TURKISH GIRL IN WAR

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 810, 2 November 1929, Page 29

TURKISH GIRL IN WAR

Ultra-emancipated Turkish women are preparing a revolution to ovei’throw woman’s traditional role in time of war. This group, led by a bi’illiant member of Stamboul’s new feminine intelligentsia, Shasiye Hanenx, declares that in the next war the enlightened women of Turkey will not be the theoretical “girl behind the man behind the gun,” but actually the girl behind the actual gun. Shasiye Hanem says that if war falls again upon this generation, she herself will lead into the trenches women who refuse to bear again the intolerable wartime burden of waiting behind the lines, says a United States exchange. “Keeping the home fires burning when there are only tatters of nerves and shreds of hearts to kindle the flames is a harder job than soldiering,” says this young reformer. “We pray to Allah that there may be no ‘next war,’ but if there is, we Turkish women who have seen our mothers wither beneath the bitter waiting at home w-ill never submit to their fate. We will fight in the front lines, and die outright, rather than have our hearts and minds slowly murdered.” This potential Joan of Arc of the new Turkey would have women fight in war partly for the sake of their own sanity. Turkish alienists bear out her sentiment that over half of Turkish city women today are neurasthenic or insane, one of the basic causes being Turkey’s incessant wars in the last half-century, during which the only occupation of the thenunemancipated city women was to wring their hands and go mad. Peasant women, on the contrary, among whom the percentage of insanity is low, have always taken an active part in warfare, many of them fighting in the front lines, but many more transporting ammunition and providing supplies. Another aspect of woman's part in the next war, new enough in Turkey, is given in an editorial in the official Turkish Press. Here the point is made that the greatest virtue of the emancipation of women is to have rendered them capable of carrying on the civil affairs of the nation during war.