unhealthy or backward. Educators, social workers,
and doctors stressed the need to eliminate many
childrearing practices, including swaddling babies,
superstition-based customs for protecting children
from harm, and beliefs that prevented women from
accepting Western biomedical models for child-
birth and childrearing. Other elite discourses
focused on urban, educated women who married
later, practiced birth control or had abortions, chal-
lenging their commitment to the call to mother-
hood in the name of national strength.
Women’s associations helped to shape and spread
early republican discourses on motherhood and
nationhood. Associations such as the Anneler Bir-
li(i (Mothers’ union) in the 1930s took up philan-
thropic and educational initiatives, advancing a
reformist project that reflected urban, elite social
values. Other associations, such as the Women’s
Union (disbanded by the state in 1935), advanced
platforms that promoted women’s rights within the
family and society as well as broader social justice
issues such as peace.
Legal reforms in the 1920s and 1930s offered
new rights for women, yet reinforced patriarchal
power structures within family and broader kin
groups (Kandiyoti 1988). Recent amendments to
the constitution and Civil Code (2001–2) have
formally introduced equality of men and women
within the family. The well-known phrase “The
family is the foundation of Turkish society” is now
amended with the phrase “and is based on the
equality of the spouses.” The Civil Code in its first
major modifications since the adoption of the Swiss
Civil Code in 1926 now recognizes the equality of
spouses within the family, has removed the desig-
nation of the husband as “head of household,” and
acknowledges inheritance rights of children born
out of wedlock and, importantly, rights to equal
shares of property acquired after marriage to all
those who married after the law came into effect.
In contemporary Turkish society motherhood
remains a dominant cultural ideal and notions of
womanhood and femininity are still largely con-
structed through becoming a wife and mother.
Marriage continues to be widely considered bio-
logically and socially necessary – an obligation to
one’s family and society (White 1994, 41) – espe-
cially among rural and working-class women.
In recent decades, despite formal gains made in
laws and policies related to women’s position
within the family and society, the work of parent-
ing remains almost the exclusive province of
women (Arat 1996, 30). We cannot assume, how-
ever, that this means that mothering takes place
exclusively within the nuclear family. Despite the516 motherhood
fact that the majority of families in Turkey are
nuclear in structure today, the extended family still
persists functionally (White 1994, 35, Abadan-
Unat 1986, 186). Erel notes that assuming the
mother is the primary caregiver is a class-specific,
ethnocentric construction, especially if one consid-
ers that in rural Turkey women and children partic-
ipate in agricultural work and child-rearing is the
collective labor of mothers, older siblings, aunts,
and grandmothers. Erel also points out that in
urban areas “housework and childcare often take
place in a wider social context of extended-family
members and neighbours” (2002, 133; see also
EWIC II Household Division of Labor: Turkey and
the Caucasus).
Erel’s work among Turkish migrant families in
Germany points to the need for comprehensive new
research on changing forms and ideals of mother-
hood and family both in Turkey and in diasporic
communities (especially in Europe). How does
greater integration into Europe shape notions of
motherhood? As families temporarily and perma-
nently divide through migration from Turkey to
other parts of Europe, how are extended family net-
works functionally and ideologically maintained?
To what extent is the social space for women as sub-
jects outside of motherhood opening up (both
within Turkey and Europe)? What new discourses
on family, family values, and the meaning of moth-
ers as carriers of the national culture are emerging?
And, perhaps most profoundly, what are the long-
term effects of a decade of growing poverty rates in
Turkey and a weak social safety net on the everyday
lives of women and their children? How do eco-
nomic realities coincide with the social valuation of
motherhood and the need for broader systems of
familial support for childcare and rearing? These
questions call for a renewed focus on the family and
constraints facing women in particular in coming
years.Bibliography
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