sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

THE VOICE OF YOUNG SEMİHA SUREYA: IDEALS OF A “NEW
WOMAN” OF EARLY‐REPUBLICAN İZMİR
İklil SELÇUK *
This article focuses on the personal writings of Semiha Moralı (1911‐1989) 1 , first and foremost
with the purpose of revealing the ideals of a teenager and young woman of early republican Turkey.
Young Semiha Sureya seems to epitomize the “New Woman” the creation of whom was targeted by
the republican Kemalist regime. As a teenager, she was most passionate about building an “ideal
home” with her “ideal husband” and raising her children as an educated mother. Her project of
becoming an ‘enlightened housewife’ guided by her positivist élite education, necessitates further
analysis both in terms of what it meant to her, as well as its social meaning within the republican
reformist agenda. Based on an analysis put forward by Ayfer Karakaya‐Stump on late‐Ottoman
discourses on women’s rights, I argue that Semiha Sureya’s passionate espousal of domestic duties
that were formulated to elevate the nation to higher levels and standards was an influence that
further empowered women of her talents and education by recognizing them as “constructive” social
agents. 2 This empowerment would create women’s demands for “equitable” rights compatible with
corresponding duties expected from them. 3
In this context, this study re‐constructs the “ideal” of Semiha Sureya, which clearly comes across
in several of her writings in both Turkish and English with the help of an extensive oral history
interview with her daughter İnci Erefe. The author of the present article is the daughter of Erefe, and
Semiha Moralı’s granddaughter. Therefore, the analysis I attempt here, though shaped by several
years of a historian’s training, nevertheless carries the remnants of a distant but significant and
formative period of my life until I reached the age of 18, shared with my grandmother.
Her life story and what she wrote
Semiha was born in 1911 into the Menteşe family of wealthy landlords of the Milas Muğla district
in Western Anatolia. Her mother was of the Kâtipzâde family, the officially‐ recognized principle
notables (a‘yân) of eighteenth‐century İzmir. Semiha had an elder brother (Galip Menteşe), with
whom she received a traditional Ottoman élite education in Milas during their childhood. The loss of
her father at an early age led them to move to İzmir with their mother to live in proximity to their
aunt’s home. Life would be more challenging thereafter without a father and the financial means
they had enjoyed in his lifetime. They did, however, have a more modest yet steady income from
their family farm in Milas.
Semiha graduated from the American Collegiate Institute of İzmir (an Amercian missionary school)
in 1928. She kept memoirs beginning in her teenage years (1927‐32), while she was an ACI student.
These first‐person accounts are those of an ordinary young woman who has a passion for literature.
Her devotion to reading in Turkish, English and French continued all her life, as her translations of
novels were later published in the İzmir papers. She married a local bank director and poet
(Moralızade Rıfat Ahmet) in 1933, raised two children, and was often involved in charity work. She
lost her husband in 1976 and continued to live alone, but close to her daughter’s home in İzmir‐
Karşıyaka, until her death in 1989.
The written sources of this article consist of several notebooks of letters and essays (1927‐1933)
addressed by young Semiha to an imaginary friend; a letter to her fiancé written in English; handcopied
poems and plays by the likes of Byron, Kipling, Shakespeare and Wilde; critiques of her
favorite authors as Hüseyin Rahmi, Reşat Nuri and Namık Kemal; her own attempts of producing
short pieces of fiction; and a newspaper interview with her, published in 1984 in the İzmir paper,
*
Özyeğin University , Faculty of Social Sciences.