Müfide İlhan

The title of this article contains the characters ü, and İ. Where they are unavailable or not desired, the name may be represented as Mufide Ilhan.

Müfide İlhan (1911, Mersin - 1996, Bodrum) was a former mayor of Mersin, Turkey in the early 1950s. She is known as being the first woman mayor in Turkey.

Life

Müfide was born on February 11, 1911 in Mersin. Her father was Mustafa Nazif, an army officer and her mother was Emine, a homemaker. She was only four years of age when her father Nafiz was killed at Conk Bayırı during the Gallipoli campaign in the World War I. After the war, Mersin was temporarily occupied by French army . So, she was sent to Ankara, where she completed her elementary education. After the liberation of İstanbul, she moved to İstanbul and completed her secondary education in the Kandilli highschool^[1] for girls. In 1928 she finished teachers' college.

She married to Dr. Faruk İlhan. The couple worked in various Turkish cities. They also studied at Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus Institute in Berlin, Germany. In 1937, they returned home only to make one more foreign travel. This time their destination was Kabul, Afghanistan, where her husband, now a professor, had got an invitation to teach in the Medicine school of Kabul University. They travelled to Iraq, where they sailed from Basra to Karachi. In 1945 towards the end of World War II, the couple decided to return to Turkey. But because of war time hardships and unrest in Karachi, the couple was not able to sail back. So, they returned home by a car over Iran, which seemed impossible to many people in 1945. In Turkey, they decided to settle in Mersin in 1946, where she began to get interested in politics.^[2]

Political life

The Democrat Party (DP) defeated the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in 1950 general elections, thus ended 27-years rule of the CHP, which later on was called as white revolution. Müfide İlhan became the mayor of Mersin as the candidate of DP, and she created sensation both at home and abroad for being the first ever female mayor of Turkey.

İlhan, as most reformists of the day, was against the authoritarian administration of pre-1950 CHP government. However she was not against the ideology of CHP, so called Kemalism. Thus, some early moves of DP government, which seemed to be against Kemalism, disappointed her. For example, it was difficult for her to accept DP government's lift of the ban on Arabic ezan.^[3] It was the CHP government, which initiated ezan in Turkish in 1932 instead of in traditional Arabic.

In 1951, after a year of extensive work, she resigned both from the post and the party. She formed a league named League for supporting independent candidates in Mersin. She also published a short lived bulletin named Mücadele (English: Struggle).

Other activities

Between 1968 and 1981 she worked as a teacher in Germany for Turkish immigrants.^[4] She worked in a number of social associations. In her later years she donated to hospitals and a retirement home in Mersin.

As a mother

Müfide had seven children. In 1965 she was elected as the mother of the year by the Turkish association of mothers.^[5]

Legacy

Yenişehir municipality named a public park after her. One of the art galleries of İçel sanat kulübü (the main art club of Mersin) is also named after her.

References

1. ^ Information (Turkish)
2. ^ İçel Sanat Kulübü dergisi, 175, Abdullah Ayan: Bilinmeyen Müfide İlhan
3. ^ Online article by Fatma Yılmaz (Turkish)
4. ^ "Online newspaper article". Todayszaman.com. 2009-03-16. http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=169710#. Retrieved 2011-01-02. 
5. ^ Evlerin Önü Mersin, Mersin Liseliler derneği, 1987, p.54

Persondata
Name	Ilhan, Mufide
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	February 11, 1911
Place of birth	Mersin
Date of death	1996
Place of death	Bodrum