Village Women in Central Anatolia: Reality, Models, Anomalies

Abstract

A large body of literature on gender relations in rural transformation points out women's disadvantaged position in market production and in the mechanization process of agriculture, more specifically in capitalist transformation. Feminist literature concerning the concept of patriarchy is similarly extensive and focuses, amongst other issues, on the emergence of Semitic monotheisms stemming from Abraham (namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam), in which women's status rapidly declined. In both groups of literature, ethnographic descriptions run the risk of particularizing asymmetrical and exploitative gender relations in the studied communities, while in the case of Anatolia, for example, there is nothing particularly rural, Turkish or Muslim about these relations.