164 Between Private and Public
also gave their daughters away as a survival strategy, often for a small
sum of money.^33 The avowed aim of the Turkish state was to turn these
girls, often seen as “backward,” into civilized Muslim Turkish citizens.
The adopting families, however, treated them very differently from their
own daughters. They were purposely dressed in an unattractive way and
often did not go to school at all, while virtually all biological daughters
were able to continue their education. Rather, it was the very presence
of adopted daughters that enabled biological daughters to refrain from
doing housework and to learn “how to command” at an early age.^34 By
the 1960s, however, industrialization and the growth of internal family
migration started to provide other possibilities for poor rural families to
make a living, and by the time slavery and slave-like practices were legally
abolished in 1964, this institution had already practically disappeared.
The middle classes had started to employ married cleaning ladies from the
squatter areas around the large cities.^35 While there were still some live-
in young girls from the rural areas, in contrast to the evlatlıks these girls
received a wage (however low) and were no longer tied to one family.^36
f in the Ottoman Empire domestic slavery had already disap-I
peared by the early twentieth century, in the United Arab Emirates as in
other Gulf states, domestic slavery is part of living memory. In Dubai the
growth and demise of slavery was tied to the development of pearl div-
ing, with slaves brought from East Africa to work as divers, and women
brought in their wake as wives for slaves or for domestic labor.^37 As else-
where the position of slaves depended to a large extent on the position of
their owner; female slaves could gain positions of prominence through
intimate relations with their owners, especially if these were wealthy. In
the case of the Emirates, British policy to abolish the slave trade coin-
cided with the fall of the pearl diving economy. Until the 1960s house-
work was mainly performed by female kin and daughters-in-law, while
in the case of the great tribal families the women of the households
dependent upon them were also engaged in this work. After manumis-
sion, domestic slaves often remained attached to the wealthy households
in which they had been living and working, while poor women from Iran
and Baluchistan as well as a substantial number of Indian men took up
paid domestic labor. By the 1980s, however, this had changed dramati-
cally, and migrant women primarily from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and