Rethinking women’s emancipation through Ahmet Haşim: masculinity outside the “brotherhood contract”

This article examines the transformations experienced by Muslim/Turkish women during the modernization process from the Second Constitutional Era (1908) to the early Republic by focusing on Ahmet Haşim’s (1887–1933) essays on women. While dominant political and intellectual male discourses framed women’s modernization as a marker of national progress, Haşim interpreted this process as a violation of women’s “nature” and as a direct threat to masculinity. In his essays, he consistently evaluated women’s bodies, public visibility, and intellectual activities within limits shaped by male desire, arguing that women who attained autonomy transgressed these “natural” boundaries and thereby lost their value. By closely reading Haşim’s essays, the article argues that his discourse can be situated outside the “brotherhood contract” that structured the modernizing male consensus. This position, however, does not indicate an emancipatory or oppositional stance, but rather reveals a distinct form of masculine anxiety produced from within modernity itself.