transformed. Educated and/or working daughters-
in-law are not willing to live under the authority of
a mother-in-law, sharing the attention and resources
of their husbands with her. Most of the time, when
mothers decline, their daughters or daughters-in-
law care for them. However, both state run and pri-
vate care facilities for the elderly now exist in Iran.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India such changes
have taken place far less, if at all.
Bibliography
S. Ali, Madras on rainy days, New York 2004.
V. Doubleday, Three women of Herat, Austin, Tex. 1988.
T. Durrani with W. and M. Hoffer, My feudal lord,
London 1994.
Z. Eglar, A Punjabi village in Pakistan, New York 1960.
S. Farman-Farmaian with D. Munker, Daughter of
Persia. A woman’s journey from her father’s harem
through the Islamic Revolution, New York 1992.
E. Friedl, Women of Deh Koh. Lives in an Iranian village,
New York 1991.
——, Sources of female power in Iran, in M. Afkhami
and E. Friedl (eds.), In the eye of the storm. Women in
post-revolutionary Iran, Syracuse, N.Y. 1994, 151–67.
B. Grima, The performance of emotion among Paxtun
women, Austin, Tex. 1992.
S. Guppy, The blindfold horse. Memories of a Persian
childhood, Boston 1988.
S. Haeri, No shame for the sun. Lives of professional
Pakistani women, Syracuse, N.Y. 2002.
J. Howard, Inside Iran. Women’s lives, Washington, D.C.
2002.
P. Jeffery, Frogs in a well. Indian women in purdah,
London 1989.
M. Kousha, Voices from Iran, Syracuse, N.Y. 2002.
S. Lateef, Muslim women in India. Political and private
realities, New Delhi 1990.
C. Lindholm, Generosity and jealousy. The Swat Pukhtun
of Northern Pakistan, New York 1982.
N. Lindisfarne (Tapper), Bartered brides. Politics, gender
and marriage in an Afghan tribal society, Cambridge
1991.
K. Mumtaz and F. Shaheed, Women of Pakistan. Two
steps forward one step back?London 1987.
A. Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, New York 2003.
P. Omidian, Aging and family in an Afghan refugee com-
munity. Transitions and transformation, New York
1996.
A. Rauf, Rural women and the family. A study of a
Punjabi village in Pakistan, in Journal of Comparative
Family Studies18 (1987), 403–15.
Å. Seierstad, The bookseller of Kabul, trans. I. Christo-
phersen, London 2003.
A. M. Weiss, Walls within walls. Life histories of work-
ing women in the old city of Lahore, Boulder, Colo.
1992.
Mary Elaine HeglandTurkeyThe nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked
an era of profound change in Turkish society. Dur-
ing the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the
turkey 515Turkish Republic (mid-1800s–1920s), Istanbul ex-
perienced the first systematic decline in fertility
and reorganization of family life, where gradually
the Western ideal of the nuclear family displaced
more traditional extended patriarchal family forms
(Duben and Behar 1991). The twentieth century
witnessed the spread of the nuclear family form to
rural areas as well, though in practice the extended
family persists as a powerful cultural ideal in both
rural and urban areas (White 1994, 35). It is in this
context that the social meaning of mothers and
motherhood became a focal point for politicians
and reformers and mothering came to be seen as
an essential aspect of producing and reproducing
national identity.
European preoccupation with the politics of pop-
ulation, fueled by the developing sciences of medi-
cine, society, and demography, influenced Ottoman
elites in the late nineteenth century and drove social
policies created by Turkish national elites after
independence in 1923 (Gürsöy 1996). Leaders of
the new republic posed population as a key issue in
building the nation-state. Linked in rhetoric and
policy, early republican leaders promoted popula-
tion expansion as a means to securing and main-
taining state sovereignty and linked population
policies directly to Turkish nationalism.
While these leaders worked to elevate the status
of women through access to education, suffrage in
1934, and work outside the household (especially
in “helping professions” such as nursing and edu-
cation), they also wanted women to marry, have
numerous children, and raise families. Reformers
equated notions of biological motherhood with
social motherhood in an effort to promote child-
birth and “modern” childrearing practices. In the
1930s deputies to the Grand National Assembly
(Turkey’s parliamentary body) passed several laws
to promote marriage and childbirth and declared
abortion unlawful (Gürsöy 1996). The extent to
which the laws were enforced and effective is ques-
tionable, yet these measures signified the impor-
tance of marriage, reproduction, and motherhood
to the republican nation-building project and
demonstrated the intensification of political inter-
est in the everyday social lives of women.
Reformist discourses on motherhood and family
in the early republic (1920s–1940s) idealized the
fecundity and strength of the Anatolian village
mother, promising monetary assistance and tax
breaks to women bearing many children. Strong,
fertile, and stalwart, Anatolian village mothers
were portrayed as true patriots. This idealization
coincided with a contradictory impulse to root out
aspects of Anatolian culture that were regarded as