Abstract
In early Republican Turkey, the government's nationalizing and secularizing project implemented many reforms related to women. The country's first president, Kemal Ataturk, asserted the need for Turkish women to "become educated in science and the arts" and predicted that they would eventually surpass European women "in many fields of scientific, intellectual, social, and economic life." Within this context, two foreign private schools, the American Collegiate Institute in Izmir and the American College for Girls in Istanbul played an important role in creating the new Turkish woman in the early Republican period, 1923-38. These schools went beyond the focus on producing educated wives and mothers and produced women who in many ways surpassed the Kemalist rhetoric. Here, Childress discusses these schools' educational goals and curricula, which both supported and transcended the Westernizing project of the Kemalist regime.
