| This dissertation examines the processes of implementation and experience of state-initiated reforms in the first two decades of the Turkish republic in four specific sites (men's clothing, women's dress, alphabet change, and national celebrations) of the state's attempt to transform the society and to create a modern Turkish nation. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources including official correspondence, inspectors', governors' and police reports, petitions, travelers' accounts, newspapers, and oral historical interviews, it explores how citizens received, reacted to and experienced reforms in their everyday lives, and how and by whom those policies were mediated on the ground. It considers different forms and degrees of acceptance, accommodation, negotiation and resistance such as voluntary acceptance, forced compliance and petitions to the authorities. This dissertation also emphasizes mediating institutions and individuals such as governors, newspapers, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, schools and teachers.;Chapter 1 examines the goals and the implementation of and different responses to the 1925 Hat Law and the other men's clothing regulations. Chapter 2 revises the standard account that the early republican state did not regulate women's dress and shows how the state attempted to modernize and nationalize women's dress differently than it regulated men's. This chapter discusses women's and men's varied reactions to the campaigns to regulate dress. Chapter 3 deals with the alphabet law of 1928. It examines the process of learning the new alphabet and its linkage with a nationwide literacy campaign, as well as the transition to the new letters and persistence of Ottoman in everyday life. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the celebration of national holidays as a less confrontational and potentially more participatory site of socializing citizens into a new national culture. |
