Thoughts….
Young Women in Turkey – Is Feminism Rearing It’s Head in 2009?
I was traveling in Turkey reading Where The Girls Are by Susan Douglas, a book suggested by Al Stravitsky, head of the graduate program I am entering in the Fall at the University of Oregon. Newsweek wrote the following review:
“What a pleasure it is to find Susan Douglas….Engagingly written, Where the Girls Are provides a first-rate analysis of the music, movies and TV imagery that helped shape female psyches.
Where the Girls Are is a book about a generation of women caught between two generations, that of their mothers and that of a new age of feminism. It is a journey through time when women were beginning to feel the rumblings of feminism and wrestling with who they were. Were they destined to follow the path of their mothers or were they destined for a new age of women, unleashed and free of constraints.
The young women of Turkey, especially those from very observant families, seem restless. Are they time bombs, as it was said to me, secretly learning about the world through their cell phones, their text messaging, the internet? Do they look at their mothers and long for a different life? Are the new technologies shaping the young, Turkish female psyches? Do they want to burn their scarves?
As I read each page of Where the Girls Are I began to recall my own life as part of the baby boomer generation. Every paragraph was about connection, connection, connection. Yes, I remember the Beatles, , Yes, I thought I wanted a life different from my mother’s and my grandmother’s before her, Yes, I had grown up with a certain set of rules and yes I felt conflicted between what I knew and the possibilities that that the media were dangling in front of me. Thank you, Susan Douglas for giving me a clearer perspective of not only how our daughters are manipulated by the media today, but how we, as young women of the 60’s and 70’s, were blindly manipulated by the media. The magazines, the fashion models and the new feminist role models emerging, wreaked havoc in our lives.
Once I got passed being absorbed in my own revisionist history, I awakened to the realities of the women, as I observed them, in Turkey.
The more I read the more the words began weaving back and forth through what I was seeing. And as the weaving took form, I began to see a very different picture of generations of Turkish women. I tried to observe without judgment, but just by taking the photos I was making a judgment.
I wanted to talk to these young women and ask how they felt about their own lives and the world they lived in, but as one of the University students in Turkey later wrote to me,
“the observant youth would not be able to talk to you about the issues of the world because some of them I know, and in general, they are suppressed by their families and by the closed society they live in. They don’t get the proper education so they don’t watch the news or read the newspaper or even read anything.”
And yet – look at the cell phones they carry. and the bright colors they wear..
While visiting the Mevlana Museum in Konya to learn about the sect known as the Whirling Dervishes, we were surrounded by a sea of scarves!
One woman in particular caught my eye – the Lady in Red
She had my attention long before this photo was taken. She was not in any way submissive, She was covered from head to toe, but flamboyantly and very stylish. The color red was her message, she was in charge and she was poised to have her way. She had her own camera and was directing her family photos. While the the family was posing for someone else, I quietly stayed in the background and and captured that moment on film. Her expression, coquettish, her clothes, daring and her posture, defiant. I, too, love red.
Will the daughters of the women in these photos be content?
Are these young women unhappy, or are they wrestling with their discontent?
The Elections in Iran
As I write about the women of Turkey, I am following the elections in Iran and reading Childen of Jihad, by Jared Cohen. I am listening to and watching the discontent of the youth and especially that of the women in Iran. Cohen describes articulately and in depth what Generation Connex is discovering. Youth wanting to connect to youth outside of their own world .
Are the seeds of change happening in Turkey as they are in Iran?
Thoughts….by Trudi Morrison, founder
*My Disclaimer: In the photos I have taken, I have captured a moment but not necessarily the truth. They are a mystery. They are an art form, they tell whatever story you see, whatever personal experience you and I bring to the photo.