New Desires, New Selves by Gul Ozyegin

Author:Gul Ozyegin [Ozyegin, Gul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781479852086
Google: 9eYWCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-08-21T05:24:34+00:00

The Parental Home

To sketch a generational profile of my participants’ parents, I pieced together various pieces of information the women shared with me about the lives of their parents. Their parents were all born roughly between 1950 and 1960, had lived their formative years (youths) during the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, married in the mid- and late 1970s, and started having children in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

These parents were born and raised either in villages or in small towns, but they all experienced geographical mobility in early adulthood by moving to larger urban areas. The absence of high educational attainment (such as high school or university education) among many of the fathers is one of the most salient aspects of this cohort, and it must have contributed a great deal to their status as members of the economically and socially subordinated classes in Turkish society. These fathers had secure employment in state-run factories or government offices in working-class jobs with the provision of lifelong employment, reflecting the important role of state-run enterprises in the economy and employment structures prior to the open-market economy of the 1980s onward. However, these jobs were low-paid, and although some of these men owned small businesses or shops in Anatolian towns, these small businesses did not seem to facilitate a transition to a higher class status. Yet for a small group of fathers, geographical mobility when they were young brought with it upward economic and social mobility through educational attainment, and they became part of the group of well-to-do professional families.

The women’s mothers were not highly educated and had little employment experience, with the exception of two mothers who had professional jobs, one of whom had a university education and the other a high school education. The other mothers, who deeply regretted their own lack of education, made huge emotional and practical investments in their daughters’ education. It seems the most important gender conflicts in the marriages of these women revolved around their daughters’ education. After these daughters had completed the mandatory primary school education, the decision concerning their further education was not only about how far they should go in their schooling but also about where they should be schooled: in “normal” middle/high schools or İmam Hatip schools, where the curriculum combines courses in religious topics with regular academic subjects. For most fathers (religiously conservative or not), the İmam Hatip system offered a good educational opportunity for their daughters. However, because the İmam Hatip schools did not give students the right to enter the university system on an equal footing with the graduates of the normal high schools, the mothers fought hard not to send their daughters to İmam Hatips. It is important to point out that these mothers tried to convince fathers of this choice not on the basis of religious belief but on the basis of the limitations that an İmam Hatip education would put on their daughters.

It is very clear from the daughters’ narratives that their mothers continued to be

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