COLUMN ONE : No Longer a Step Behind in Turkey : Led by their new prime minister, women are rising to power. They are riding a wave of modernization that is toppling old legacies of machismo and Muslim inequality.

Some women on the shuttle flights here from the capital at Ankara wear concealing head scarves above long, shapeless coats. They walk an obedient pace behind their husbands. These are the women of devout Islam, and their self-effacing sisters tread the byways of every Turkish city.

Yet in the air they are outnumbered in these changing times by women flying alone in sculptured business suits with short skirts and high heels. They may carry Allah in their hearts, but more visible are their modish briefcases--and their panache. They walk behind no one.

It can be disconcerting when a country fails to live up to its stereotype, but that is what’s happening in patriarchal Turkey. In this fierce land of storied sultans, potbellied pols, bristling mustaches, baggy pants and “Midnight Express,” hardly a harem happens.

The new prime minister of Turkey is a woman. That surprises nearly everyone. Except the Turks.

Putting substance on the framework of legal equality, the women of Turkey are playing an increasingly visible, active and assertive role in their rapidly modernizing society.

Tradition dies hard in rural areas and among religious fundamentalists. But across Turkey, old legacies of machismo and Muslim inequality are being rapidly overturned, amid pell-mell urbanization and modernization.

Like Tansu Ciller, who since June has led their boisterous nation of 60 million, Turkish women are becoming striking symbols of achievement in a tough neighborhood athwart the Balkans, Caucasus and Middle East where power has always been a male preserve.

“Our problems are not of law, but of culture and education. If we were missing a role model, after Tansu Ciller we have no excuse anymore,” said Leyla Alaton, a young entrepreneur and magazine advice columnist for working women.

For Turkey, the change has been as rapid and dramatic as it has been for Ciller, 47, who vaulted seemingly overnight from economics professor to Cabinet minister to elected leader of Turkey’s largest political party to prime minister.

“Ciller is not an aberration. Educated Turkish women now expect and receive equal treatment and opportunity,” said Oya Akgonec Mughissuddin, a professor of international relations in Ankara who has represented Turkey at international women’s conferences.

Indeed, Ciller is in charge: There she was last month, giving a joint news conference with President Clinton at the White House. It etched a powerful message on the television screens that now burn everywhere in an ancient land where the sultan’s harem survived the birth of this century.

“Ten years ago, I couldn’t go with a woman friend to a restaurant for dinner at 9 o’clock. Today, two women can walk into an Istanbul bar at 1 in the morning and nobody blinks,” said Suzan Bahar, who sells financial information systems to major corporations. Her company has a 20-person sales force; 17 are women.

The growth of women in Turkey’s national profile mirrors the flourishing Westernization that took off here in the ‘80s. Only last year did Parliament finally repeal a long-ignored requirement that women get their husbands’ permission to work. A pending reform seen as a historic advance by women’s advocates would award divorcing wives one-half the goods and property acquired during marriage.

In one poll, 82% of women said they believe they could lead full lives without getting married. Men tell pollsters they want women who are loyal, beautiful and affectionate. Women want to be clever, self-confident and perceptive.

As a general rule, the degree of emancipation is highest in the west and diminishes in direct proportion to how far east you go from Istanbul.

In 1985, a third of women were illiterate, compared with an eighth of the men. Half of women married before age 18, and a fifth were married off by their families to cousins.

Education counts: In one poll, 48% of women in Istanbul thought it was normal for husbands to beat their wives. Among college-educated women, 5% found it normal. “A diploma is for life, not like a husband who can leave you,” Alaton counsels.

Today, about 15% of eligible women go to university, where they are outnumbered 2 to 1 by men, said Sirin Tekeli, a political scientist who runs a women’s library from a building on the Golden Horn lent by the city of Istanbul. But the ratio is narrowing. Already, about one-quarter of Turkish university professors are women, and women dominate some fields, including the humanities, the arts, languages and teaching.

Tekeli said the number of female managers in business has doubled in the past five years. From a low base, yes, but a sure sign of what is by now an unstoppable tide. Three Turkish ambassadors and one provincial governor are women. The proportion of female doctors and medical professors is higher than in the United States.

There is no shortage of female lawyers; most work for large firms, although there are a fair number of solo practitioners, many of whom specialize in women’s law.

Nil Celik, who works for a public relations firm owned by a woman, said all 30 members of her graduating class of translator-interpreters at Bosporus University were women. Many fresh-minted chemists and architects are women, as are most new pharmacists. Turkey’s newspapers invariably gush when women break the gender barrier as, for example, intercity bus drivers.

The deputy managing director and all but one of the 13 financial officers at Turkey’s national airline are women, the newest among them a recent graduate of an American university.

“When I began working after college in 1977, my only job offers were as a secretary until I found a bank willing to give me a chance. Now, with a good education, bright women have no trouble finding jobs,” said Ilknur Ezgu, the airline’s finance director. German female executives tell her they despair of advancing as quickly and as far as she has, Ezgu said.

Women received legal equality overnight after the collapsed Ottoman Empire was reborn as the modern Republic of Turkey in the 1920s. The farsighted reforms of Kemal Ataturk, the republic’s founder, separated church and state and imported whole cloth to Turkey the Swiss Civil Code.

“The code meant Turkey could never have Sharia (Muslim religious law) or adopt any Islamic belief celebrating the supremacy of man,” said Tekeli, a founder of Turkish feminism, which she estimates is about a decade behind similar movements in other nations.

By the 1930s, upper-class women, who had access to university training beginning in 1918, routinely became doctors, lawyers and architects. But they didn’t always work.

In Ankara, Bilkent University’s Mughissuddin notes that her mother spoke five languages and graduated from medical school but never practiced. Her father, a lawyer, would not allow it.

Today, said Tekeli, women are about 25% of Turkish professionals. Legislation, often after the fact, continues to move Turkey west. Family planning has been allowed since 1965, and abortion since 1981, although a husband’s permission is still required for an abortion, a requirement now under feminist assault.

“We have not achieved equality, but proportionally there are more women executives in Turkey today than in many Western countries. The gap between law and life depends where you live; social controls over women in the southeastern parts of the country and in conservative villages are still great.

“But in major cities today, important minorities of women have access to education and have economic independence,” said Tekeli.

Birgul T. Aksehirlioglu, 32, deputy general manager of a merchant bank here, said she draws stares at international conferences where she is sometimes the only woman.

“Turkey is ahead of many countries in its openness to change. I go to a place like Tokyo to make a speech about Turkish capital markets and people are shocked to see a woman from Turkey. There’s nothing strange about it here. Foreigners are more conservative than we are,” she said.

Indeed. For years, the largest taxpayer among the 10 million residents of Istanbul has been the Armenian madam of the metropolis’s largest bordello.

Banking, finance, advertising, insurance, computers, travel, hotels and public relations are bulwarks for modern Turkish women.

But they also turn up in more unlikely places: Tijen Cidan, sister of the merchant banker and mother of a young daughter, is deputy managing director of Turkey’s biggest steel company. Guler Sabanci runs the tire-making branch of a family empire that is the second-largest private company in the country. Long the only female member of an elite business association here, she has recently been joined by half a dozen others.

Women, until lately more drawn to technical jobs like engineering than to management posts, now make up about 10% of the managers of tire-making companies and about 25% of factory workers, Sabanci said.

“Compared to other tire companies in the world, we have more women. It’s not up to my satisfaction. It is still a man’s world. But it’s not the men who don’t want the women. It’s the women who don’t want their jobs,” Sabanci said.

About as many Turks are Muslim as Italians are Roman Catholic, and they take their religion about as seriously, to the dismay of Turkey’s more devout neighbors in Iran and the Arab world. The relaxed attitude is an ingrained part of Turkish life--and a catalyst to women seeking full equality.

“Our Islam is a different kind of Islam, a religion, but not a way of life. Our way of life is European,” Mughissuddin said. “What is an Islamic woman? Are we worse off than Hindu women? Or Catholic women, who can’t get an abortion or divorce? Don’t Jewish men have a prayer in which they thank Allah I am not a woman?”

The new emancipation extends also to insurgency: About a quarter of Kurdish separatist guerrillas fighting government troops in the Turkish southeast are women, according to one report.

Although there are fewer women at universities than men, city women with equal education compete on an equal footing with men in the job market, said Mughissuddin.

“But local traditions stop progress in some areas,” she said. “The obstacles are not of the law, but of fathers, brothers and husbands.”

She recalls working to implement a World Bank project and trying to persuade men in one rural area to let the women go to school.

“First the men complained the schools were too far. We moved them closer. Then they insisted on women teachers. We got them. Still they wouldn’t let the women come to school,” Mughissuddin said. “Finally, the local head man said to me, ‘If all the women here become educated and like you, how am I going to keep my control and authority?’ ”

Kurdish areas in the southeast and small villages have changed least in the social revolution that has rolled across Turkey. Migration of families to the cities from the countryside has improved the lot of many women, but in some cases it has simply brought to town mores that have not changed for centuries.

“Turkey is a country of extremes. We have a woman prime minister, but we are still talking about basic rights in villages. Girls write saying, ‘I kissed a boy, am I still a virgin?’ ” said columnist Alaton.

One 17-year-old living in an Istanbul suburb, call her Selma, not long ago became restive at the prospect of marrying the man to whom her traditionalist family had betrothed her.

“Better you should die” than call off the wedding, her mother said. But strange things happen in big cities, and Selma fell in love with a young man she met by phone one day when he dialed a wrong number. They eloped, but the police tracked them down.

Village fathers often do not register children until they have survived the first harsh years of life, and Selma’s identity document says she is 13.

The boy with whom she eloped faces eight years in jail if Selma cannot persuade police doctors that she is older than 16.

Her parents have repudiated Selma, a decision ratified by her grandfather and village elders who traveled 20 hours to Istanbul by bus for a council of war. Some of the more hotblooded kin talk of killing her. Selma is in hiding.

Selma’s life is ruined, history insists. Yet Turkey is changing so fast that that is no longer as certain as it would have been just a few years ago.

Now, celebrations of emancipation beckoning with the speed of light and print reach into every cranny of the country.

Columnist Alaton, and hundreds of thousands of modern women like her, represent the promise of a better tomorrow for all the Selmas of Turkey.

“I tell women that they cannot be afraid to jump in at the deep end, that everyone can be a Tansu Ciller,” said Alaton. “I tell them that Turkish women are like tea bags. You don’t know how strong they are until they are in hot water.”