Dr Ipek Mehmetoğlu will be presenting at the SAH 79th International Conference in Mexico City.

Women Writing Welfare Architecture in 1940s Turkey

This paper investigates women’s philanthropic labor in shaping modern architecture in Turkish print culture. It interrogates how women activists experienced and wrote about modernity within the political context of 1940s Turkey—a decade marked by the transition from a single-party rule to a multi-party democracy and continued state-led modernization on the one hand, and by the growing visibility of women’s movements on the other. It focuses on the work of the Turkish Charity Organization, a non-governmental organization founded in 1928 by women activists and philanthropists, and the feminist Women’s Newspaper, founded by the members of the Organization in 1947. In its search for gendered interpretations of modern architecture and its place in everyday life, “Women Writing Welfare Architecture” underlines the social and political nuances embedded in local stories and highlights non-architect women’s collective knowledge and labor in a situated way.

The Newspaper was a public platform where a knitted community of politicized women with a collective yet diversified voice addressed topics from politics to culture to urbanism. In particular, the texts of activist Hasene Ilgaz, a member of the Organization and a writer in the newspaper, reveal a distinctive voice, engaging with the design and construction of various welfare projects for children, women, and elderly and disabled populations, as part of the country’s modernization efforts. Drawing on the newspaper, the Organization’s documents, and Ilgaz’s memoirs, travel notes, and photographs, I argue that the modern architecture of the 1940s in Turkey relied on a wide range of gendered work that remains at the margins of architectural histories. Women’s collective labor at the intersection of architecture, welfare, and journalism constituted a vital yet invisible infrastructure of modern life during the developmental phase of the Republic.

https://www.sah.org/2026