reformers said that "to repeat the sermons [by a politician in the parliament] of a thousand years ago was to preserve backwardness and promote nescience." Religious organizations The abolishment of Caliphate removed the highest religious-political position. This act left the Muslim brotherhoods (Muslim associations working as a society of Muslim believers for any purpose) who were institutionalized (religious-political representation) under the convents and the dervish lodges without higher organizing structure. The reformers assumed that the original sources, now available in Turkish, would render the orthodox religious establishment (the ‘ulamā’) and the Ṣūfī ṭarīqas obsolete, and thus help to privatize religion as well as produce a reformed Islam (Turkish Reformation = Turkified). In 1925 institutions of religious covenants and dervish lodges were declared illegal. The reformers imagined that the elimination of the orthodox and Ṣūfī religious establishments, along with traditional religious education, and their replacement with a system in which the original sources were available to all in the vernacular language, would pave the way for a new vision of Islam open to progress and modernity and usher in a society guided by modernity. Along with the multi-party period, with Democrats both taking part and winning for the first time in the 1950 Turkish general election, religious establishments started becoming more active in the country. Religious holiday (Work week) Turkey adapted the workweek and weekend as the complementary parts of the week devoted to labor and rest, respectively. In the Ottoman Empire, the workweek was from Sunday to Thursday and the weekend was Friday and Saturday. A law enacted in 1935 changed the weekend began from Friday afternoon (not Thursday afternoon) and a weekend ended on Sunday. Women's rights During a meeting in the early days of the new republic, Atatürk proclaimed: In the following years of Atatürk's Reforms women's rights campaigners in Turkey differed from their sisters (and sympathetic brothers) in other countries. Rather than fighting directly for their basic rights and equality, they saw their best chance in the promotion and maintenance of Atatürk's Reforms, with its espousal of secular values and equality for all, including women. Equal participation The Ottoman society was a traditional one and the women had no political rights, even after the Second Constitutional Era in 1908. During the early years of the Turkish Republic educated women struggled for political rights. One notable female political activist was Nezihe Muhittin who founded the first women's party