International Women's Day: The Stories We Choose to Tell About Women
- Merve Kagitci Hokamp
- Mar 8
- 8 min read
I am currently reading Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell.
You probably know the premise by now: it is the story of Shakespeare's son, who died at eleven, told entirely through the eyes of his mother Agnes. What strikes me every time I pick it up is the structural audacity of the thing. The most famous writer who ever lived appears in these pages as a peripheral figure. He is never once named. The novel insists, quietly and firmly, that the woman history forgot is the one worth knowing.
I have been thinking about that insistence a lot this week.
Because during International Women's Day my LinkedIn feed was doing its annual thing — the pastel graphics, the celebration posts, the organizations that have quietly ignored gender equity for eleven months suddenly finding their voice. I do not say this to be dismissive.
Visibility matters. But I keep coming back to Maggie O'Farrell's choice, and what it says about whose stories we decide to tell, and whose we let disappear into the margins.
This year, instead of writing another piece about the gender gap in leadership — the statistics you already know, the frameworks you have already seen — I want to talk about books. Specifically, the ones I have been reading lately. Because fiction has been doing something for me that no leadership report quite manages: it shows me what the experience of being a woman in the world actually feels like from the inside.
Alan Murrin's debut novel The Coast Road is set in Donegal in 1994, the year before Ireland voted on whether to allow divorce. It follows three women — Colette, a poet who has left her husband and sons for a man in Dublin; Izzy, a politician's wife quietly suffocating inside a respectable marriage; and Dolores, trapped with a faithless husband and a fourth pregnancy she did not plan. Their lives intersect in the way lives do in small Irish towns: unavoidably, intimately, and with lasting consequences.
What Murrin captures with remarkable precision is not just the legal constraint — the fact that these women could not leave even if they wanted to — but the social architecture built around it. The gossip. The priest. The way a woman's reputation can be dismantled by a single decision, while her husband's behavior barely registers as news.
The divorce referendum passed in November 1995 by a margin of less than one percentage point. Fewer than nine thousand votes separated one Ireland from another. I find myself sitting with that number whenever I think about this book. Nine thousand votes. The women in Murrin's novel were living in the country that nearly stayed on the other side of that vote.
I am from Turkey. Turkey has its own complicated, contested, often painful history with women's rights — and I say that as someone who grew up inside it. It is not a simple story of progress. But here is a fact that tends to surprise people: Turkish women gained the right to vote in national elections in 1934. The right to divorce — equal for women and men — came even earlier, with the Civil Code of 1926. France did not give women the vote until 1944. Switzerland, 1971.
I do not say this to score points or to suggest that Turkey has figured something out that Ireland has not. The picture in Turkey is far more complicated than any single data point, and I know that. What I am saying is that the story of women's rights does not run in a straight line from less-developed to more-developed, from East to West, from there to here. Ireland — educated, Catholic, European, prosperous — very nearly voted in 1995 to keep divorce illegal. Nine thousand votes.
That contingency is what Murrin captures so precisely. Not just the law, but the world built around it. Progress is not a straight line, and it is never finished. The women who know this best are usually the ones who paid for it.
Elif Shafak's novel begins with a woman's body being found in a rubbish bin on the outskirts of Istanbul. Her name is Tequila Leila. She was a sex worker. And in the ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds that the brain remains active after the heart stops beating, she remembers her life.
Five memories, triggered by tastes and smells, take us from Leila's childhood in a conservative family in eastern Turkey, through the forces — religious, economic, familial — that narrowed her choices to almost nothing, and into the warmth of the friendships she built in Istanbul with four other women who lived on the margins of society. The novel ends with these women, her chosen family, claiming her body from the Cemetery of the
Companionless, where the city buries those it has decided not to mourn.
What this novel does — what it insists on — is that Leila's story matters. That the architecture of a life constrained by poverty, religion, and gender is worth understanding in its full particularity, not just its broad outlines. That the women society walks past are not abstractions. They are people with memories, with tastes, with friends who love them.
If I am honest about what I want from International Women's Day, it is more of this. More insistence on the particular. Less rhetoric about 'women' as a category, and more attention to the specific, varied, unequal lives that category contains.
Ayşe Kulin's biographical novel Füreya tells the story of Füreya Koral, Turkey's first female ceramics artist. Born in 1910 into a prominent Istanbul family — her aunts were the painters Fahrelnissa Zeid and Aliye Berger — Füreya moved through a world that offered her connection and privilege alongside the firm expectation that she would not take up too much space.
She was diagnosed with tuberculosis in her thirties and sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland to recover. It was there, with materials sent by her aunt, that she discovered ceramics. She spent years working and studying in Switzerland and Paris before returning to Istanbul, where she spent the rest of her life making work that combined Anatolian traditions with modernist forms — large-scale panels, tiles, figurines, ceramic-inlaid furniture — in a medium the art establishment did not fully take seriously.
She died in 1997. Her work spent decades being overshadowed, as Kulin's novel quietly notes, partly by her gender and partly by her family's complicated prominence. She has been rediscovered in recent years.
What moves me about Füreya's story is not the belated recognition. It is the decades of making, regardless. The daily commitment to the work, inside a world not organized to support it. I think about the women I coach who are doing something similar — not making ceramics, but building something: careers, businesses, ways of leading that do not fit the existing templates. The cost of that is often invisible. Füreya makes it visible.
R.F. Kuang's Yellowface is a satirical novel about a white American writer named June Hayward who, after witnessing the death of her far more successful Chinese-American friend and rival Athena Liu, steals Athena's unpublished manuscript — a novel about the forgotten contribution of Chinese laborers to the First World War — and publishes it as her own.
What follows is a dissection of the publishing industry, of social media, of the way institutions package 'diversity' as a marketing strategy while systematically sidelining the voices they claim to celebrate. It is also a deeply uncomfortable portrait of self-justification — June's narration is so fluent, so relentlessly persuasive in its own defense, that you find yourself being convinced by arguments you know are wrong.
The question at the book's center is one I think about in any industry context: who gets to tell which stories, and who benefits when those decisions are made? The women in Yellowface are not victims or villains. They are people inside a system, doing what people do inside systems. That is, perhaps, the most unsettling thing about it.
Kaveh Akbar's debut novel follows Cyrus Shams, a young queer Iranian-American poet, newly sober, who becomes obsessed with the idea of martyrdom — people who gave their lives for something larger than themselves — and travels to Brooklyn to speak with Orkideh, a terminally ill Iranian artist spending her final days in a museum installation, talking to whoever will come.
Martyr! is not primarily a novel about women. But the women in it have stayed with me. Roya, Cyrus's mother, who was killed when a US warship shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 — a real event, one of those historical facts so absurd and catastrophic that fiction can barely hold it. In the chapters told from Roya's perspective, she is not a symbol of loss. She is a woman who realizes she loves her friend Leila, who wants something the world around her has not made a place for. She is alive and specific and then she is gone, and the novel carries that loss without resolving it into meaning.
Orkideh, the dying artist, chooses to spend her final days in public — choosing the terms of her own disappearance, refusing to die quietly. There is something in that choice I keep returning to.
What Akbar does is give these women an interior life that feels genuinely inhabited. In a novel ostensibly about a man's quest for meaning, the women are not backdrop. They are the thing the quest is actually about.
What I Hope For, Instead of What I Will Celebrate
I love the idea of a celebration for women - a day dedicated to them. Recognition matters. The women who fought for things I now take for granted deserve to be named.
But if I am honest, what I hope for on International Women's Day — and every other day — is something quieter and harder than celebration.
I hope for organizations that do not need a special day to think about this, because they think about it always. I hope for the women in coaching sessions who are done apologizing for taking up space. I hope for more books like these — ones that do not tell women who to be, but that take the time to look carefully at who they already are.
And I hope, when my daughter is old enough to read Hamnet, that Agnes feels less like a discovery and more like a given. Like of course we would tell this story. Of course she was the one worth knowing.
Happy International Women's Day!
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