Political Parties of Women’s Suffrage: Two Cases from the Early 20th Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33831/feebhe49Keywords:
Women’s suffrage, Political parties, First wave of feminism, Turkish modernization, DemocracyAbstract
The early 20th century witnessed the emergence of women’s suffrage political organizations motivated by the first wave of feminism. The National Woman’s Party in the United States (U.S.) and the Women People’s Party in the newly founded Turkish Republic were established as a result of the first wave of feminist movements advocating for women’s suffrage. After suffrage was achieved in the 1920s, women in the U.S. fought for fifty more years to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), while Turkish feminism entered a period of silence and discontinuity from the 1930s to the 1980s. Using a comparative methodology, this article attempts to explore the reasons for this divergence to draw inferences about the future of women’s rights movements. The article compares the two parties in terms of the framework of the movements underpinning the parties, including their campaigning strategies, and the political climates in which they struggled. From this comparison, the study identifies the necessity of mass-reaching movements and a democratic political climate for the survival of women’s rights movements.
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