It describes not the Atatürkist reforms -- it was written in 1921 at a time when the nationalist movement was still brewing -- but a city under Allied occupation. Like accounts of contemporary Berlin, it describes a world in which the old ways were breaking down. Political upheaval and post-war trauma meant that long-held social conventions were melting into disuse.The author, Demetra Vaka Brown, was an İstanbul Greek who emigrated to America before returning to the city of her birth. “Unveiled Ladies” is the sequel to an equally interesting volume called “Haremlik,” which describes the situation of women in İstanbul at the height of the reign of Abdülhamid II. Both titles have an Orientalist ring, clearly designed to excite the curiosity of the turn-of-the-century reader about the hidden women's quarters of a Turkish home. Yet it contains fabulous stories, like that of the Ottoman woman who torments her Italian officer lover to extract revenge for her nation's defeat.
For all that, the book titillates to good purpose and is a valuable guide to the spirit of its age. It captures the post-Great War sense in İstanbul that European civilization was on the verge of collapse. The new Turkey, Turkish nationalists believed, would become the preserve of Western values, just as the Byzantine Empire became the receptacle of Latin virtues after the barbarians sacked old Rome. We forget too easily that for the founders of the Turkish Republic, the “clash of civilizations” referred to a war-stricken Europe, divided by ideology and tearing itself apart.
Vaka Brown moved easily through the upper echelons of İstanbul society, and so for her there was no clash of cultures between those women trying to modernize by shedding their veil and a conservative underclass. The notion of Turkey being in permanent revolution against its own backwardness did not preoccupy her in the way that it does her intellectual successors.
Vaka Brown had a slew of contemporary women authors like Grace Ellison or Melek Hanım who played off the Western fascination with the harem as a hook for their own insights. Their spirit is not dead. I confess to having read with prurient interest a series by Ayşe Arman in the Hürriyet newspaper. Arman promised to take her readers on a journey to an exotic country -- the one right under their very noses. As a columnist, she has a reputation of being something of a socialite and her field of expertise is styles and trends. So her decision to dress up in religious-inspired headgear and clothing and see how her life would change promised to be something of a journalist coup.
Alas, it turned out to be something of a damp squib. Other writers in this newspaper have reported to feeling very much offended by Arman's account of slumming it in the land of the pious, patronized by her giggling as she tries to shimmy into a head-to-toe rubber swimming outfit. I have to confess that wasn't my reaction, although I wish her editor had told her that any decent piece of reporting shouldn't just be about “me.” For me, the problem was that she didn't try to trespass into a domain any more forbidding than a fancy Bosporus nightclub where the doorman politely squirmed and suggested she might be happier coming back another night. Even then she did not confront the bouncer's prejudice but treated it all as a great lark. Her greatest insight was how by putting on a head covering she became invisible to her old world. Her closest friends and relatives didn't recognize her. However, for the most part people were distant if courteous. Who in Turkey, after all, can be shocked by the sight of a headscarf?
The late Grace Ellison traveled from İzmir to Ankara in 1923 -- a hazardous journey in those days, particularly for a single woman reporter, and I suppose the best sort of journalism carries a whiff of danger. Had Ayşe Arman not disguised herself but announced to her colleagues at Hürriyet that she had a Damascene conversion and henceforth would be wearing a headscarf to work, an account of her colleague's reactions would have made the better story.
