Authenticating Gender Policies through Sustained-Pressure: The Strategy Behind the Success of Turkish Feminists

Gendered Strategies between Democratization and Democratic Reversal: The Curious Case of Turkey

“…In this article, I will focus on four groups of women's organizations that reflect the dominant political cleavages in Turkey: feminist, Kurdish, Islamist, and Kemalist women's CSOs. Most of the scholarly literature on women's organizing in Turkey refer to these four groups and examine them, albeit to different extents (e.g., Arat, 2008;Bora & Günal, 2007;Coşar & Onbaşi, 2008;Diner & Toktaş, 2010;Marshall, 2009). For each group, I selected three organizations that are each highly influential and representative within their groups, and that are not dependent on political parties.…”

“…In this military-dominated political space, civil society was considered a way of resisting the strong state and of incubating pluralistic society in Turkey. As the literature on women's movements in Turkey acknowledges, organized feminist women were the first group within civil society that had the courage to challenge the military dominance and voice their demands for more freedom, democracy, and gender equality (e.g., Arat, 2008;Bora & Günal, 2007;Diner & Toktaş, 2010;Marshall, 2009). 3 From the mid-1990s on, the public visibility of feminists encouraged women from other oppositional movements to mobilize around women's issues, especially from the Islamist and Kurdish movements.…”

“…Feminist CSOs thus gained an important opportunity for advancing women's rights. They were highly active and influential in the amendment processes of the Civil and the Penal Code (Arat, 2008;Kandiyoti, 2015;Marshall, 2009). While the new Civil Code (2002) guaranteed equality between men and women within the family unit, the Penal Code revision was a major step in criminalizing violence against women.…”

“…Drawing upon the Kemalist state feminism that made women's equality a national policy, they primarily focused on strengthening gender equality in the legal framework but did not question the underlying patriarchal mechanisms in the public and the private sphere (Arat, 2008;Turam, 2008). Thanks to the rise of feminist activism in the 1980s, the Kemalist women's CSOs became more engaged in combating violence against women and pushing the governments for further legal reforms regarding women's rights (Marshall, 2009). Despite their distant attitude toward organized Kurdish and Islamist women, they became a constituent part of the women's movement.…”

Transnational Labour Solidarity and Social Movement Unionism: Insights from and beyond a Women Workers' Strike in Turkey

“…One element feeding into the current situation of mutual neglect and suspicion between the labour and feminist movements in Turkey is the absence of a history of positive interaction, which has been central to co‐operation elsewhere (Luxton 2004). Unions and the wider leftist movement in Turkey have often ascribed to ‘the notion that feminism is a bourgeois phenomenon’ (Müftüler‐Bac 1999: 307), and ‘labour issues were never a priority in the feminist movement’ (Marshall 2009: 374). While feminist scholars have since long been concerned with the economic situation of women in Turkey, and women's NGOs are centrally involved in projects promoting women's entrepreneurship, the extensive involvement of feminist groups in both the Novamed case and a few more recent cases seems to indicate that labour issues are moving up on their agenda, and that they are becoming more critical of neoliberalism.…”