(Un)veiled Women, Modernity, and Civilizing missions "Selma Ekrem’s Legacy and the Suffrage Movement"

Abstract

In her autobiographical memoir Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1930), Selma Ekrem recounts the above exchange that she had with an immigration official when she first arrived in New York in 1923. It marks the moment when the author first encounters existing knowledge about “the Turk” and “Oriental” women in the United States. In this passage, Ekrem offers a critique of the long-standing Orientalist stereotypes of the harem and the veil, as she does throughout her writing, and displaces them with the image of a fully realized modern Turkish woman who adopts Westernized clothing.