Turkey held its first ‘Miss Turkey’ beauty contest in 1929. This competition was not just about beauty, but about a very specific kind of Western beauty that highlighted Atatürk’s success in constructing the new Turkish woman. Miss Turkey would be crowned for her acquiescence to this modern ideal. This competition was more about Turkish nationalism and the success of Atatürk as a liberator of women than it was about aesthetic standards. Supporters of the regime put forward another response to the Muslim woman question that reaffirmed Atatürk’s
international agenda and helped solidify international legitimacy in the post-WWI world order. P.T. Barnum conducted the first beauty contest to attract audiences to his show in 1854. However, once he realized that “respectable” women would not participate, the format of the
contest changed and participants submitted their photographs instead. This format garnered huge success and quickly spread to national and international newspapers. Starting in the 1920s, beauty contests took on a distinctly nationalistic character. The idea of beauty pageant
contestants as national figures and symbols is at the center of Sarah Banet-Weiser's research. In
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity, Banet-Weiser focused on the Miss America pageant and argues that the beauty pageant defies a singular
definition. She contends that pageants create a national field of shared symbols and practices that define femininity and ethnicity in national terms. According to Banet-Weiser, the pageant tries to reassure tensions about femininity, but because femininity is an unstable and unfixed category, the pageant cannot accommodate all of these tensions. Instead, Miss America does complex cultural work in terms of race, gender, and the nation.297 The same can be said for the Miss Turkey and Miss Universe contests in the 1920s and 1930s.
297 Sarah Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity (Berkeley:
148
The newspaper Cumhuriyet sponsored and covered in great detail the first ‘Miss Turkey’ contest in 1929. Cumhuriyet was founded in 1924 by Yunus Nadi, an intellectual, journalist, and politician who had been active in the Young Turk Period. In 1918 he had founded and edited the newspaper Yeni Gun in Istanbul but moved the paper and its press to Ankara after the French and British occupied Istanbul. He also helped found the Wilsonian Principals Society of Istanbul in 1919. Both he and the paper supported the nationalist cause throughout the war. Then, in 1924, after the abolition of the caliphate—an act that had been greeted with some hostility by the existing Istanbul press—he returned to Istanbul to publish Cumhuriyet. His new paper
Cumhuriyet supported the new republican regime. While at times critical of the government’s corruption or inefficiency, the paper enthusiastically supported the government’s social reforms
and initiatives.298
In this context Cumhuriyet covered the beauty contest in conjunction with government initiatives that held direct bearing on women. The press coverage also presented initiatives the government wanted to illustrate through the use of women, like the national language reform. Throughout the 1930s the newspaper published frequent front page stories and photographs on the beauty contest, women’s suffrage, the introduction of women judges in courts of law, and the Women’s Union (Kadin Birligi), a political group dedicated to improving the position of women in Turkey.299 Beauty contests were featured with the same level of importance as the social and legal reforms affecting women’s lives.
As previously mentioned, Turkey’s Republican regime focused on policies involving
religion. The government aimed to modernize religious life on the one hand, while also
298 A. Holly Shissler, “Beauty Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of: Beauty Contests As Tools of Women’s Liberation in
Early Republican Turkey,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 109.
149
criticizing those they felt were reactionary in their religious practices. These issues played out on the pages of Cumhuriyet and present another example how the paper used women to illustrate certain objectives of the regime. Stories about “modern” women participating in beauty pageants were placed next to stories regarding “progressive” religion or religious “reactionaries.” This had the potential to shift people’s perceptions on women by suggesting there was nothing morally questionable in women’s participation in these contests. Holly Shissler argues, “the body of women contestants was indeed read as a marker of a particular kind of, not feminine, but female, subject: the kind whose physical presence in a public space did not exclude her from the social contract, and who thus took an important first step towards becoming a citizen and a public actor.”300 The placement of these images also served to highlight the “backwardness” of religious
reactionaries.
The announcement of Turkey’s first beauty contest happened just before Ramadan. There was an article entitled, “Who is Turkey’s Most Beautiful Woman?” next to an article that read “Ramadan is Coming.” In later publications, the prolific coverage of the contest was placed alongside articles covering the trial of religious figures involved in the Menemen protests, where a dervish demanded the return of the caliphate. When policemen showed up to disband the demonstration, the crowd beheaded a policeman and paraded his head around on a pike. The contrasts in images grew more striking, with studio portraits of attractive young women dressed in Western fashion placed next to “harsh and unflattering pictures of traditionally dressed, bearded, and turbaned Sheikhs and Hocas.”301There are two possibilities when analyzing the
positioning of these articles. One possibility was that the editors intended to create a dichotomy
300 Shissler, 110.
150
between devout practitioners of Islam as “backwards” and the new Turkish woman as “progressive” and “modern.” Another possibility was the editor’s goal of normalizing and safeguarding women’s participation in these pageants as morally sound. If the contest, and therefore the women participants, was construed as immoral the newspaper could subliminally use the positioning of these images of women to undercut this impression. Either way, the newspaper served as an echo chamber for Atatürk’s Westernization efforts.
Adopting the format of the pageants in the United States, Cumhuriyet laid a foundation to ensure readers would be open to the idea of a beauty contest. In the weeks leading up to the contest announcement, the paper pictured foreign female dignitaries touring the country. Each photo highlighted how modern and chic each of the unveiled women looked. These figures, generally appearing on the front page of the newspaper, included queens from Serbia, Romania, and Afghanistan. In addition to these front-page images of women, Cumhuriyet had a regular column titled “What’s going on in the World,” which often depicted women in Europe or the U.S. at the beach or glamorously attired to enjoy the nightlife in European capitals.302
Turkish beauty contests were exercises in nationalism. By projecting a “modern” national image through the display of its “modern” Westernized women, the contests became a way for Turkey to claim it reached the status of a “civilized” nation. Since civilizational and Orientalist discourses continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these beauty contests presented Turkey with another opportunity to answer the global Muslim woman question. The woman to be crowned Miss Turkey was sent to compete abroad in international beauty contests. From the
151
beginning, the editorial staff of the paper presented these young women contestants in terms of national pride, nationalism, and Turkey’s status as a “civilized” country on the world stage.303
With the earliest mention of the contest, Cumhuriyet posited the rhetorical question: “Can
it really be the case that Turkish women are less beautiful than those of other nations?”304 It then invited the reader to compare foreign beauty queens to the women of Turkey. There are several comments about what an honor it is for Turkish women to represent their country abroad. Also, during this period, the newspaper published several editorials that lauded the revolutionary changes affecting Turkish womanhood, with one editorial addressing how women had left the harem behind in exchange for a Parisian nightclub. Time and again, the beauty contest was linked to Turkey’s image in the “civilized” world.305 Beauty contests were a rising phenomenon
in countries that had recently undergone modernizing revolutions.306 In the domestic context, beauty contests were often intended as tools for effecting a social revolution at home, and in the international context they functioned as a way to project a revolution to audiences abroad. As Holly Shissler argues, “participation in international beauty contests was an important form of nationalist expression and means of representing the new state on the world stage, as an equal accepted among the ‘great’ and ‘civilized’ nations of the earth.”307
303 Shissler, 110.
304 Shissler, 111.
305 Shissler, 112.
306 Shissler, 113.
152
Figure 3.2 Keriman Halis submission photo for Miss Turkey
The power of beauty contests to project a national image on an international stage is evidenced by Keriman Halis, who won the Miss Universe pageant in 1932. Various winners of the Miss Turkey pageant competed in Miss Europe contests with no success. This caused many to feel disillusioned with Cumhuriyet’s beauty contests, such that in 1932 there were not enough participants to hold the contest. Later that same year, however, Belgian organizers of the Miss Universe contest extended an invitation to Turkey. A Miss Turkey was hurriedly selected.
Keriman Halis enrolled minutes before the final selection as one of only eight candidates and, the eighteen-year-old Halis was selected as the winner. The young winner traveled to Spa, Belgium for the international contest with alacrity and fanfare—her train was met by several large groups at every train station stop along the Turkish border. The fanfare only multiplied when Keriman Halis won the Miss Universe crown. This led to an extended tour of Europe for the winner, and to extensive coverage of the victory in the Turkish press at home, with a congratulatory
153
Turkish race is the best race in the world, it is unsurprising that a Turkish woman should win Miss Universe.”308 Keriman Halis’ victory was also a victory for Atatürk who could point specifically to Halis as proof of the success of Turkey’s entrance into modernity and the European world order.
Figure 3.3 Keriman Halis after winning the title Miss Universe.
Countries throughout the Middle East paid close attention to the policies implemented by the Kemalist government during the 1920s and 1930s. This keen observation occurred because for some, Atatürk’s leadership and accomplishments served as a useful example worth emulating in their own countries. For others, Turkey’s secularization process was a cause for alarm in Muslim majority countries. In other words, for some countries in the region, Turkey would be a model and for others a cautionary tale. Either way, people in the Middle East understood that there were lessons to learn from the Turkish experience. Middle Eastern countries that debated the pros and cons of Turkish reforms used those celebrations and critiques as a framework for their own cultural, social, economic and political conversations. Prominent Middle Eastern newspapers covered Turkey’s transformation, and Egyptian periodicals in particular reflected an
154
awareness that the events in Turkey held great potential to influence changes in Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries.309
The Kemalist regime knew various Middle Eastern countries were watching closely. Turkish officials and institutions even published and distributed pamphlets in Arabic and French, for foreign audiences. These works routinely celebrated the new nation’s success under Atatürk. On the fifteenth anniversary of the new republic, a photo album was issued that celebrated Turkey’s transformation. An Arabic translation of the album was printed in Istanbul and then distributed to Arab readers, exactly ten years after the language reform eliminated the Arabic- based alphabet in Turkey. In the late 1930s Turkey began using radio broadcasts to disseminate propaganda to the Middle East. Early broadcasts were only heard in Syria, but later reached as far as Egypt, Iraq, and Kuwait. Turkey willingly took on the position of “role model” for other countries in the region and this meant cultivating a specific image abroad.310 Therefore, the Turkish government closely followed the Arab press and used these different propaganda tools to refute or complement whatever messages were articulated abroad. A London Times
correspondent reported in 1935, that:
“although ‘Kamalism’[sic] is the natural outcome of Turkey’s struggle for independence and is designed first to meet purely Turkish conditions, a strong feeling exists in the minds of Turkish rulers that it contains valuable lessons for other countries whose political and economic independence is not assured. It is indeed believed that Persia and Afghanistan have already borrowed leaves from the Turkish book, and that other Asiatic or Moslem countries might profitably follow the example set them by Kamalist [sic] Turkey.”311
309 Bein, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East, 139. 310 Bein, 139–41.
155
One of the factors that determined if Turkey would be a model for the Middle East or a cautionary tale was the emancipation of women under the auspices of Kemalist state feminism. Women’s rights activists across the Middle East were inspired by the Turkish regime’s
encouragement of women to unveil, to enjoy educational and employment expansion, and to adopt the legal rights and protections spelled out in the Swiss Code. However, critics of the change in women’s social and legal positioning viewed these as dangerous precedents.312 Turkey and Atatürk were often at the center of polemical discussions on the best route for political independence, economic prosperity, and social progress in the region.
The Turkish experience as a model worth emulating appeared increasingly relevant in the 1930s. Of course, Turkey faced many critics in the region. However, Atatürk’s admirers and defenders of both him and his reforms were quite significant. Donald Webster, an American expert on Turkey at the time, published The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process in the Turkish Reformation (1939). He wrote that countries in the region were aware of the fact that Turkey functioned with full autonomy and that this prompted “not only admiration and envy, in the countries without full autonomy-but also emulation.”313 Decades later, Middle East historian Albert Hourani concluded that the Kemalist republic of the 1930s, “exercised a great influence over the political minds of the Arabs. Not only because of the success of the Turks [against European encroachment] …but because there remained profound ties, of religion, shared history and often blood relationship between Arabs and Turks.”314
312 Bein, 143.
313 Donald Everett Webster, The Turkey of Atatürk: Social Process In the Turkish Reformation (Philadelphia:
American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1939), 123.
314 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) quoted in
156
The surprising victory of Miss Turkey in the 1932 Miss Universe competition presented Turkey with an opportunity to promote internationally the country’s answer to the global Muslim woman question. Keriman Halis’ image graced European and North American newspapers and Turkey quickly took ownership of her success to further promote their answer to the Muslim woman question, while reinforcing that their response was indeed the best answer.315 The Kemalist regime hailed Keriman Halis as a marker of Turkey’s success and its ability to nurture a new liberated and educated “modern” woman on par with women found in other “civilized” nations. In 1932 The Times in London published an article called, “Feminism in Turkey” where the correspondent put forward a positive narrative by noting that Turkey:
“acquired one notable victory at the expense of women chosen from Western
countries…as a symbol of the new freedom which Turkish women have won, and a proof to the world that Turkey has finally shaken off the shackles which kept her for so long from taking her place among civilized nations.”316
Different newspapers in the Middle East were not far behind with their own reports on the Turkish Miss Universe. For example, the widely read Egyptian daily al-Ahram published a large photo of Halis Hanim in an evening gown on their front page, celebrating her victory. The
Egyptian pro-feminist literary magazine, al-Ma‘rid also published a photo congratulating Turkey on Halis Hanim’s victory.
After months of traveling around Europe, Keriman Halis arrived in Egypt in early 1933, in what was supposed to be the first leg of a journey that would end with a visit to the Chicago World’s Fair. Huseyin Remzi organized and publicized the Egyptian part of Halis Hanim’s tour. Remzi owned and served as editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Arabic weekly Muhadanet. In cooperation with the Cairo-based Turkish Benevolent Society, Remzi financed Halis’ time in
315 French newspapers and Yiddish periodical in New York quoted in Bein, 143.
157
Egypt. He felt Keriman Halis’ visit would foster positive publicity and good will between Turkey and Egypt.317 People thought her visit could help energize the Egypt-based Turkish community, which consisted of Muslim immigrants from Anatolia and the Balkans and their descendants. However, her visit was also expected to appeal to all Egyptians because she was a Muslim woman who embodied the modern, progressive, liberated, and beautiful face of Turkey. What was only meant to be a two-week visit, turned into a four month stay with Halis’ decision to forgo the trip to Chicago for more time spent in Egypt. For a few months in 1933 Halis Hanim experienced celebrity as an international star and informal representative of Turkey in Egypt. During this time the Middle East in general viewed her victory as a source of pride to share across the region.318
Keriman Halis Hanim arrived in Cairo where both she and her hosts were astounded to find hundreds of Egyptians gathered to witness her arrival. The Egyptian press suggested that the large crowd wanted to convey their pride in the fact that a fellow Muslim and Easterner had won Miss Universe. After this unplanned encounter with average Egyptian citizens, Halis spent the rest of her first day in meetings with politicians, dignitaries, and journalists. A delegation of the