and which in turn leads them to consolidate their
sense of empowerment through female solidarity.
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Fawzia Afzal-KhanTurkeyA gendered spatial organization offers women
advantages as well as disadvantages. Within soci-
eties in which social space is separated according to
gender, distinct women’s cultures can emerge.
Women’s visits to each other’s homes, to religious
sites, and their role in a range of life cycle rituals
take on definite social and political significance.
One of the effects of the separation of space by gen-
der is that the stricter the boundary between the
two domains, the greater the possibility that a cer-
tain independence of the female domain will
emerge. In such a situation a rich social life and
forms of intimacy among women develop. When
spatial separation occurs within a society in which
men’s political patronage networks need to be as
wide as possible, women’s networks and channels
of communication become important to men.
In some regions and societies, restrictions on
women’s movements through space counter these
potentialities, but in Turkey many women have
enjoyed considerable autonomy within and be-
tween the spaces allocated to them. Under both the
imperial society of the Ottoman era (1453–1918)
and the secular republic established in the 1920s,
Turkish women have a long tradition of visiting
and excursions outside the home. Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu (Murphy 1988, 111), an early
European observer, remarked upon the compara-
turkey 533tive freedom of the wealthy and powerful women
she moved among but later foreign observers some-
times dismissed women’s sociality as trivial. These
later observers failed to appreciate both the ways in
which visiting was integrated into status and power
networks and their significance in sustaining
women’s interests within society more generally.
A number of scholars have described the formal-
ized visiting patterns found among Turkish women
(Aswad 1967, Benedict 1974, Dobkin 1974, Fallers
and Fallers 1976) and the ways in which women’s
networks provided both social support and impor-
tant forums for the circulation of information. Beck
and Keddie’s important book, Women in the
Muslim World(1978) brought together the first
fruits of the new wave of scholarly interest in the
lives of Muslim women and provided a crucial
foundation for the work that followed. Kıray
(1981) identified four types of visit among women
living in the Black Sea town of Ere(li and these
forms are found across Turkey. The first was the
informal visits of poorer women as they passed
their leisure time together. The second was the
regular, formal visiting day with formal food and
drink held by better off women and from which
children are generally excluded. Then there were
women’s ceremonial visits to households, particu-
larly for the performance of death ceremonies as
well as for other life cycle events, leisure excursions
to parks, the cinema, or a women-only beach, and
visits to the main markets. Women also visit saints’
shrines. In the major cities where attendance at vis-
iting days can be difficult, working women may
attend afternoon teas held at about five o’clock.
Taken together, these patterns of women-only visits
and excursions add up to a social life that is far
from the lonely seclusion of the Orientalized West-
ern imagination.
Studies emerging under the influence of feminist
theory and the women’s movement of the 1970s
generally adopted some form of structural analysis
in developing understandings of the ways in which
women’s space was established and of how women
lived their lives within them. In particular, there
was considerable interest in examining the pub-
lic/private division of space associated with bour-
geois modernity as it developed in European states.
Many studies considered whether patterns of seclu-
sion should be considered in terms of public and
private, whether the private and domestic domain
should be given a less subordinate position than it
enjoyed in secular, modern societies, and whether
religious beliefs could be thought of as causing the
seclusion of women. Kıray (1981) argued that visits