This dissertation explores the construction of womanhood and female subjectivities in the educational discourse of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey between 1859 and 1933. It approaches women’s education through multiple entry points, including girls’ rüşdiyye (secondary) schools, women’s education’s relation to “the West,” stereotypes of women, and representations of muallimes (female teachers). The analysis draws on a comprehensive range of sources, including secondary school curricula, women’s magazines, education journals, literary works, and autobiographical texts. Methodologically, the thesis employs historical case study evaluation, qualitative thematic analysis, and the analytical concepts of stereotypes and countertypes. The overarching theoretical framework of gender and educationalisation is supported by the concepts of patriarchal bargaining, Occidentalism, and social disciplining. The dissertation argues that education functioned as a central site through which womanhood was negotiated, modernised, regulated, and politicised. Four interrelated sub-studies demonstrate that 1) women were prioritised in state-led moral regulation and social disciplining through education; 2) female subjectivities were shaped by ambivalent engagements with “the West,” where Occidentalist tensions functioned as patriarchal bargains; 3) women developed flexible stereotypes through educational discourse to navigate social transformation in the making of the “ideal patriotic Turkish woman;” and 4) the muallime emerged as both a product and an active agent of modernisation, negotiating tensions between professionalism, nationalism, domesticity, and morality. Overall, women were positioned as key targets of state and societal regulation, with educational discourse framing motherhood, morality, health, and patriotism as core female responsibilities. At the same time, women actively appropriated educationalisation to legitimise access to schooling, articulate professional identities, and claim social and economic agency. These strategies enabled participation in public life while simultaneously reaffirming gendered, classed, and national hierarchies by recasting structural inequalities as problems for education to solve. The dissertation contributes to the history of women’s education in Turkey by offering a gender-aware reading of early girls’ curricula and by foregrounding women’s own educational discourse. It demonstrates that similar curricular reforms imposed stronger moral expectations on girls than on boys and reveals clear divergences between male- and female-authored representations of womanhood. By combining gender, educationalisation, and Occidentalism, the study provides a theoretical framework for analysing women’s agency in a non-Western context, showing that educational discourse functioned as a site of negotiation rather than a linear path toward emancipation.
Badegül Eren Aydinlik (Thu,) studied this question.