Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
History
Advisor
Beth Baron
Committee Members
Lale Can
Dina Le Gall
Subject Categories
History
Keywords
children, welfare, Turkey, nationalism, gender, urban space, public health
Abstract
In 1927, the Children's Protection Society (Çocuk Esirgeme Kurumu, CPS) estimated that child mortality in Anatolian villages reached as high as 75 percent. That same year, it inaugurated the “Robust Turkish Child” contests, staging the strength and health of the nation’s future population through photographs, measurements, and maternal testimony submitted to Gürbüz Türk Çocuğu, a CPS publication. Crisis and celebration were not contradictions the Republic failed to reconcile; they were two faces of the same governing logic. Emerging from a decade of war, genocide, and population loss, the new nation-state inherited what its politicians and intellectuals called the “child question,” a demographic crisis it could neither fully measure nor adequately address.
This dissertation examines how that crisis was governed, not resolved, through püerikültür, the art and science of childcare. It argues that püerikültür functioned not simply as a medical idiom but as a practical ideology whose effectiveness depended on elastic categories capable of absorbing competing moral, scientific, and nationalist ideas. The CPS, acting as an intermediary between charity and state power, translated this ideology into health programs, urban space, and public performances, mobilizing child welfare as an instrument of demographic engineering.
Methodologically, the dissertation widens what counts as an archive for the history of nationalism and childhood in a society with limited literacy, treating architecture and national celebrations as primary sources alongside printed material. Chapter One analyzes child mortality surveys, census debates, and expert controversy to show how unstable numbers generated urgency and authorized intervention in maternal practices. Chapter Two examines püerikültür manuscripts by CPS-affiliated physicians, tracing how scientific childcare combined hygiene, terbiye (moral cultivation), and eugenic reasoning within a single framework. Chapter Three reconstructs the spatial logic of the Children’s Palace (Çocuk Sarayı) in Ankara as a multifunctional site marked by institutional ambivalence. Chapter Four analyzes roughly five hundred contest applications (1927–1930), showing how ambiguous criteria of robustness performed inclusion while producing hierarchies of class, religion, and ethnicity. The Epilogue reads CPS inspection files against its public image, exposing the gap between spectacle and institutional reality.
By reading numbers, manuals, urban space, and performance together, this dissertation shows how child welfare operated through strategic ambiguity, producing a system that could claim both crisis and success, both inclusion and hierarchy, without resolving the contradictions between them.
Recommended Citation
Sulos Akyelli, Melis, "Beyond Spectacle: The Children’s Protection Society and the Politics of Childcare in Early Republican Turkey (1923–1945)" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6767
