172
E. ÖZCAN
patriarchal state, but on the other, they were aware of the fundamental differences that made it difficult to see the Islamist women as allies.3 At the same time, other feminists from the left and scholars from the secular circles cautioned against the anti-feminist strands of thought in conservative Islamist women’s writing and saw women’s headscarf as another manifestation of patriarchal oppression and a symbol of men’s control over women’s sexuality (Koc 2015; Merçil 2007; Özbudun 2016).
Conservative/Right-Wing Women or “Islamic Feminists”? Islamist politics, that had remained marginal until the 1990s in Turkey, managed to translate the unrest caused by economic upheavals, poverty, secular authoritarianism, oppression of the Kurds, and the deficiencies in democratic institutions into a populist language, carrying the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power in 2002. Within the last fourteen years, AKP and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have replaced secular authoritarianism with conservative authoritarianism. With its tight grasp on the media, AKP has effectively built a propaganda machine that accompanied the elimination of dissent (by going after journalists, writers, and academics) and silencing the opposition (by going after leftist NGOs, feminist women’s organizations, and pro-Kurdish opposition leaders among others). As of this writing in 2017, academics, intellectuals, and observers increasingly express concern about the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey under the AKP regime (Esen and Gumuscu 2016; Kadıoğlu 2016; Tugal 2016). The history of feminist movements in Turkey entered a new phase with the rise of Erdoğan’s right-wing Islamist Justice and Development Party. This phase requires the reassessment of the narratives and histories about leftist feminism in Turkey and its interaction with the Islamist women. The Trump administration might create a similar push toward reading the history of feminism in the United States in light of the less prominent narratives that emphasize feminism’s interaction with right-wing women who are both feminism’s beneficiaries and fervent opponents. Women’s right-wing/conservative activism is better documented in the United States than in Turkey (Dworkin 1983; Faludi 1991; Nickerson 2012; Schreiber 2008). In Turkey, right-wing/conservative women’s activism has been reduced to women’s search for the rights to wear the heads-
