Introduction

Industrialisation and women’s participation in public life were among the key motifs of the Turkish Republican project, the hegemonic narrative of which was built on a strict repudiation of the imperial past. The two most condemned aspects of the imperial past were women’s repression and the semi-colonial character of the economic, political and social structure. Women’s changing public status was presented as the strongest indication of the former’s disappearance, while the large factory became an incandescent symbol of the Republic’s ambition and achievement –a physical embodiment of dreams about an economically as well as politically sovereign nation.