2017 Essays

Bedia Muvahhit and Neyyire Neyir

Atakav, Eylem

The Ottoman Empire dissolved after the First World War and was replaced by the self-consciously modern and Westernized Republic of Turkey in 1923. Turkish culture under the Ottoman rule has been characterized by historians as a traditional Islamic culture that experienced very little change for centuries. What change did occur has typically been attributed to Western contact. The Republican state evolved into what later scholars called a feminist state, which made women’s equality in the public sphere a national policy. Indeed, a secular civil code replaced the Islamic law in 1926, giving women equal civil rights. It is in this transitional period that Bedia Muvahhit became a pioneer in cinema.