order to the lack of democratization and of individuality. Social backwardness was related to the traditional structure of gender relations, the traditional roles of women and the traditional family structure; and breaking these traditional structures was seen as a way to foster social progress (pp.68–9).

The progressive efforts concerning women’s education, increasing public visibility and wider social participation proceeded in parallel with broad reformist attempts towards civilizing the country and remained limited in their ability to reach peasant women in Tsarist Russia. The pursuit of expanding the scope of education towards the larger segments of women repeatedly encountered backlashes during the periods of autocracy throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Lapidus, 1978a, p.30). These backlashes were often influenced by traditional and religious concerns that the Westernizing reforms would distort the moral health of women, family and, in consequence, the whole of society. The ups and downs terminated with the Bolshevik Revolution and its promise of a radical social transformation that would establish the full equality of women in economic, political and family life (Lapidus, 1978b, p.116).

In 1917, two revolutions fundamentally changed the political structures, the ruling elite and the ruling ideas in Russia. The February Revolution overthrew the imperial government and saw the establishment of the Provisional Government. Strikes by working-class women demanding peace and food over the winter played an important role in changing the political order. Educated women, female workers and peasant women, who had already been involved in protests against low pay and deteriorating working conditions since the war years, later became mobilized to claim citizenship rights in the new political order (McDermid and Hillyar, 1999, pp.144–88). The Provisional Government acquiesced in giving women the right to vote and to serve in the civil service on equal terms with men (Shnyrova, 2007, p.131). However, women continued to have grievances against the Provisional Government, whose policies did not bring about any improvement in their harsh working and living conditions. The disappointed female workers participated in demonstrations and strikes against the government and started to unite over the general demands for improvement in working conditions, an eight-hour day, a minimum wage and maternity benefits, with the significant help of leading Bolshevik activists such as Alexandra Kollontai. Between the two revolutions of 1917, the Bolsheviks began to recognize the importance of recruiting women as active participants and integrating them into the cause of the coming revolution by establishing a special bureau and publishing a journal, Rabotnitsa, to organize work among women. Hence, the female workers supported the revolution because the Bolshevik Party seemed to articulate their immediate concerns as women and workers (McDermid and Hillyar, 1999, pp.144–88).

The Bolshevik revolutionaries’ devotion to women’s issues was largely motivated by the widespread belief regarding the backwardness of women, and the rivalry with other political movements of the pre-revolutionary era. Early Bolshevik writings conveyed the concern that women needed to be integrated with the socialist revolution if the Bolsheviks were to achieve success. Russian women, who were portrayed as the most backward, illiterate and superstitious of the populace, were regarded as the potential constituency to resist the new social order and at the same time to help consolidate the revolution of the proletariat by joining the ranks of revolutionaries and raising the succeeding generations to defend and build socialism (Wood, 1997, p.3). Focusing on the backwardness of women provided the Bolsheviks with certain opportunities to integrate the distant regions, particularly Central Asia. The mobilization of Central Asian women gained prominence for the Soviet regime as part of its attempts to undermine the traditional social order and realize modernization in the region. For this task, the Bolshevik leaders relied on Muslim women, who benefited least from the established order based on tradition, custom and kinship, to create a surrogate proletariat (see Massell 2015). In addition, the Bolsheviks’ fear between 1905 and 1917 that women workers might join the liberal feminist and Menshevik movements, with their respective bourgeois understanding of equality and offer of social democratic solutions to the problems of women’s work, and might become distanced from the revolution of the proletariat had an impact on the Bolsheviks’ increasing preoccupation with the woman question after 1913 (Wood, 1997, pp.30–3).

When the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution and proclaimed the establishment of a new Soviet state, they had a specific agenda concerning the rights of women. The revolutionaries were determined to establish a new order, under which women’s equality would be fully realized by going beyond the reformist attempts, such as female suffrage on the same terms with men. They envisioned a Soviet society, in which women’s role in the economy, politics and the family would be ultimately changed and sexual oppression would disappear (Lapidus, 1978a, p.54). The Bolshevik approach to the woman question was influenced by socialist feminism and the theoretical works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and August Bebel. Marxist writings constituted a legitimate resource for Soviet discourse, policy making and ideological commitment towards sexual equality. Despite Marx and Engels being concerned about the oppression of women and their sincere commitment to sexual equality, the greater part of their writings focused on elaborating the contradictory nature of the capitalist mode of production. Marx did not produce a systematic theory of gender relations but connected the oppression of women to the existence of capitalist relations of social production. Women’s emancipation would accordingly be accomplished along with the entire abolition of capitalism and the transition to a new socialist order, when the class structure and private property would disappear (Buckley, 1989).

Further comments on women’s oppression were made by Engels (2010) in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, but the main Marxist feature of connecting the emancipation of women to an overall social and economic transformation did not change. Engels connected the emergence of various forms of family to different economic foundations that changed historically. In his framework, the modern – patriarchal and monogamous – family shows the mechanism and operation of bourgeois society at the basic level. In this form of family, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family and thus gains a position of supremacy, while the wife carries out domestic duties within the family and is excluded from participation in social production. The modern family is described as constituting the main source of all forms of social and economic oppression and a profound obstacle for women’s participation in public industry. So, for Engels, to put an end to the domestic slavery of women and liberate them would primarily require the establishment of a legal and real social equality between the sexes and, more importantly, women being enabled to participate in public industry.

Like Engels, August Bebel treated the bourgeois family as a core unit of the state and society to be transformed. In Women and Socialism, Bebel (2005) described how the evolution from primitive communism to the rule of private property stemmed from the secondary position of women within the family. In bourgeois society, women suffer from restrictions and obstacles that are unknown to men, and men enjoy many social rights and privileges. Because of their dependent position, women regard marriage as a means of subsistence while men look upon it from a commercial point of view, considering its material advantages and disadvantages. So, a change in the capitalist mode of production would bring about the elimination of the social oppression of women. Despite the reservations of Marx and Engels concerning the women’s suffrage movement, Bebel draws attention to its contribution. According to him, formal equality before the law should prioritize all attempts that enable women to participate in working life and become liberated. The connecting thread of the thoughts of Marx, Engels and Bebel is that women’s oppression is connected to their economic dependence on men. They all overlooked other sources of oppression derived from ideology, culture, religion and so on.

Under the influence of these theoretical arguments, Bolshevism was fully committed to sexual equality and recognized equal civil, economic and political rights for women. It differentiated itself from liberal feminism by accepting that political equality was not the ultimate goal but only a step toward full liberation that would take place through the transition to socialism (Lapidus, 1978a). The revolutionary attempts to transform the traditional family and abolish the private subordination of women were connected to women’s integration into society through participation in social production. The Bolsheviks sought to erase the traditional patterns by liberating women from being socially and economically dependent on men, and the new state embraced the role of supporting working women’s economic independence by providing public childcare (Kiblitskaya, 2000). A wide range of educational and occupational options was established for women; they were encouraged to acquire new skills, values, orientations and aspirations, surpassing their traditional roles. It was expected that the more educational and occupational attainments were enjoyed by women, the greater sexual equality and equal relations within the family would be (Lapidus 1982: xxxii).

In the Turkish context, the family system and the status and rights of women made an irreversible entry into political debate concerning the course of modernization via westernization or Islamism. The dilemma between the need for westernization and progress, and keeping Ottoman culture intact, influenced political debate on the woman question. While Islamists pointed to the corruption of Islam as the reason for moral decline and advocated a return to a purified application of Sharia, the westernizers suggested a radical break with Islam in the name of progress (Kandiyoti, 1997, p.124). In these ideological terrains, woman was approached as an important part of the modernization project but not as an individual or citizen so much as a mother and wife. For both westernizers and conservatives, women were defined as a social category that could contribute to the welfare and prosperity of society with their wisdom and intellect (Durakbaşa, 1998, p.36). This long period did not stand out as a period of substantial change and controversy regarding the position and rights of women. During the Tanzimat period (1839–76), which has been officially recorded as the kick-off of Ottoman modernization, the traditional Ottoman family structure, segregation, polygamy, arranged marriages and repudiation – that is, the unilateral divorce of the wife by the husband – were the main objects of criticism. However, even the most enlightened thinkers and reformists took care to remain in conformity with the religious dictates (Kandiyoti, 1989, pp.132–3). The issue of women’s education was another subject of debate in this period: women started to attend the newly opened middle-level schools and a teachers’ training college for girls in 1863, but a very basic education which was mainly religious in orientation was provided, with the aim of creating good Muslim mothers and wives (Kumari, 2016, p.27).

During the Second Constitutional Period, which started with the capitulation of power by the Union and Progress Party in 1908, the discursive limits in which the woman question could be discussed extended towards nationalism and created an interest in women as mothers and reproducers of the nation, going beyond the question of education. More high schools and teachers’ colleges for women were opened, and the first university for women was established in 1915 (p.30). Women mobilized a little in educational facilities, social welfare activities and the labour force. The number of women’s associations and periodicals increased, vocational schools for girls were opened, women were allowed to discard the veil during office hours and a tendency to participate in the women’s struggle started to emerge among women in this period (Kandiyoti, 1989, pp.133–5; see Abadan-Unat, 1981, pp.7–8). Çakır (1994), in her study on the Ottoman women’s movement, shows that Ottoman women expressed a right-demanding rhetoric in the women’s journals that denied any difference between men and women on the basis of competency and opposed the formulation of feminine identity as subordinate. On the other hand, the judicial system failed to satisfy those who wanted to see fundamental changes in the family system. The Family Law of 1917 established marriage by mutual consent and made divorce more difficult by the introduction of a conciliation procedure but did not abolish polygamy (Kandiyoti, 1989, p.137). Moreover, the political authority continued to impose control over women’s bodies and appearance in public: women were often forced by the police to return home if their skirts were shorter than officially allowed.

A clear rupture regarding the course of modernization and women’s emancipation took place with the establishment of the new Republic in 1923. The new regime set the direction of modernization as westernization and secularization from a nationalist perspective. A series of legal, political, religious and cultural reforms were accomplished straightaway, in accordance with the changing priorities of the newly established state. The Caliphate was abolished in 1924. A secular Civil Code replacing Islamic law (Sharia) was accepted in 1926. Islam was ruled out as the official religion in 1928; religion was purported to be a matter of personal conscience, and its visibility and practice were restricted to the private sphere. In order to eliminate the symbolic power of the old regime and catch up with Western norms, the Republican regime started a cultural revolution that targeted the transformation of physical appearances and lifestyles of the populace, and the collective consciousness. A new Turkish alphabet modified from the Latin form was adopted (1928), the segregated education system and religious curriculum were annulled and free elementary education was made mandatory for both boys and girls (1924), there was a hat revolution (1925), a modern dress code for both men and women was encouraged, Western units of measurement and calendar were adopted (1925), and Sunday was set as the day of rest (1925).

This judicio-political rupture meant a completely new discursive shift for women’s emancipation. In Turkey, it was assumed that the only way to modernize society was by deconstructing the religious law and order, including rules, customs and arrangements. The early Republican regime aimed to establish a civilized society on the grounds of secularism and nationalism. Kandiyoti (1991b) writes that in national projects the crises of post-imperial identity could be articulated as crises of the family system and women’s status. The woman question in Turkey was politicized in this context of heightened Turkish national consciousness at the expense of a broad Islamic identification. The secularization of the legal system and the enfranchisement of women thus came about as part of a broader nationalist struggle to dismantle the religious basis of the Ottoman state and create a new state legitimizing ideology in the making of a national culture and history (p.4). As Durakbaşa (1997) states, Kemalist feminine identity provided a cultural solution for the socialization of citizens in accordance with new legal and institutional regulations and for the re-establishment of relations between men and women in conformity with the requirements of the nation-building project. Women’s illiteracy, seclusion and subordination were denounced not only for restricting the individual rights of half the population but also for producing ignorant and uncivilized mothers and wasting half of the national resources (Kandiyoti, 1991b, p.10). Atatürk’s own views on women’s equality strike important parallels between a new family system and a civilized feminine identity for creating a progressive and productive nation. Speaking to the people in Kastamonu in 1925, he said:

A society, a nation is comprised of two genders: male and female. Is it possible to lift a huge block up if you concentrate on one side of it and leave the other side completely unattended? Is it possible that a part of a society reaches the skies while the other part is tied to the ground with chains? Undoubtedly, the steps forward on the path to progress should be taken by both genders together (Ministry of Culture and Tourism, n.d.).

According to Atatürk, women’s emancipation would come about of itself with the help of egalitarian legislation (Abadan-Unat, 1981, p.5). Against this backdrop, women’s liberation was conditional on the establishment of a secular legal system that would guarantee equality before the law for both sexes, thereby emancipating women from repressive norms of Islamic law and tradition (p.178). The nomadic and egalitarian pre-Islamic Turkic past constituted the grounds of Turkish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Discourses on Gender in Early Modernization, Transition and Authoritarian Eras in USSR/Russia and Turkey
• Part 2 Gender Climate Under Authoritarian Politics in Russia and Turkey
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint