DISCARDING VEILS

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 250, 18 July 1931, Page 22

DISCARDING VEILS

Trukish Girls in Revolt WESTERN IDEAS SPREAD Five yeara after Mustaphs , Kemal Pasha urged, but did not command, the women bf Turkey to discard their veils, the women of the Anatolian town that is named after him, Ghm-Aintab, have decided to heed the Westernisation call. They recently held a mass meeting, and by popular vote decreed that the day of the hat had come for them. It was easy enough for the Ga*i to order the docile men of Turkey to change their headgear, but the women ate different. So much so that the vast majority of Anatolian women still wear the traditional "tehartcb.if”—the loose hood covering head and shoulders. They will take it off only when, as in the case of Gasi-Aintab, they decided to do SO of their own accord. Turkish city women are also independent, but Kemal Pasha’s modernising ideas have been to their liking, and they, perhaps, have become even more Western than their liberator calculated. One thing that worries Turkey’s leaders is that these emancipated young Women refuse to marry. Marriage still savours too much of the harem, and the novol role of bachelor girl amuses them vastly. ' While the hew freedom means chiefly poker, contract bridge, and fox-trotting to the wealthy city matrons, their daughters and the girls of the middle class are embarking seriously in professions and jobs. The Turkish medical and law schools number many girl students. ' Business offices and banks are full of bobbed-haired typists, whose eyes, still shadowed With kohl, study figures and keyboards instead of the patterns of harem lattices. In the most powerful of Turkish banks, the Banque d’Affaites, a young woman, Hatche Hanim, has been promoted to an important administrative post. In municipal councils throughout Turkey women for the last year have been deliberating with men on the problems of local government. In the near future they will be in Parliament. It is reported that they would have been there this year if they had not accepted so enthusiastically the motor-ear rides to the polls offered by Fethi Bey, leader of the Opposition party, during the municipal elections. That was a defection for which Kemal Pasha’s People’s Party cannot at once forgive them. To overcome the bucolic indifference of Anatolian women toward the wonders of emancipation, the Stambolil Women’s Union (n Constantinople is launching a big crusade. It will send Out groups Of city women to lecture to women of the provinces On feministic Subjects, in the hope of whetting their appetite for hats, votes and other gifts of the Kemalist regime.