In May 1987, about 3000 women marched through the streets of Istanbul to protest against the battering of women in the home. This was not the first time that women in Turkey had taken to the streets, but it certainly was the first time that they had voiced demands specific to their conditions of existence as women in Turkish society. As stated by one of the speakers at the rally marking the end of the march, women were not marching for their nation, their class, nor for their husbands, brothers and sons, but for themselves. I take this march and events following it to signal a new form in which the position of women in Turkish society is being articulated within the political terrain of Turkey. This new visibility of women in Turkish political discourse has many links to strands of thought that can be broadly called ‘feminist’ and as such provides a fruitful arena for the investigation of the forms this ideological current takes in Third World countries.

This is an age of identity crisis. Who am I? What are my roots? These are the central questions of our age. The search for identity is mixed with a wave of skepticism about development, technology and environment. This is a universal phenomenon. Questions about one's roots, about ecological and technological and demographic limits of growth and development (Olson and Landsberg, 1973; Schumacher, 1973) are being asked in the mass consumption societies of the developed world (Scitovsky, 1976; Hirschman, 1977). And they are being asked in the post-colonial societies of the developing world.

The timing of the global identity crisis is paradoxical. In the developed world economic affluence was expected to liberate man for leisure and creativity. In the search for material satisfaction, western man has lost his soul to “technomania” (Grant, 1969, p. 39). Christian fundamentalism and born-again Christianity are on a rising curve.

The rapid industrial growth accompanied by even more rapid export growth of such Far East economies as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan has drawn due attention from students of economic development. Economists with a Neo-classical ideological stance, favoring a perfectly free market economy, tend to attribute the industrial growth of these LDCs to the phenomenal increase in their exports. They argue that export expansion will be conducive to growth and the problems that might arise on the way will be taken care of by market forces. They identify the export sector of the economy as the “leading sector” and label the growth strategy patterned after this model as “export-oriented growth.” Over the last decade this growth strategy has been effectively “recommended” to a large number of LDCs facing debt servicing difficulties.