Fatma Aliye Hanım, the first Turkish female novelist and the first Turkish woman to be featured on a banknote, is facing harsh criticism -- just as she did when she was alive.
When she was alive, she was subject to criticism for defending women's rights. Now that she has been featured on the TL 50 bill, she is the subject of a large boycott whose organizers claim she was an enemy of secularism and does not deserve to be on the Turkish lira. However, feminists from a variety of ideological backgrounds say the protests are directed more at her gender than at her ideas. For example, protest slogans refer to Fatma Aliye as "this woman," written in very sexist language and stressing her surname, which she never used.
A group titled "We don't want this woman, an enemy of Atatürk, on our banknotes" has already been created on Facebook, a social networking tool, and has over 160,000 members.