She was born in 1884 and died in 1964. Halide believed that Turkish women should become actively involved in women's rights when the, Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk became intent on westernizing Turkey. Active in the Young Turk movement, she joined the Nationalist Party in 1919, supported Ataturk's cause, and became an army officer by 1922 in the war against Greece. Fleeing Turkey when she came under suspicion of organizing opposition to Remal, she lectured in American and Indian universities. Later on she returned to her native country of Turkey where she became a professor of English literature at the University of Istanbul.
Halide is described as a true daughter of a “new” Turkey. She was never afraid to express herself in print or in speech. Her influence over Kemal Pasha (known as a founder of modern Turkey) was good and sound. Kemal Pasha was a very superstitious man who believed that Halide brought good luck to him whenever she was near him. She wrote her memoirs documenting the social conditions before Ataturk's modernization in order to leave younger generations of Turks a historical account of why she became an activist for women's rights in a time when Islamic leadership was the rule.
The Turkish Caliphate fell in 1924, thanks to Ataturk's strong ideals in bringing his nation into the modern world and Halide's political activism with it. Women's rights included being admitted to schools where only boys were previously allowed; voting rights, running for government positions, divorce and child custody rights, property and inheritance rights. Because of Halide's political activism, Turkish women now have the same rights that other women in western nations have.
