Transatlantic Connections in the Making of a Socialist–Feminist Framework for Social Welfare in Turkey

Ottoman Education and Roots

Sabiha Nazmi (Zekeriya Sertel) was born in 1895 in Ottoman Salonika (Thessaloniki) into a Dönme household. Dönme is a Turkish term for descendants of Jews who converted to Islam in the 17th century. The word can carry a pejorative connotation as a marker of difference and “pseudo-conversion,” yet it is also the common marker of ethnic-cultural distinction in Turkish (Baer, 2010).

Her father, Nazmi Efendi, divorced her mother, Atiye Hanım, when Sabiha was about 8 years old, after which she was raised by her mother and her mother’s family. Sabiha attended elementary and junior high schools from 1902 to 1908 and the well-known private school Terakki Mektebi (the Progress School) from 1908 to 1911 (Özkan Keresticioğlu, 2006). Access to this level of education for a young Ottoman woman was still remarkable in this era and demonstrated both a strong familial commitment to and Sabiha’s own desire for education. Growing up and being educated in Salonika had a profound impact on her intellectual and political development. As Özkan Keresticioğlu (2006, p. 494) noted, the city was “a center of social opposition, containing cultural plurality and western lifestyles.” Following high school, Sertel and her female friends, who were excluded from a university education because of their gender, founded the Tefeyyüz Cemiyeti (Progressive Society) and hired university professors to instruct them in law, philosophy, sociology, and economics. This effort to attain a higher education for women was still unusual in the Ottoman Empire, although it was increasingly possible for women to achieve advanced training in law, medicine, and humanities in the context of Ottoman educational reforms during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

At age 16, Sertel began publishing essays on education, women’s rights, and revolution (Özkan Keresticioğlu, 2006). And around this time, she met her future husband Zekeriya, as a result of essays they each published in Yeni Felsefe (New Philosophy) and an affinity they shared for women’s rights. In 1913, following the fall of Salonika to Greece, Sabiha’s family moved to Istanbul. In 1915, despite initial opposition from her family to her marrying a non-Dönme Muslim, Sabiha wedded Zekeriya (Baer, 2010).

After her marriage, Sertel wrote articles for Büyük Mecmua (the Big Review), a weekly publication aimed at the Ottoman intelligentsia and political elites, founded by her husband and several close colleagues. In 1919, her husband was imprisoned for publishing articles that were critical of the Western occupation of Istanbul; while he was in prison, she assumed the editorial tasks and continued to publish the weekly. Although Büyük Mecmua appeared for less than a year, it became a flashpoint for the Ottoman elite’s intellectual resistance to the occupation and an important venue for publishing on women’s rights to education and political participation (Özkan Keresticioğlu, 2006). Following her husband’s release from prison, colleague Halide Edip (Adıvar), one of the most prominent (women) writers of the time, helped the Sertels to secure two scholarships provided by American philanthropist and industrialist Charles Crane to study at an advanced level in the United States (Shissler, 2007). Between 1921 and 1923, Sertel studied community organization at the Columbia University-affiliated New York School of Social Work (Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, 1923a, 1923c, 1924). Sertel was awarded a diploma in community organization in June 1923, along with other students of community organization, Margaret Barnard and Lucy J. Chamberlain. A listing of 2-year graduates between 1911 and 1924 shows that Sertel was one of 176 graduates from the program and one of a handful of students from outside the United States (Charity Organization Society of the City of New York, 1923b).

Social Work Education and Community Work in New York City

In 1919, Sabiha Sertel traveled to New York with her husband and 2-year-old daughter, Sevim (Y. Sertel, 1993). Sertel was familiar with sociology, having attended lectures in Istanbul by the prominent Turkish sociologist, Ziya Gökalp, who had been deeply influenced by the work of Emile Durkheim. After arriving in New York, she studied English at Barnard College. In 1921, she began taking courses at the New York School of Social Work, simultaneously taking sociology courses for a theoretical background at Columbia University (S. Z. Sertel, 1969). Although Sertel’s interest in social inequality and poverty predated her time at the New York School of Social Work, her understanding of the dynamics of social class and poverty were significantly shaped by her formal studies as well as by living in Manhattan.

Sertel described taking a sociology course with well-known professor Franklin H. Giddings, an early founder of U.S. sociology whose theories were rooted in evolutionary naturalism (Chriss, 2006). According to Sertel’s (1969, pp. 36–37) memoir, Giddings lectured to large audiences (including members of the wealthy public) on a theory of “consciousness of kind” (cins şuuru). He posited that one could explain the primacy of attachment to racial groups because of an innate human drive to differentiate and associate by “kind” or “type.” Giddings asserted that wars and conflicts could be explained by this process of differentiation and that religion was often the root of such divisions. The theory intrigued Sertel partly because it helped to explain the recent wars in her homeland.

Initially, Sertel was taken by Giddings’s theory and “tried to understand every situation” in terms of this process of differentiation on the basis of race, religion, or national identity (S. Z. Sertel, 1969, p. 37). Her interest shifted away from Giddings’s efforts to theorize the “social mind” (culture), however, when she took a course by William F. Ogburn on women and the family, who assigned his students texts by Lewis H. Morgan and Friedrich Engels and August Bebel’s (1879/1966) Woman and Socialism. Sertel noted that her “thoughts were turned upside down, and in place of ‘knowledge of type/kind’ (cins bilinci), I learned an awareness of class (sınıf).” Although it is not clear from Sertel’s memoirs whether this was her first introduction to socialism, her views on social problems that were generated by the capitalist economic system were fundamentally shaped during her stay in the United States. Her growing concern with economic inequality and differentiation based on social class played a critical role in Sertel’s future writing and political advocacy after her return to Turkey. Sertel grew convinced by Engels and Marx’s theory that contradictions and alliances in relationships between people were not caused by “cins” (type/kind), but rather by the relations of production among classes based on shared or conflicting interests. Bebel’s Woman and Socialism (1879/1966), which she later translated into Turkish, had a lifelong influence on her. Indeed, Sertel would write in 1935 that “It was like Bebel had captured my mind, like a ball, and thrown it into a new and unknown stage of consciousness” (quoted in Y. Sertel, 1993, p. 100).

While Sertel first described her experience in sociology courses at Columbia in her memoirs, she devoted considerably more attention to her observations about life in Manhattan and her outreach within immigrant communities as a result of “practical” courses at the New York School of Social Work. She earned a 2-year diploma in community organization in 1923. Sertel explained in her memoirs that “[t]his school was formed to research and find solutions for the social problems and disruptions of the whole society. [The school] pursued a goal of creating scientific methods for social assistance” (1969, p. 38). Influenced by Ogburn’s “objectivist” approach, which emphasized the collection of empirical data to understand social problems, Sertel trained in doing “social survey” research and conducted small surveys among Ottoman immigrants in several communities in the United States, including in New York City. Later in Turkey, she hoped to conduct social survey research and approached sociologist Ziya Gökalp with a proposal to survey rural and urban locales. Gökalp, although apparently interested in the project, failed to gain permission from the government for the project prior to his death in 1924. Although Sertel lamented not being able to initiate social survey research in Turkey, she “adapted” the survey approach to journalism, soliciting the “input” of those who were able to write to the publishing house on a range of socioeconomic and political issues.

Sertel’s (1969) memoirs emphasized the stark contrast between the “rich” and “poor” neighborhoods of Manhattan. Sertel lived in an apartment in a wealthy neighborhood near Columbia University and worked with poor immigrants in community organizations on the Lower East Side, including the Lexington Community Center and in the Bowery District. She was critical of efforts by social workers and other “society ladies” with their philanthropic activities to “Americanize” Ottoman and other East European immigrants. She was also critical of Ottoman Muslims’ resistance to mobilize on their behalf through ethnic self-help groups and labor organizing. Sertel opined that unless Ottoman immigrants came together in ethnic or nationally based associations, they would continue to be deeply marginalized in the United States. She pressed for the development of solidarity groups that fused ethnic allegiances to efforts for workers’ rights and political recognition at the local level.

As part of her training at the New York School of Social Work, Sertel worked at the Lexington Community Center, where she had the chance to become acquainted with the life narratives of scores of immigrants: “[These narratives] addressed topics not even found in novels. The dossiers were filled with life stories of how they had come to America, what hoops they had jumped through, how they were exploited, how they had grappled with unemployment, and how they had felt nostalgia and remorse for their countries [which they had left behind]” (S. Z. Sertel, 1969, p. 40). They “all came from Europe to the ‘golden paradise’ of America in hopes that they would earn money and become wealthy” only to work day and night like “slaves” (köle) in factories. For the women, men, and children who came, “there was no escape, no going back.” Sertel also witnessed the efforts of elite women who were working in a variety of charitable organizations and was increasingly skeptical of the usefulness of such efforts to address poverty and inequality in New York. She asserted, “In a capitalist society, regardless of what method is used to provide social assistance, without a doubt [such efforts] will not prevent extreme poverty” (S. Z. Sertel, 1969, p. 41).

As part of her practical studies, the instructors at the New York School of Social Work asked Sertel to create a community organization in Manhattan that would serve the needs of recent Muslim Ottoman immigrants. Sertel’s husband initially discouraged her from doing the project, arguing that working-class Turkish and Kurdish men would not relate to her, an elite, educated woman. Both gender and social class proved to be barriers in her initial contact with the immigrant workers, but relying on an intermediary, Sertel was eventually able to gain their trust and support to establish a community center in a rented building. As word of the Turkish Welfare Association (Türk Teavün Cemiyeti) spread to other communities like Detroit; Worcester, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh; and Philadelphia, Ottoman workers reached out for support to create their own branches of the associations (S. Z. Sertel, 1969, p. 48). Likely aided by a call to raise funds to support the Ottoman efforts to defeat the Greek army that had invaded in 1921, these organizations capitalized on nascent feelings of nationalism and connection to the homeland during wartime. But aside from providing a locale and rationale to send remittances back to the homeland, the Turkish Welfare Association offered opportunities to meet the needs of immigrant workers, including temporary housing or food assistance and aid for burials or other rituals of life transition.

Sertel also played a critical role in helping the founder of the newly established Turkish Children’s Protection Society (CPS; Himaye-i Etfal Cemiyeti), Dr. Fuat Umay, to raise funds for war orphans and poor children and their mothers (S. Z. Sertel, 1969; Umay, 1927/2003). She obtained introductions to various Turkish and Kurdish communities in the United States to promote the establishment of U.S. chapters of the Turkish CPS, with the primary goal of raising funds and providing ongoing financial support to the child welfare organization in Turkey. Sertel, in fact, led one of the first New York sections of the CPS. This effort represented an early transnational form of organizing for humanitarian and social development goals—the U.S. “branches” of the Turkish CPS as voluntary associations were instrumental in providing funding for the establishment of a children’s hospital, orphanages, and programming for poor children and their families in Turkey throughout the 1920s and 1930s (Libal, 2001). After her return to Turkey, Sertel continued to write for CPS publications and published translations of children’s books from English and French into Turkish in a series to benefit the CPS.

An Alternative Voice in the Early Turkish Republic

Sertel’s experience in New York clearly influenced her development as an advocate for social and economic justice, perhaps most profoundly through the practical experiences she gained as an organizer and researcher at the Lexington Community Center and working to establish Ottoman-based ethnic organizations that both served immigrants’ needs in the United States and provided resources to the “home country” through ethnic philanthropy.

Sertel’s formal education in community organizing as a form of social work influenced her public activism following her return to Turkey in 1923, just after the new republic was declared. Between 1923 and 1950, Sertel devoted most of her creative efforts to writing and editing a variety of serial publications, including the progressive periodical Resimli Ay (Pictorial Monthly) and newspaper Tan (Dawn). Sertel quickly abandoned thoughts of continuing to organize workers in Turkey, although she remained active in public and political life, critically engaging municipal and national politicians to create laws to protect the rights of workers, including child laborers and working women. She served as a publicist, translator, and writer for a variety of prominent newspapers and for the Turkish CPS and became known as an intellectual, a feminist, a socialist, and an antifascist.

Political Activism: Running for the Istanbul Municipal Assembly (1930)

The Turkish suffrage movement gained considerable momentum after the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923 (Libal, 2008). By 1930, women had gained the right to run for political office and to vote at the municipal level. Signaling her desire to insert herself firmly within the Turkish public sphere, Sertel made an early bid as a feminist and emerging socialist candidate for public office. Although she was unsuccessful in her 1930 run for the Istanbul municipal assembly, we nevertheless can see the evolution of her focus on working-class interests (Koçak, 1988). Her progressive platform highlighted the rights of workers broadly, but also drew attention to the rights of women and children. The necessity of governmental protection for “the people” dominated Sertel’s political platform and writing throughout this era.

In a short account of why she ran for office, Sertel explained that she chose to be an independent candidate, not aligned with the regime’s Republic People’s Party or the nascent (short-lived) Free Republican Party. In particular, she sought to represent the working class and poor of the city: “The foremost thing I will work to realize is to defend the votes, authority, and political and social rights of poor people” (quoted in Koçak, 1988, p. 156). Her political program included eliminating municipal taxes on the poor, “protecting the political interests of the people,” implementing public health policies to regulate the quality of drinking water and milk, creating “health stations” in poor neighborhoods, developing sanitation systems, and grappling with communicable diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. Her program prioritized “social insurance” and the creation of a strong “social organization” to address the needs of workers requiring child care, unemployment offices, cafeterias providing inexpensive food, housing for the poor and elderly, housing for illegitimate children, and agencies in which complaints or petitions could be filed (quoted in Koçak, 1988, p. 157). In essence, Sertel called for the creation of a modern welfare state and sought through municipal politics to address the rights of the working class and poor. Such efforts resembled similar movements in Europe and the United States during this era, illustrating the importance of attending to the overlap and synergy in such movements in an “early” era of globalization.

Social Journalism: Reaching a Broader Public

Although Sertel never took up political office, because of the increasingly authoritarian regime, she continued to be an ardent, visible, and respected voice through the vehicles of social journalism, writing, and informal organizing and advocacy in Istanbul until her exile from Turkey in 1950.

Following the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, questions of postwar reconstruction, the creation of the institutions of government, and the transformation of a beleaguered Ottoman citizenry into a Turkish one dominated the political landscape. Political elites had to deal with the reality of stratification and social inequality in the new republic, but officially the state denied that such differences existed (Hale, 1981). Sertel and other left-wing intellectuals and activists labored to underscore the reality of class differences through their writing and political mobilization. Through social realist journalism, Sertel highlighted the necessity of developing a democratic welfare state. Through her reporting of everyday encounters with children on the streets, at work in factories or fields, and in households, she underscored that in Turkey most people lived at a subsistence level. She also invoked the figure of the child to call for widespread reform. She wrote, “The infant resting in the cradle has neither religion, race, nor class. The infants in the golden cradle and cardboard cradle are the same. In this country no one can judge which one is more useful. We must establish equality in the rights that society accords children and use all our social power on behalf of children” (S. Z. Sertel, 1929b, p. 3).

Convergence of Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, and Opposition to Fascism

Much of Sertel’s writing examined the position of women in society (Shissler, 2008). In addition to her commitment to reveal the struggles of working-class and poor women and children, she wrote popular columns in leading publications, such as the newspaper Cumhuriyet (the Republic), under a pseudonym. While her short columns were often framed as answers to readers’ questions on popular topics, such as marriage, love, and gender relations, other articles that were penned in her own name were more explicitly political.

Sertel’s feminism was informed by a deep critique of imperialism and fascism, which she saw as interlinked (Özman & Bulut, 2003). This convergence of values set her apart from many other Turkish feminists of her generation and from the dominant liberal vision that was espoused in international feminist organizations located in the West. Sertel used her pen openly to critique the global women’s rights agenda advanced by the International Alliance of Women for Peace and Suffrage, which she regarded as promoting Western imperialism (Libal, 2008; Tezcan, 2004). Her many newspaper articles, columns, and longer articles that were published in periodicals in the 1930s reflect her deep awareness of divisions in society that were based on class, patriarchy, and an understanding of the impact of colonialism and global capitalism (S. Z. Sertel, 1935). As a sign of her commitment to address what she saw as overlapping questions of women’s subordination and the effects of capitalism, Sertel translated and published August Bebel’s Women and Socialism into Turkish in 1966. Although she was living in exile in Baku in the Soviet Union (now Azerbaijan), she published in Turkish in an effort to continue to shape socialist and feminist consciousness and dialogue in Turkey. Sertel’s orientation resembled those perceived as “radical” in the United States—by such activists as Mary van Kleeck, Alice Salomon, and Florence Kelley. Her marginalization in Turkey came at a considerable cost, however, because an increasingly authoritarian regime and political elite sought to silence socialists by the 1940s.

Conclusion: Sertel’s Exile From Turkey and Her Significance for Social Work

Despite Sertel’s affinity with socialism and her close connections with Turkish communists, the importance of promoting democracy and opposing authoritarianism was central to Sertel’s writing and public advocacy. Indeed, throughout the 1930s, Sertel and her husband increasingly asserted the right to express their views openly in the press (see S. Z. Sertel 1969; Y. Sertel, 1993). By the late 1930s, state authorities and right-wing radicals in the media grew increasingly intense. Sertel was most often criticized in the media for her strident opposition to fascist and pro-Nazi supporters within the ruling Republican People’s Party. Moreover, her open challenges to “one-party” rule in Turkey in the left-wing media met with formidable opposition by authorities in Istanbul and Ankara (Baer, 2010).

In the wake of several lawsuits for alleged slander in the press in 1941 and 1942, Sertel was banned by the state authorities from publishing her writing. Sertel was branded as a Bolshevik and Gypsy (deeply offensive terms akin to calling someone a “red” or “communist” in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s) in Cumhuriyet, the newspaper representing the Turkish regime in which she had published extensively in the past. She was allowed to write again when Turkey declared official “neutrality” in World War II in 1944. Yet, their fierce support of a multiparty democracy and antifascist critiques of the ruling party in the 1940s put Sertel and her husband in grave danger. In 1945, an estimated 10,000 students, organized by the Republican People’s Party, marched from the main gate of Istanbul University toward the building housing the newspaper Tan. According to Sertel’s daughter’s memoir, the mob shouted “God damn communism” and “God damn the Sertels.” The mob destroyed Tan’s offices and press (Y. Sertel, 1993, p. 212). Officials placed the Sertels under house arrest in 1945 and subsequently tried them for slandering the Turkish state. News of the arrest and trial was covered extensively in the Turkish press and was reported in the New York Times (“Turkey Frees Jailed Writers,” 1946; “Turkish Editors Jailed,” 1946). Following their brief imprisonment, the Sertels were released. The police monitored their activities, and it became increasingly difficult for them to participate in intellectual life or find work. In 1950, the Sertels emigrated to Paris, where Sabiha continued to write and was active in Paris leftist intellectual circles. In 1963, the family moved again to Baku, Azerbaijan (USSR), and in 1968, Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel died in exile of lung cancer (Y. Sertel, 2001).

While Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel did not claim the title “social worker” throughout much of her career, her sojourn in New York City and studies in the New York School of Social Work and Columbia University’s Department of Sociology made her one of the few formally trained social workers in community organization to graduate from a U.S. institution in the 1920s. This episode itself is an intriguing part of Sertel’s life story, but in view of her considerable accomplishments as a writer and activist in Turkey, the experiences she gained in her New York years formed only a small part of her identity and contribution to social justice. Sertel’s understanding of the intersection between social class and gender inequality, as well as links to global capitalism and imperialism, was evident throughout her writing. Her efforts to promote a multiparty democracy and give voice to disenfranchised groups, such as children, women, and the poor in Turkey, merit a reconsideration in light of ongoing struggles in these domains today. Sertel’s struggles to realize social justice in Turkey deserve being accorded a prominent place in the growing historiography of feminist and international social work.