FACTORS SHAPING THE IMAGE OF WOMEN IN JADID LITERATURE

Abstract

This article examines the historical, social and literary factors that shaped the image of women in Uzbek Jadid literature of the early twentieth century. Drawing on works by Behbudiy, Fitrat, Hamza, Qodiriy and Cho‘lpon, it combines close textual reading with historical contextualisation to trace how female characters were constructed. The analysis identifies six interacting factors: the colonial crisis and the idea of national awakening, the new-method school movement, the reformist press, the transregional circulation of ideas about women's emancipation, the lived realities of marriage and seclusion, and the aesthetic turn toward psychological realism. The results show a gradual shift from the woman as a symbol of national duty, above all the educator-mother, toward the woman as an individual with an inner life and a fate of her own. The article argues that this shift was uneven, and that Jadid writers remained partly bound by patriarchal assumptions even as they criticised patriarchal customs.