A woman’s place: The theory and the practice

The theory and the practice

IN 1993 Turkey elected its first female prime minister, Tansu Ciller. Many wealthier nations have yet to equal that feat. In business, too, some Turkish women stand out. For example, one of them heads the Sabanci Group, a large conglomerate. Guler Sabanci succeeded her uncle when he died in 2004. There are plenty of Turkish women who appear scantily clad in the local gossip magazines, and there are those who parade up and down Istanbul's ultra-smart Abdi Ipekci Street, buying fashion labels. There are also brilliant female professors, glamorous TV journalists and dogged lawyers. And there is Leyla Zana, the Kurdish parliamentarian who shortly after she was released from prison last year went to Brussels to receive the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

The official republican line on women is written on a wall inside the Ataturk memorial at Anit Kabir. “The ancient Turk considered men and women to have equal rights. With the adoption of Islam women lost these rights...Ataturk was determined that men and women should have equal rights.” And indeed the civil code he introduced in 1926 ended the Muslim law allowing husbands to divorce their wives unilaterally - a law he himself had taken advantage of only six months previously.

More important than the law itself was his public attitude to women. He encouraged them to be independent and to go out to work. Childless himself, he adopted a number of young girls, one of whom, Sabiha Gokcen, he sent to Russia to be trained as a military pilot.

And yet behind the door of the average Turkish home, much has remained unchanged since 1923. A survey in 1994 found that virtually all the women in a poor neighbourhood in Istanbul needed the permission of a man to leave their house at night. And in eastern Anatolia there are towns where the teeming crowds on the mid-day streets seem to be made up exclusively of men.

The hamam and the coffee-house

With the migration of families from villages to large towns, “family conflicts have increased,” says Aytekin Sir, a professor at the Dicle University faculty of medicine in Diyarbakir. Anthropologists explain that traditional Turkish villages were organised into “male spaces ” - -such as the coffee-house and the mosque - and “female spaces ” - -such as the hamam (Turkish bath) and the public laundry, where women could get together.

As Turkish villagers migrated to the cities and living standards rose, the tasks of washing and cooking were transferred to the home. Most hamams today are in luxury hotels, for the benefit of tourists. The mosques and the coffee-houses, on the other hand, are still there. And in the towns there is yet another place for men to gather: at the football ground.

Ms Sir says that when families move into cities, young girls can be virtually incarcerated in small urban apartments. This, she says, explains a sharp increase in recorded suicides among 15-25-year-old women in eastern cities. One such rash of suicides inspired the latest book by Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's most famous contemporary writer. The girls in “Snow” kill themselves because of the official ban on headscarves.

Wearing the headscarf is prohibited in government offices, schools and universities. Its original purpose - to screen women's hair, once considered a particularly sensual human feature, from the lascivious gaze of men - has long been overlaid with political and feminist significance. Kemalist women would not be seen dead in one, but women in the villages have always covered their heads.

Outside a multiplex cinema in a spotless new shopping mall on the outskirts of Adana there are no headscarves to be seen. Near the gates of Ankara University, though, your correspondent spotted a male student giving his female companion an undisguised kiss on the lips. She was wearing an Islamic headscarf and the particularly unattractive ankle-length khaki macintosh that often goes with it.

The girls' suicides in the east may be provoked by more than a general absence of freedom, or of the particular freedom to wear a scarf. Ms Sir says family members often claim that a girl committed suicide to cover up an “honour killing” by a family member. This is just one of many forms of abusive behaviour within families, says Nuket Sirman, an anthropologist at Istanbul's Bogazici University. Turkey has only very recently moved from a kin-based community, where family relationships and honour were the cement of society, to a citizenship-based rule of law. The law may now give Turkish men and women equal rights; the family still does not.

Article is part of an Economist survey on Turkey.