in households. Mothers play an essential role in the
socialization process: “before the child is seven, the
father has no direct role in childrearing” (Sow
1985, 565). Women are responsible for all house-
hold cleaning and cooking, except in same sex male
households. Most meals are taken at the same time
within the household in gender and age segregated
groups.Material living conditions
Compounds include one or more households.
Compounds are enclosed spaces, usually square in
shape, bounded by two-meter high walls. There is
only one entrance. Houses are built against the
outer walls, with their doors and windows facing
an interior courtyard. Households consist of a
mean of three rooms each about twelve square
meters, including a living room and two sleeping
rooms with a mean of three persons per sleeping
room. Houses are constructed of either local,
handmade mud bricks or thatch, in roughly equal
prevalence. A tiny minority are built with industri-
ally manufactured bricks.
Most households lack industrially manufactured
amenities. Only 25 percent have electricity, and
only 33 percent enjoy piped water. Only 7 percent
include flush toilets, while 49 percent have pit toi-
lets, and 44 percent have no toilet. Fifty-five per-
cent have dirt floors. Fifty percent of households
own radios, while only 10 percent have televisions,
and 2 percent have telephones.Bibliography
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429–50.Scott M. YoungstedtTurkeyEuropean travelers often described Ottoman
Muslim households as patriarchal extended fami-
lies having large numbers of slaves and servants.
They focused their descriptions on harem life, poly-
gynous marriages, and concubines. They degraded
Muslim women, seeing them as sexual objects who
were kept strictly inside the harem. This Orientalist
perspective was adopted by the modernizing elites
in Turkey, who criticized family life in their writ-
ings. Only during the last two decades have serious
studies on Ottoman families and harem life emerged
and the Orientalist myths about Muslim families
and women been refuted (Duben 1985, Geber 1989,
Duben and Behar 1991, Peirce 1993).
Using the 1885 and 1907 Ottoman census re-
cords (Ta™rìr Defterleri), Duben and Behar (1991)
showed that the dominant household type in
Istanbul was the simple family. Polygyny was prac-
ticed in not more than 2 percent of households.
Late marriage and low fertility levels, comparable
to the large European cities, were prevalent in
Istanbul at the turn of the century. Even in rural
Anatolia the majority lived in simple family house-
holds from the nineteenth century (Duben 1985).
High mortality and poor economic conditions
meant few could live in extended family households
with large numbers of kin and non-kin members. In
addition, late age at marriage (particularly of men)
was responsible for the dominance of simple fami-
lies in Istanbul.