believed that the understanding of religion and its texts was too important to be left to a small group of people. Thus, his objective was to make the Qur'an accessible to a broader demographic by translating it into modern languages. In 1934, Atatürk commissioned the first Turkish operatic work, Özsoy. The opera, staged at the People's House in Ankara, was composed by Adnan Saygun and performed by soprano Semiha Berksoy. On 5 December 1934, Turkey moved to grant full political rights to women. The equal rights of women in marriage had already been established in the earlier Turkish civil code. The role of women in Atatürk's cultural reforms was expressed in the civic book prepared under his supervision. In it, he stated: The 1935 general elections yielded 18 female MPs out of a total of 395 representatives, compared to nine out of 615 members in the British House of Commons and six out of 435 in the US House of Representatives inaugurated that year. Unification and nationalisation efforts When the modern Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, nationalism and secularism were two of the founding principles. Atatürk aimed to create a nation state (ulus devlet) from the Turkish remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Kemalism defines the "Turkish People" as "those who protect and promote the moral, spiritual, cultural and humanistic values of the Turkish Nation." One of the goals of the establishment of the new Turkish state was to ensure "the domination of Turkish ethnic identity in every aspect of social life from the language that people speak in the streets to the language to be taught at schools, from the education to the industrial life, from the trade to the cadres of state officials, from the civil law to the settlement of citizens to particular regions." The process of unification through Turkification continued and was fostered under Atatürk's government with such policies as Citizen speak Turkish! (Vatandaş Türkçe konuş!), an initiative created in the 1930s by law students but sponsored by the government. This campaign aimed to put pressure on non-Turkish speakers to speak Turkish in public. However, the campaign went beyond the measures of a mere policy of speaking Turkish to an outright prevention of any other language. Another example of nationalisation was the Surname Law, which obligated the Turkish people to adopt fixed, hereditary surnames and forbade names that contained connotations of foreign cultures, nations, tribes,