ABSTRACT
In 1915 the British feminist and Turkophile Grace Ellison wrote about her visit to Turkey on behalf of a British suffrage organization.1 Her book An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem aimed to reveal the true state of Turkish women’s lives and to challenge Orientalist stereotypes. She emphasized the high standards of education among elite women and the level of support among pro gressive men for female emancipation. Notably, Ellison also wrote in consider able detail about clothes, especially about the familiarity of elite Ottoman women with European clothes and furniture and the codes of conduct which accompanied these. Although changes in dress were often seen as signs of mod ernization, Ellison, despite her progressive feminist politics, romanticizes the Ottoman harem system (Melman 1992) and aestheticizes the veil, seeing it not as a mechanism of seclusion but as a fetching head-dress. She herself adores capering about in a veil. These contradictory attitudes are seen most acutely in her 1928 work when she returns to review the new Turkish republic. Although she is thrilled with its modernizing reforms and the advances she sees in women’s social position, the veil remains a garment so tantalizing to behold and to wear that, when Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), propounding his project of national and gender liberation, argues resoundingly that ‘All that nonsense is going to cease. Harems, veils, lattice windows . . . must go’, Ellison is moved to intervene:
I could not resist the feminine protest, - ‘But veils are picturesque. No more becoming a head-dress has ever been invented for women.5 ‘We cannot remain in the Dark Ages to supply foreign writers with copy,5 was the answer. (Ellison 1928: p. 23)
It is no coincidence that Mustafa Kemal prioritizes getting rid of the veil; not only is he opposed ideologically to the Islamic gender division of society but he is also by now determined to limit the power of the conservative ulema (clergy) who had supported the sultan in his opposition to the nationalists (Arat 1994; Kandiyoti 1991; Shaw and Shaw 1994). But what is so delightful about the spectatorial pleasure offered by the figure of the veiled Turkish woman that it threatens the British feminist's political commitment to female emancipation?
