Women in the land of the generals
IN EVERY respect, women in Turkey bear the brunt of the various oppressions imposed by dictatorship,
Kurdish women — politically persecuted by Turkish regime (DR) economic deprivation, enforced ignorance and religious bigotry. This is reinforced at all levels of the society, and remains unchallenged by the majority of the left, who oppose feminism as a "bourgeois" current. ELIF KESKIN
HE ROLE of women in Turkey as housewives, mother: and workers is similar to elsewhere. Of those who work outside the home, 90 per cent do jobs similar to the tasks that they do in the home, 40.8 percent of female industrial workers are in the textile industry, and 53.1 per cent in tobacco. Only one per cent work in traditional "male" industries, such as metal, auto and chemicals, where the best paid jobs are.
Other industries in which women are employed are banking, hospitals, and lower ranking positions in administration. Very few women hold leading posts. For example, out of 74 deputy directors of the Labor Bank (one of the biggest in Turkey), only four are women. In the same bank, the coding system used in the contract for calculating seniority provides for a coefficient of one for a woman after 20 years of service, while it is five for a man!
In the last six years, the number of working women has declined by 36.5 per cent. The growth of unemployment has thus hit women hard. Women's lack of skills, and the massive entry into International Viewpoint • May 18, 1987 the computer market have played an important role in this phenomenon. In unsteady jobs, working women have been driven to accept flexible hours, night work and overtime.
The general drop in the standard of living of working people in Turkey over this period put an additional burden on women. The only way that modest homes could make ends meet was to save money on housekeeping expenses, and thereby increase women's work in the home. This put a double burden on working women. The situation is made still worse by the fact that they do not have the same access that women in the European countries do to household appliances. This means that most housekeeping tasks depend on the physical labor of women in the home.
Work in the kitchen to prepare food takes up a lot of time, because what takes precedence over all else is preparing good food as cheaply as possible. Moreover, industrially prepared foods have not yet come into general use.
Women are tied to the kitchen
Also, in most dwellings, the kitchen is a particularly disagreeable place: small, with little air and no facilities (little or no running water, to say nothing of hot water, frequent cuts in water and gas and electricity, and so forth.) And this is where women spend most of their time.
To this has to be added the fact that parents who have to be cared for because of illness and disability, as well as other reasons, are the responsibility of the women of the house. few, if any, specialized institutions to assume this task, and those that exist are too expensive for modest households to afford.
In the rural areas, many more women work than men, and 92.5 per cent of them are not waged but work within the family. Some 62 per cent of women are illiterate. They have to work both in the fields and in the home. They have no rights of inheritance, and cannot even freely choose their husbands.
An acute problem is the countryside is the tradition of the "head price" [baslik]. In order to be able to marry, men have to pay a "head price" to the young woman's family. After a fashion, they have to "buy her" from her parents. This reinforces the view of women as commodities.
As a general rule, marriages are arranged through brokers - that is, the future spouses do not meet each other. Moreover, the average age of marriage is very low (in general, it occurs at puberty). Even though there has been an improvement in this respect in the cities, virginity is still considered "sacrosanct" and inviolable. The same of course goes for marital fidelity.
Every year dozens of women are murdered by their husbands or even by their children or their parents for having "besmirched the family honor"! For women, marriage means satisfying their husbands' sexual needs and the duty of bearing them children (preferably males). Men, as well as most women, consider women to be the object of sexuality. Many women do not even know their own bodies, and anything that has to do with sexuality remains taboo, both in the family and in the schools.
Little, if anything, is known about contraception, and this even goes for
you 80,000 lire [about $150]. The man did not have that kind of money. So, they threw the couple out. And the women gave birth to her child in front of many women in the cities. It is true that the state clinics offer a free service of inserting coils — in the name of birth control! But often they lack personnel and material means — above all in the remote areas of Anatolia - and there is inadequate information. Backstreet abortions are very common.
Moreover, 70 per cent of births take place without the attendance of medical personnel (neither doctors or licensed midwives). Every year, almost 10,000 women die as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. On the other hand, sterility is always a shame for women, especially in rural areas, and is grounds for "repudiation." Although polygamy is formally banned by the civil code, it (Koranic law allows men to take up to
Thousands of women subjected to repression
Under the military dictatorship, thousands of women have been imprisoned, tortured, raped and subjected to other forms of ferocious repression. Women activists in the unions or left and far-left political parties, wives or mothers of political activists, women workers in the militant plants, peasant women their coming to classes in a scarf or a turban that would cover their hair according to the Islamic rules.
A third social phenomenon has also marked the last six years from the standpoint of women — a spectacular increase in prostitution. Economic disaster for many working-class families, massive unemployment and poverty have driven more and more women to seek to earn money by any means. In the big cities, especially in Istanbul, prostitution has increased enormously according to official police statements.
The mayor of Istanbul has said that "love cities" should be built to put a more "respectable" face on this proliferation. In a village near Milas, on the southern Aegean coast, every family, without exception, has prostituted its daughters in order to survive economically! Prostitution of girls and young women from 10 to 15 is becoming more and more widespread. There is no protection for them.
The constitution imposed by the military junta in 1982 repeats almost word for word the provisions with respect to women in previous constitutions, that lock women up in the framework of the patriarchal family. All the inequalities
TURKEY and the reactionary and discriminatory measures are still in force.
Obviously, the general political restrictions of political and trade-union rights, the right of association, censorship and so on also affect women. They are an additional obstacle to the politicization of women. The new police law gives arbitrary and exorbitant powers to the repressive forces, including with respect to relations between men and women. Couples who walk holding hands can be taken to police stations for identity checks and prosecuted for indecency. Female students wearing "low-cut" dresses can also be taken in by the police for the same reason. The new law on "public morality" permits repression in all aspects of the public and private lives of women.
On the political level, the constitution bans the formation of women's groups or factions in the political parties, and thereby limits women's participation in public life. In fact, women in Turkey had won the right to vote and be elected to office in municipal elections back in 1930 and the right to be elected to parliament in 1934 — before many European countries!
With the abolition of the sharia and
"What sort of country am I in Kurdish villages, female inhabitants of the shantytowns that were controlled living in?"
by the left before the coup d'etat - tens of thousands of women activists have died under torture or resisting their
"What Tasted myseithat lost oreoc is was reading the papilv hangmen, resisting humiliation, torture, sexual maltreatment and rape.
Three reports struck me particularly and made me ashamed. I was ashamed
They have resisted along with their as a human being. I was also ashamed and felt humiliated as a woman. The male comrades, and have participated in pain of my shame and my humiliation was Increased because I was a woman.
every form of struggle, including the
Here are the three reports, taken from Cumhuriyet of September 3, 1986 and hunger strikes.
Bulvar of September 5, 1986. Here are three women in Turkey, among so
In particular, the mothers of prisoners have supported their children in such
• The forces of order went into her village to look for the wife of a member suffering.
They have continually apof the PKK (a Kurdish nationalist organization] who had been hunted for two pealed to the authorities for informayears. The police took this worman to a doctor to subject her to a gynecologition about the state of their children's cal examination to see whether she had had sexual relations recently. In this health. They have demonstrated in front way, they wanted to check if her husband, whom they wanted to arrest at of parliament, signed petitions and so any cost, had stayed in the village in the preceding days. Since the medical on demanding an end to torture and illreport did not satisfy them, they demanded a second examination... Ques treatment in the prisons. They in turn tioned by reporters about this affair, the prefect of Tuncell la town in Kurdi have been tried as parents of the acstan] found this all quite normal and legal: "Where's the problem?" he dared cused and for demonstrating; they have been subjected to all sorts of pressures,
• Three people, a young man, his uncle and a female friend were jogging in insulted and humiliated. Even if it has the Belgrade woods [in Istanbul]. It was 7.00pm. They returned home in a not reached the level of organization of car. The police arrested them. They made an Identity check. They became
Argentinian women, this resistance by angry because the family names of the man and woren did not correspond
Turkish mothers should be highlighted.
No, this time they did not send the woman for a gynecological check ithe
A second phenomenon that deserves hospital was far away!. They held them for a good while, lectured them and fito be noted is the rise of the Islamic nally released them, having forcing the man to swear [on the Koran] that he movements, with all that this implies would soon marry the woren to put an end to such a scandalous situation.
for women. It should be pointed out,
• His wite was about to give birth. The husband took his wife from Manisa however, that there are a great many to Izmir [towns in the Aegean region]. At the University of the Aegean, the women, above all young women of the doctors who examined the women at the gynecological service told her: "The post-coup d'etat generation, in the Isbaby is sideways; we will have to do a caesarean. But that is going to cost lamic groups. Recently, they demonstrated in the actions in the university.
They wanted to protest against the rule imposed by the administration against many others.
to ask.
the hospital door, in the street.
[Zeynep Oral, Milliyet, September 1986.]
May 18, 1987 • International Viewpoint
TURKEY the adoption of the Swiss civil code in
1926, there was a real improvement in the legal status of women in Turkey.
Women, moreover, benefitted from a campaign of social advancement under the Kemalist regime. All of this created more than a few illusions in the
"progressive" character of Kemalism.
These reforms represented above all an attempt by the government to Westernize. In practice, these legal and social liberalizations went hand in hand with emergency laws, the banning of opposition parties and unions and the establishment of a totalitarian regime based on a single party — to say nothing of ferocious repression against the
Kurdish national movement. Moreover, in 50 years, only 100 women have ever sat in parliament.
No strategy for women's liberation struggle
Until today, the left in Turkey has not been able to work out an overall conception of the struggle for women's liberation. The waves of mobilizations by women in Europe and in the United
States in the 1960s and 1970s had no echo in Turkey. The left has remained under the dual sway of Kemalism and
Stalinism. It has apologized for the traditional structures (the family, honor, marital fi.
delity) in the name of the revolution, counterposing a primitive populism to "decadent bourgeois life styles.
Blinded by their illusions of a revolution right around the corner and conceptions that relegated all these problems to the
"post - revolutionary" period, devoting themselves entirely to abstract propaganda for revolution, most of the revolutionary groups have ignored this question outright. The pro-
Soviet groups have
1 paid a bit more attention to it.
The Turkish Communist Party had a real influence over layers of working women through its
International Viewpoint • May 18, 1987 parallel association, Progressive Women. But it confined itself to trying to recruit them to the party, without concerning itself with their special demands and problems and course, a thought of giving impetus to an independent women's movement.
From the standpoint of male activists in the left movements, women were, of course, comrades and also activists but they had their limits! They were above all "sisters," and therefore sacrosanct (their honor had to be protected) and desexualized. They were supposed primarily to take care of cleaning the headquarters, preparing the meals and tea, serving as couriers and transporting material, as well as hiding activists sought by the police.
All of these tasks were, of course, considered political, but they were all supposed to be women's work! As for the women activists themselves, their general attitude was a resigned acceptance of this tradition. Some tried to compete with men on their own ground, to strike "virile" poses, to swear a lot, to swagger, to try to prove their value by playing "men's" roles. The rare women activists who got into leading feminize positions in these organizations preferred to keep quiet about this subject.
It is no accident that International
Women's Day, March 8, was never celebrated in Turkey, nor even been discussed. The left organizations converged in their opposition to feminism
(which was seen as a "bourgeois" current) and in a view of the working class as being made up exclusively of men.
An important element in left recomposition
Of course, after the coup d'etat, with the influence of the exile milieus and the encounter with political currents in the countries of exile, there has been a certain development on the women question. Some revolutionary organizations have begun to undergo serious change on this question, while others are making it a point of honor to continue to combat feminism.
In Turkey itself, a circle of feminist women has been formed, and has begun to publish books and pamphlets on this question. Various articles have also begun to be published in the magazines of the legal left. In
1986, for the first time, March 8 was celebrated in Turkey at the initiative of the feminist circle, and a petition bearing several thousand names was submitted to parliament advancing several demands concerning women.
In Turkey there are hundreds of women activists or former activists who have spent years in the ranks of the various left groups and have held out during the period of repression and reaction after
1980. This is an important element. It has to be taken into consideration in thinking about the recomposition of the left in Turkey.
Under the influence of their own experience and the new discussions on feminism, it is possible that this layer of activists may turn toward feminism and provide the cadres for the development of a real women's movement in Turkey.
Pinochet's bitter