Editing Women's suffrage (section)

==== Turkey ====
[[File:First female MPs of the Turkish Parliament (1935).jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|Eighteen female MPs joined the Turkish Parliament in 1935.]]
In [[Turkey]], [[Atatürk]], the founding president of the republic, led a secularist cultural and legal transformation supporting women's rights including voting and being elected. Women won the right to vote in municipal elections on March&nbsp;20, 1930. Women's suffrage was achieved for parliamentary elections on December&nbsp;5, 1934, through a constitutional amendment. Turkish women, who participated in parliamentary elections for the first time on February&nbsp;8, 1935, obtained 18&nbsp;seats.

In the early republic, when Atatürk ran a one-party state, his party picked all candidates. A small percentage of seats were set aside for women, so naturally those female candidates won. When multi-party elections began in the 1940s, the share of women in the legislature fell, and the 4% share of parliamentary seats gained in 1935 was not reached again until 1999. In the parliament of 2011, women hold about 9% of the seats. Nevertheless, Turkish women gained the right to vote a decade or more before women in such Western European countries as France, Italy, and Belgium  – a mark of Atatürk's far-reaching social changes.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://blog.oup.com/2012/02/turkey-women-vote/|title=Turkey holds first election that allows women to vote|work=OUPblog|date=February 6, 2012}}</ref>

[[Tansu Çiller]] served as the 22nd prime minister of Turkey and the first female prime minister of Turkey from 1993 to 1996. She was elected to the parliament in 1991 general elections and she became prime minister on June 25, 1993, when her cabinet was approved by the parliament.