Original air date: 25 October 2015 | In the 1920s and 1930s, politicians, intellectuals, and members of the public joined a lively debate about the issue of female suicide in Turkey. While we cannot know whether the rates of female suicide were actually skyrocketing during this period, the fact that so many public figures began to treat this issue as a central concern tells us a lot about the relationship between the modernizing state of Early Republican Turkey and the women whom it governed. In this episode, Nazan Maksudyan explores what might have provoked this debate, what it might say about the state and its relationship to women, gender, and the female body, and how women themselves might have used suicide as a means of asserting their agency.

More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/10/suicide-turkey.html

Nazan Maksudyan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Kemerburgaz University. Her work examines the social, cultural, and economic history of children and youth during the late Ottoman period.

Episode No. 205
Release date: 25 October 2015
Recording location: Kemerburgaz University
Editing by Onur Engin, generously funded by a paid assistantship at Koç University under the supervision of Associate Professor Nina Ergin
Bibliography courtesy of Nazan Maksudyan
Image courtesy of Nicholas Danforth

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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A. Holly Shissler. "Beauty Is Nothing to be Ashamed of: Beauty Contests as Tools of Women’s Liberation in Early Republican Turkey," Comparative Studies of South-Asia, Africa and the Middle-East 24 (2004): 107–122.

Ruth A. Miller. The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective. Aldershot, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2007.

Pelin Başçı. "Love, Marriage, and Motherhood: Changing Expectations of Women in Late Ottoman Istanbul," Turkish Studies, 4 (2003): 145-177.

Nazan Maksudyan. “Control over Life, Control over Body: Female Suicide in Early Republican Turkey.” Women’s History Review (Spring 2014): 1.

Nazan Maksudyan. "'This time women as well got involved in politics!': Nineteenth Century Ottoman Women's Organizations and Political Agency." In Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective to Ottoman Urban History, Nazan Maksudyan (ed.) New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. pp. 107-135.

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