Memoirs of Halide Edib

A prominent novelist, social activist, journalist, and nationalist, Halide Adivar Edib (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography, published in 1926, whilst she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. Ýn it Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Providing an account of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Balkan and First World Wars, and ending with the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Edib explains her philosophy of pacifist nationalism, and her ideas on Islam and Islamic civilisation. Her retrospective account of Young Turk and nationalist politics, emphasizing the agency of Ottoman women in their fight for emancipation, aimed to redress the Kemalist account of Republican historiography, which undermined the activities of the Young Turks in order to praise the reforms of the Republican period. Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality. Hülya Adak is Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey. Cultures in Dialogue returns to print sources by women writers from the East and West. Series One considers the exchanges between Ottoman, British, and American women from the 1880s to the 1940s. Their varied responses to dilemmas such as nationalism, female emancipation, race relations and modernization in the context of the stereotypes characteristic of Western harem literature reframe the historical tensions between Eastern and Western cultures, offering a nuanced understanding of their current manifestations.