This article traces Nene Hatun’s popularity and legacy for women’s image in Turkey. The rediscovery of Nene Hatun and the political construction of her public image during the rule of the Democratic Party (DP), as an icon of anticommunist Turkish mothers, not only maps out the gendered effects of intensified anticommunist policies in Turkey in the period under consideration but also showcases the immediate consequences of the growing conservative discourses and gender anxieties on the public images and roles of women. Exemplified by Nene Hatun’s sudden popularity, the 1950s witnessed a change in the references to motherhood in the discourses of politicians and other public figures. Framing the family roles of women as a question of security, such discourses referred to mothers as the protectors of family values against communist threats, which assigned further domestic duties to women in Turkey, already living in a strongly patriarchal society.
This article traces the cultural and social integration of Pomaks into post-Ottoman Turkey and the controversy over their ‘Turkishness’. Current scholarship on early republican nationalism is particularly interested in the importance of the imperial legacy in nation-building in the early republic period. Scholars discuss that the Ottoman legacy of the millet system was vital to the formation of Turkish identity because the republican elites continued to accept Muslim immigrants from the Balkans due to their Islamic background. A closer analysis of primary sources with a focus on Pomak-speaking immigrants, however, reveals not only the challenges that their cultural assimilation posed for the government but also competing versions of Turkishness within intellectual and political circles. This article argues for a complex understanding of relations between immigration and nationalism, which shows that the public acceptance of Pomaks as Turks depended on domestic factors, such as linguistic nationalism and security concerns.
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