Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 4 – HALIDE EDIP AND YAKUP KADRI 
109 
founded the 
Teal-i Nisvan Cemiyeti
(Society for the Promotion of Women) and 
during the Balkan Wars through this Society she opened hospitals in Istanbul. In her
 
Memoirs 
she claimed that the Balkan Wars were the first to see Turkish women 
nursing men
25
. Her description of Istanbul during the Balkan Wars is an eloquent 
expression of the grim conditions the capital and possibly the whole country were 
in
26
: 
On the other hand, there has never been a war worse managed than the 
Balkan war. The lack of sanitary organization, the badness of the service 
behind the lines was deplorable. The sheep starved in cars, and the flour 
rotted at the depots, while less than a mile away men died of hunger. 
When the Turkish refugees flocked in panic to Constantinople to escape 
from massacre, when cholera broke out among the immigrants and in the 
army, when one saw an entire population dying in the mosque yards 
under the icy grip of winter, the sight of the misery in Constantinople 
seemed too grim to be true.
 
Other novels which she published in this early period of her career have 
autobiographical elements and look at women’s problems within a married life: 
Raik’in Annesi
(Raik’s Mother)
 
(1909), 
Seviyye Talip 
(1910), 
Handan
(1912) 
Son 
Eseri 
(Her Last Work) (1913) and 
Mev’ut Hüküm 
(The Decree) (1917-8)
27
.
When the First World War broke out she supported the idea of the Committee for 
Union and Progress for Turkey to join the war as an ally of the Germans: she thought 
that the war was necessary in order to rid the Ottoman Empire of the Capitulations 
25
Adıvar 2005, 335 
26
Adıvar 2005, 334 
27
Adıvar 2005, ix 

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