Turkish Women Happy in New Freedom

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6621, 6 August 1931, Page 9

Turkish Women Happy in New Freedom

LONDON. Turkey was described as a country in which women to-day, although dazed by their new freedom, are nevertheless living on an equal footing with men, by Aliss Grace Ellison, speaking recently at the AYomen’s Freedom League. Aliss Ellison was the first English woman to visit Angora during the Turkish War of Independence, and was instrumental in obtaining permission for the Turkish women to study at the University of Stamboul.

It was only in 1923 that Alustapha Kemal Paslia began his crusade to emancipate women, but already his accomplishments seem to lii.s neighbours in Europe little short of a miracle, she said.

Young Turkish girls to-day, she explained, now begin life by undergoing a course of co-education with boys. They then enter universities on equal footing with men and progress to government and business positions more advanced than those held by women in any of lire surrounding countries. Miss Ellison agreed that the newly emancipated 'women were happy, but also possibly a little dazzled by the limelight. The testing time would come later, she said, when the new interests of life in an office could be more reasonably compared with the old interests of life and when normal existence having established itself, hard work would 'be faced with its novelty worn off. In the midst of so much uncertainty, she believed, one definite thing had been accomplished. Turkey had, by the hand of her present ruler, been put in the forefront of the nations of the Near East, and, possibly for the first time in history, the people of the world could speak of Turkey with hope, as of a nation though small and poor, yet in possession of an ideal which, if followed, should make of it an influence for good in world affairs.