TURKISH WOMEN. REVOLT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20922, 11 July 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

TURKISH WOMEN. REVOLT

DECISION TO DOFF VEIL.

ROLE OF " BACHELOR GIRLS."

SPREAD OF WESTERN MANNERS,

Five years after Mustapha Ivemal Pasha urged, but did not-commai'S tho women of Turkey to discard their veils, the •women of the Anatolian town that is named after him, Gazi-Aintab, have decided to heed the Westernisation call. They recently held a mass meeting, and by popular vote decreed that the day of tho hat, had come for them. It* was easy enough for the Gazi to order the docile men of Turkey to change their headgeax - , but the women are different. 'So much so that the vast majority of Anatolian women still wear the traditional " tchartchaf " —the loose hood covering head and shoulders. They will take it off only when, as in till' casa. of Gazi-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 r young women refuse to marry. Marriage still savours too much of the harem, and the novel role of bachelor girl amuses them vastly. While the new freedom means chiefly poker, contact bridge, and fox-trotting

to the wealthy city matrons, their daughters and the girls of the middle class are embarking, seriously in profes : sions 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'affaires, 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-car 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 ovei-come the bucolic indifference of Anatolian women toward the wonders of emancipation, the Stamboul Women's Union in Constaninople is launching a big crusade. It will send out groups d 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 o£ the Kemalist regime.