writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

My efforts in this study have been to try to discover the biographies of these women: who they
were, what they wrote, and why and how they struggled; and I have done so by conducting research
that included meetings with their family members, reading books written about them, conducting
internet research, benefiting from various institutional and private archives and libraries, sifting
through newspaper articles and obituaries of the period, and reading all journal and magazine
articles written about them. But I obtained first hand information only about few women. While
many western countries have a host of libraries, archives, dictionaries, biographies, and web sites all
about women, unfortunately Turkey is devoid of such resources about the women who lived within
its borders. Even the names of some of the women of most renown are rarely, if ever, mentioned in
accounts of a family's history. That being the case, hundreds of pages of text have to be combed to
find whatever information one can glean about those women and then, when that information is
compiled, it is only sufficient to form the start of a biography, and never a biography itself. The
biographical information about female members of parliament published in the Parliamentary
Catalogue also consists of only a couple of sentences. The acquisition of correct and detailed
information about female activists still depends on personal effort and is only possible through the
shared efforts of the still‐living relatives of these women. It is, however, possible to gather summary
information about some of the more famous women, information like their birthplaces, the names of
their fathers, and (if fortune is on our sides) the names of their mothers, where they studied, where
they worked, and – if they wrote books – the names and brief information of those works. On the
other hand, it is virtually impossible to acquire any information about the organizational activities of
these women (acknowledging that such information is vital when writing the biography of an activist
woman). Still, thanks to some detailed scholarly papers, some of these biographies are available.
And, in very exceptional cases, a very small number of women did carefully preserve the documents
relative to their personal and public lives. Some of these archives are even richer than those of
which a historian might have only dreamed.
Having the opportunity to meet with the relatives of the first generation of feminists of the
Republic was a very moving experience for me and I was sincerely grateful for their willingness to
open their doors and to so generously share with me the memories and any extant documentation of
their mothers and/or their aunts, for all of the remnants remaining from the years spanning the brief
slice of history from 1924 to 1935 have left us with huge gaps in memory and documentation. Sitting
around a table and listening to the life stories of these activists women being related by their
daughters or grand‐daughters made me feel as though I were saving the stories of these women
from oblivion. Entering these homes and meeting with so many different people also made me
realize that when private papers has not been preserved, it only takes two generations for these
important memories and information to fade completely away. During the course of the interviews I
held, I understood that – other than a few rare examples of keen family memory – these memories
last the maximum of three generations. In addition to this, I saw in a dramatic way how dichotomies
of life‐death and memory–amnesia are related to the documents a person leaves behind.
Accordingly, because Western women are either less afraid of death, or view death as a natural
component of life, they tend to arrange their documents before they die. For example, prior to their
deaths, western female activists who died in the 1870s both saved their important documents and
then bequeathed them to a trusted organization. Whereas, is it possible for us today to find such
archives preserved by the Ottoman feminists who lived and died during this same period? Thus it is
that, as I was preparing the biographies of first generation women feminists, I found that it was very
difficult – if not altogether impossible – to find firsthand sources.
Seniha Rauf, a member of the administrative board of the Union of Turkish Women and one of
the delegates to the 1935 Congress, was born in Istanbul in 1886. She was Turkey's first woman
museum curator and the the first to translate Shakespeare's works into Turkish. She represented the
27