Women in law, women in literature: Gender equality in Turkish constitutional experience

This paper tries to reconstruct the historical evolution of the Turkish-Ottoman debate on the subject of women's rights and emancipation through a cross-analysis of the three Republican-era constitutions. The analysis will refer to the narrative productions of female writers, both Muslim and secular, as an auxiliary source for inquiring legal effects at the sociocultural level with regard to the redefinition of gender relations. I will thus attempt to illustrate, on the one hand, the positions that countered the emergence of feminist discourse and, on the other, the ways in which women's claims took shape within the unique Turkish dialectic between secularism and Islam.