page_title: Women in Turkey
section_title: Feminism
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Turkey / Politics / Feminism
caption_attribution_description: photo of novelist and feminist political leader Halide Edib Adıvar
context_page_description: Women in Turkey are the women who live in or are from Turkey. Turkey gave full political rights to women, including the right to elect and be elected locally in 1930. Article 10 of the Turkish Constitution bans any discrimination, state or private, on the grounds of sex. It is the first country which had a woman as the President of its Constitutional Court. The article 41 of the Turkish Constitution reads that the family is "based on equality between spouses".
  The Turkish feminist movement began in the 19th century during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Welfare Organization of Women, was founded in 1908. The ideal of gender equality was embraced after the declaration of the Republic of Turkey by the administration of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose modernizing reforms included a ban on polygamy and the provision of full political rights to Turkish women by 1930.
  Women in Turkey continue to be the victims of rape and honor killings, especially in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern Anatolia region, where most of honor-related crimes against women take place.
context_section_description: The first wave of Turkish feminism occurred in the early 20th century, when women's organizations began to demand equality in civic and political rights. During this early period, the women's rights claims overlapped with the Kemalist reform process in the aftermath of the Republic.
  Second wave feminism reached Turkey in the 1980s, bringing up issues common to the movement which had emerged in the West in the 1960s, such as the elimination of violence against women, the oppression experienced in the family and the challenge against virginity tests, then a common practice for women who were about to get married or who had been subjected to sexual assault.
  The rise of a global civil society and the internationalization of women’s organizations and the accession of Turkey to the European Union have given women’s organizations the possibility of accessing foreign funds. The number of women’s organizations as well as the projects that these organizations conduct have increased. On the 23 July 1995, it was allowed for political parties to form women's branches, which beforehand was banned in the Turkish constitution of 1982.
caption: Halide Edib Adıvar
   Turkish novelist and feminist political leader.
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