Debate: Mother Tongue and Women

The history of education in the Ottoman empire and the Turkish republic, among others, show that nationalist projects have used the motherhood qualities of women in order to imagine new communities. The role of Kurdish women in the advent of Turkish nationalism goes beyond their potential as information banks where lost and or created knowledge is stored. The resistance and independent thinking the Kurdish students of the Girls’ Institutes have developed exemplify that while the preservation of one’s own language is fatal, women’s roles in this preservation can be more liberating than it is readily imagined.