Moors, Jureidini, Özbay, Sabban 163present-day domestic workers (including their social characteristics such
as gender and ethnicity), but also into the labor relations according to
which these earlier categories worked (such as slavery and bonded labor).
Transformations of these labor relations intersect with the development
of nation-states and the growing importance of transnational relations.
n the Middle East generally, there is no longstanding tradition of I
employing paid domestic workers on a large scale. In the rural areas of
the Middle East in particular, where the ideal was that new couples would
live for some time with the husband’s family, daughters-in-law were often
responsible for the heavier household tasks, while elderly women also
took care of children. There were, however, other categories of women
that could be seen as predecessors of present-day migrant domestic work-
ers: domestic slaves and “adopted daughters.” Furthermore, impoverished
local women, girl children and orphans were also employed as live-in
domestics as part of webs of patron-client relations.
e institution of domestic slavery is one of the oldest forms of Th
non-kin domestic labor in Muslim societies such as the Ottoman Empire.
Great differences in the life experiences of slaves were often tied to the
social position of their owners; slaves of the wealthy and powerful were
able to rise to positions of power.^29 In the nineteenth century the majority
of slaves were women, many of whom engaged in domestic labor.^30 By the
end of the nineteenth century Ottoman antislavery policies had started to
reduce the number of slaves available and in 1926 with the abolishment of
Islamic law the institution was indirectly eliminated.^31
s slavery gradually disappeared in the Ottoman Empire, the num-A
ber of evlatlıks and paid live-in servants increased.^32 Though the literal
translation of the term evlatlık is “adopted daughter,” Islamic law allows
for fostering but not legal adoption. These adopted daughters were
orphans or girls from poor, often rural, families who were taken into
better-off urban homes at the age of six or seven, and who would work
as unpaid domestics for unspecified periods of time, often ten to twenty
years, when their foster families would arrange a marriage for them. In
republican Turkey, evlatlıks became the substitute for domestic slaves, for
although legal adoption became possible with the civil law of 1926, foster
families did not formally adopt them. Many evlatlıks were war orphans
(Balkan refugees, Armenians and Kurds), while poor Anatolian peasants