Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Few presidents changed daily life so completely. Under Atatürk, Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet, a civil code modelled on Switzerland's that ended polygamy and gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, women's suffrage in 1934, surnames and a secular state with religious courts abolished. The alphabet and civil code are still in force nearly a century later. The reforms came from a one-party state that suppressed dissent, and the treatment of Kurdish risings, especially Dersim in 1937 and 1938, remains bitterly disputed.