Women and Modernity: Turkey’s Conundrums, Winter 2013

Turkey has made exceptional gains in the last decade; however, these are overshadowed by the country’s low rankings in global gender indexes. One reason behind this fact is the exclusion of headscarved women from the public sphere. As development in Turkey is commonly measured by the degree of  Western resemblance, headscarved women are marked as a “problem” and correspondingly subjected to different treatment, avowedly based on the concept of modernity. As long as the women in Turkey are subjected to different treatment contingent on their choice of dress, debates over the headscarf, or “türban”, becloud genuine problems of women and ultimately delay concrete solutions.