1 Koca, C. & B. Arslan, “Media Coverage of Turkish Female Athletes in 2004 Olympics”, Media Coverage of Women at the 2004 Olympic Games: Missing in Action, ed. T. Bruce, H.J. Hovden and P. Markula, Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research- New Zealand and SENSE-Netherlands Publishers, 2009. CANAN KOCA AND BENGU ARSLAN TURKEY Turkish Media Coverage of the 2004 Olympics GENDER RELATIONS IN TURKEY The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 provided ideological and legal bases for the modernization process in Turkey. Within this modernization project, the new state replaced the Islamic civil code with a secular or republican code adopted from the Swiss code, which introduced gender equality in marriage, divorce and matters of inheritance. In 1930, Turkish women were granted the right to vote in local elections and, in 1934, the right to vote for and to be elected to public office in national elections. Republican gender ideology in general expected women to follow a particular form of education and act as visible ambassadors to challenge the backward image of Muslim women in the world as well as in Turkey (Kandiyoti, 1989). However, these reforms for recognizing women as individuals did not in reality bring equality to women. In the new state, the women continued to be described according to their traditional female roles and this prevented the development of a perception of women as being equal partners of men (Arat, 1994; Kandiyoti, 1987). As Arat (1994) argues, Turkish women are emancipated but unliberated. Keeping mind all these modernization movements and legal changes which are focused on women, it seems contradictory, as Muftuler-Bac (1999) has argued, that Turkish women are still oppressed by the patriarchal system. However, a whole year of intensive lobbying and widespread campaigning by the women’s movement throughout 2001 has resulted in reforms which have drastically changed the legal status of women in the family and in the promulgation of the new Turkish Civil Code, which was passed by the Turkish Grand National Assembly on November 22, 2001 (WWHR, 2002). The new Code sets the equal division of the property acquired during marriage as a default