women in turkey--7/21/26
Today's selection-- from From Life Itself by Suzy Hansen. The emerging aspirations of women in modern Turkey:
"Ebru noticed how people often came to her with their problems. One day she had been sitting in the pide shop on Professor Naci Sensoy Avenue, drinking some tea with the owner's family. Some young Roma girls from Sulukule came in, all of whom were belly dancers; their brothers played the violin, someone else in the family played guitar, and they made music together. One of the girls announced she was getting married. She was only fifteen years old.
"You don't go to school?’ Ebru asked. It was normal to butt into people's business in the Mahalle, to pass judgment, offer advice.
“The girl replied that she didn't, but what she most wanted was to marry someone from the neighborhood, just for the sake of getting married, or for love.
"Love vanishes in time. You should get an education, anyway," Ebru said. "Stand on your own two feet. Add something to your beauty.’
“Ebru knew there weren't many ways for a fifteen-year-old girl to get out of the neighborhood and get an education. They imitated what they saw around them, and yet here was the girl's grandmother, her father's mother, crying in the pide shop, ‘Get a job! Earn money!’ Ebru had three master's degrees, and she didn't know any woman in Karagümrük as educated as herself. Someone once suggested that Sibel Can, the pop star who had Roma origins and grew up in Karagümrük, was as educated as she was, but that was silly; Sibel Can began performing at age fourteen, the newspapers said, she wasn't educated. The young women of this neighborhood had so many obstacles: poverty, illiteracy, wannabeism–the kids would go to school with their cell phone, showing off, asking everyone what brand they had, or what were the brands of their coats. Turkey would lose these girls to marriage, their young people, the youth of Turkey.
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| Women demonstrating and asking for non-interference with their clothing in Kadıköy, Istanbul |
“The girls were under pressure in the neighborhood and from above. In the 1990s, Erdogan had empowered women to organize and help out with political campaigns, an initiative for which he won stunned plaudits from the West. Turks fearful of Islamism still feared that Erdogan wanted to repress women as they did in a fundamentalist country like Iran. In 2012, I asked the pioneering Turkish feminist Pinar Ilkkaracan about Erdogan's changes to a women's rights law, in which he altered the language to focus on the protection of the family. At the time, some said Erdogan did this to imitate the Muslim Middle Eastern countries. But Ilkkaracan said, No, that's not who Erdogan was imitating. Erdogan was borrowing this language from the Republican Party of the United States of America. Erdogan began saying all Turkish women should have three children, though he later amended that to five. He said that he did not believe men and women were equal–’Women are women and men are men. Is it possible for them to be equal?’–and then began denouncing cesarean sections as ‘unnatural.’ All of this in a country where only 25 percent of women even worked.
“The neighborhood had so many problems Ebru wanted to solve.Many kids were doing bonzai, a powerful synthetic cannabinoid drug that was ravaging the neighborhood, turning young people into zombies, falling down in the street, just lying there, as if dead. Worse, the drug dealers came from this neighborhood, they lived in Karagümrük, and everyone knew who they were, because, come on, Ebru said, a stranger couldn't come into Karagümrük or Sulukule and sell drugs! They'd be killed. There were also small groups of thugs, and when they ran out of money, they would go around intimidating people for 10 liras, 20 liras. Our neighborhood is a bit strange, you know? She said. It has a rough reputation.”
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